Paul Staines has some views on the interesting changes going on in India.
My initial disappointment (and surprise) that the world’s largest democracy had rejected the right wing BJP-led coalition for the Congress party, the former home of Gandhian-Nehruvian socialism, has turned to near joy with the news that Sonia Gandhi has stood down in favour of Manmohan Singh, a man described by the Grauniad as “the poster boy of India’s reforms, the architect of policies that turned India from a socialist behemoth into a regional economic power.”
Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister means India will have an avowed admirer of Margaret Thatcher in charge. In 1991, with India facing financial crisis, he convinced Rajiv Gandhi to implement liberal reforms in one month. He has described the changes he made:
We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India’s entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive… [and] much more profitable. So we tried to create an environment conducive to the growth of business. We removed a large number of controls and regulations, which in the past had stifled the spirit of innovation, the spirit of entrepreneurship, and restricted the scope for competition, both internal competition and external competition. As a result, in the ’90s, productivity growth in the Indian industry has been much faster than ever before.
He is pro-globalization and a critic of US and EU agricultural subsidies:
Globalization creates opportunities. As I said, freer trade, if it is genuinely free, and India’s labor-intensive products can find markets abroad that will help to get new jobs in our country. That will help to relieve poverty.
I am sure he faces many challenges, the Congress party is allied with communists, but international investors and Indian entrepreneurs are sure to welcome a man once voted “Finance Minister of the Year” by European bond investors. Indeed his first mission has been to re-assure that he would implement a “responsible macro-economic policy… We’ll bring in policies that will not hamper India’s progress – policies that are pro-growth.”
Paul Staines
I hope India gets the growth it deserves from open markets and an anti-socialist domestic agenda.
Thankfully, I needn’t hope, it is virtually guaranteed.
A minor correction: Manmohan Singh set the reform agenda for Narasimha Rao, not Rajiv Gandhi, who had already been assassinated by an LTTE bomber. Singh was the one who recommended the various steps, but it was Rao who steered the reforms through the political minefield. Now Singh will have to brave the politics all by himself.
That is exactly what we believed in the 1980’s following the Thatcherite revolution in Britain.
That is exactly what we believed in the 1980’s following the Thatcherite revolution in Britain.
As a semi-ignorant American, I was wondering if you could give me a pointer to a site giving a historical view of the period? Maybe a few sites with declared perspectives would be the best.
JM,
Sorry, bad phrasing on my part. Manmohan Singh is quoted as saying that Rajiv Gandhi
Therefore I should have written “Rajiv Gandhi’s successor…”
Sonia Gandhi has raised her own standing too. She’s demonstrated the one characteristic most desirable in politicians: a willingness to let go of power.
This is fascinating in many ways. Especially when you consider what’s going on elsewhere in similar veins. In France they were forced to declare the 35 hour work week a failure because it demonstrably hurt the economy. In Germany there have been similar developments in the government acknowledging that (at least some) socialist policies are objectively unhelpful. And now in India we have the stock market reining in the economic fantasies of the voters. It’s always nice to see reality and common sense intruding into politics but this is almost unheard of.
This is such phenomenally good news. Sonia Gandhi has done her country and the world a tremendous service by stepping aside and letting Mr. Singh carry on with the reforms.
Manmohan Singh isn’t just going to be PM, he’s also retaining the Finance Minister’s portfolio directly. He’s expected to remain both PM and FM for at least 6-12 months. The market in India crashed when Congress came out on top in the election. Ms. Gandhi stepping aside and Mr. Singh being a dual PM/FM has greatly calmed the market’s jitters, both because of his experience as FM in the past, and the importance Congress leadership is placing on maintaining economic progress. Singh as PM with any other Congress Party FM but himself just wouldn’t cut the mustard.
He sounds like the right man for the job and fingers crossed, he’ll have the bottle to persevere. I hope so. We need India to be a powerful country.
Robin Goodfellow, the 35-hour week in France is perfectly safe. You’d have to pry cold, dead French fingers off it to get it changed. The six weeks annual vacation stands, too. They know these miniscule work hours have stifled the economy, but the electorate, particularly the vast public sector (one-third of the workforce) is not interested in the economy. Just themselves.
….not interested in the economy. Just themselves.
Something wrong there, surely? “The economy” doesn’t have interests. Even if it did, why should people value its interests above their own?
Many of the problems of France, India and elsewhere spring from an economism that says, “We must do X for the good of the economy.” Or, “… to make the economy good.” This near-universal rhetorical trick is what allows people to get away with suppressing the economic choices of others to their own advantage. The “economic good” as god is just another guise for the General Will, an excuse for controlling others on the ground that they do not know what their own best interests are.
This is not a game I want to play. I like free markets because they are free, not because they are markets.
That said, I hope Mr Singh will make India a freer place, and if he does I don’t much care what his motives are.
Guy, I’m not following you. Of course the economy doesn’t have interests. What I was conveying, or thought I was conveying, that French workers have absolutely no interest in the wellbeing of their country. They get to work at 9 on the dot and at one minute past noon, the parking lots are empty. They get back a few minutes after two, and they leave at five on the dot.
They spend their day at work avoiding attention. It is their ambition to clock in every day for 25 years or so and never once come to anyone’s attention and never once be called upon to make even a small decision. They are focused on early retirements, their pensions, their 35-hour week and their six weeks’ annual vacation.
Doctors and dentists here answer their own phones in the middle of consultations and do all their own paperwork because once hired, an employee is almost impossible to sack. The government doesn’t want them back on unemployment. As small businesses, like doctors’ and dentists’ practices are so consumer oriented, a rude receptionist can wreck a practice – and keep her job at the same time. Therefore, they simply don’t hire them. Result, the job market continues to shrink apace.
There are now, officially, 10m unemployed in France. Even not counting the real numbers the government is hiding, that is quite a large number of idle young people. For the ones in employment, it’s a case of I’m all right, Jacques. They couldn’t care less that their economy is going down the tubes. They trust the government will somehow find the money to pay for their hefty pensions. But the government’s already borrowing hand over fist to pay for today’s pensions.
Verity, I understand all that. What I’m querying is why one should expect otherwise. People in general do act in their own interests at the expense of others. And people in general are politically short-sighted. Which is why a variety of political Ponzi schemes do so well in the totalitarian democracies.
Failing work that’s interesting and enjoyable in itself–which is available to very few–work is something one does only as necessary to get material rewards. That many workers do the absolute minimum is scarcely blameworthy. It is the political system that, as surely as the old communist ones did, ensures there is no advantage for ordinary people who work and consider their neighbours over anti-social skivers.
I don’t know what the answer to this is. “Someone else will pay” is a powerful sell. But I do think that more of the same reinforces the message. Your oratorical emphasis on the good of the country as a value to be elevated over individual circumstance makes you seem to me like a mirror-image of the New Labour major-generalcy that, having deliberately destroyed the value to individuals of personal initiative and responsibility because independence cannot be permitted, tries to impose a fake “responsibility” via bullying exhortation and bureacratic control.
Well, Guy, I’ve never been accused of being a mirror-image of New Labour before!
Obviously, I failed to make myself clear. I expect all human beings to be all consumingly self-interested. As I am. My point was, in refusing to see the truth, they are not looking out for their own self-interest. They are blinded by the smoke and mirrors and refuse to make the intellectual effort to see that it’s all going wrong. France is failing, and it would be in their own best interests to understand this and do something about it. (Not that there’s much they can do.) Not for the good of the economy, or the good of other people, but in order to protect their own future. What they have now is too good to be true, and they must surely know this in the back of their minds. But they won’t face it.
That is all I meant. Not that people should put their shoulders to the wheel for some notional good of the state. Of course not!
Verity, nobody in Britain or the USA works hard for “the good of the country”, except maybe in the civil service. Nobody sees their best interet best served by boosting the country, and works for that, except maybe in wartime. People in America and Britain work hard for personal gain, and at personal vocations.
Perhaps the problem with the french system is it isn’t selfish enough! The only rewards it seems to offer are in the form of less work, rather than eg: more, harder, more interesting and lucrative work.
Julian – Aaaargh! What I was saying was, the French are blind to the fact that this cushy life they are enjoying has to be paid for. They are refusing to look facts in the face. At no point did I suggest that they should fling themselves on the sacrificial fire. I just said they were very short-sighted and very, very trusting of their government if they think this situation can last forever
In other words, they should realise that their present cushy lifestyle has serious ramifications down the line.
When the economy’s interests are served, so are theirs. Not the only way round.
I think. Ehhhhh…
Yes, Wobbly. Exactly that.
PS – I see that even the original template of multiculti is getting fed up with it. There was a letter from an Indian national in The Telegraph this morning saying that both the president and the speaker are Muslims and now they’ve got a Sikh prime minister, that’s quite enough diversity, thank you. The last thing they need is an Italian PM to prove how multiculti they are. And this is from a country with over 300 dieties.