Introduction

In the past 15 years, several political scientists have tried to understand and explore ‘liberalisation’ reforms in India: first, the efforts in the 1980s and why they failed, and later, the apparent success of the reforms in the 1990s. This chapter reviews the literature that focuses on the latter – and still ongoing – reform process. It does not discuss the impact of economic reform as such, instead concentrating on political explanations for the reforms: the success or failure of both stages of reforms and the relative absence of opposition to them. The terms ‘reform’ or ‘reforms’ are used here rather loosely. I do not refer to specific monetary or financial measures, but rather to the whole process of change from a more state-regulated economy to a more market-oriented economy.

The real beginning of the economic reform process in India is widely viewed as having been in 1991. There had been earlier episodes of economic liberalisation: first, during the post-Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi (1980–4) and later during Rajiv Gandhi's regime (1984–9), but the pursuit of liberalisation policies during the 1990s was much more significant. In 1991, a new government, headed by PV Narasimha Rao and with Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister, announced its first reform measures almost immediately after taking office in June 1991, and continued to introduce new reform measures in various key economic sectors during its term. The first measures aimed at stabilisation and included a substantial currency devaluation and deflationary measures.

Introduction

In the years after Indian independence, the concept of Panchayati Raj seemed to have disappeared permanently into the mists of India's romantic past. In the late twentieth century, however, the notion has returned once more to the political agenda, for a variety of reasons: strategic, practical, economic and ideological. This essay briefly traces the origins of the concept of Panchayati, offers some historical examples of the panchayat in use, and attempts an explanation as to why it should once again have assumed importance in the minds of politicians, NGOs and administrators.

To begin with, we need to ask about the etymology of ‘panchayat’. On doing so, one discovers that despite its apparent place in Indian tradition, the meanings of the term have their origin in orientalist thinking. Using inscriptions and other sources, historians have identified patterns of association and resistance among peasant communities in both north and south India. The terms used to describe such communities include the bhaiband or ‘brotherhoods’ in the villages of the Bombay Deccan, and the nurwa and patidar in Gujarat. Further back in time, the gana, sabha, samiti and parisad in the north, and the nadu, brahmadeya and periyanadu in southern India, refer to equivalent political or social communities, while anthropologists have observed the functioning of caste panchayats in the present day.

Some readers will regard the statement that Dostoevsky was a Christian novelist, as a simple statement of an obvious truth, while others may regard it as a denial of all that is modern and of enduring importance in his work. It is easy to see why. However, both camps will agree on one thing. Dostoevsky and his novels take the claims of religion seriously on its own terms. Religion does not occupy the peripheral place that it does in most notable English novels of the period: it is not just depicted from the outside as a social phenomenon nor, with some minor exceptions, is it the subject of caricature. In both Dostoevsky's life and work, Christianity was engaged in pitched battle with the most desolate atheism, and neither is of that untroubled, optimistic variety often held to be characteristic of the Victorian age. When, awaiting his own execution on the Semenovskii Square in 1849, he had murmured the words ‘Nous serons avec le Christ’, his companion, the atheist Speshnev, had rejoined dryly, ‘un peu de poussière.’58 Whatever thoughts on life and death had passed through Dostoevsky's mind before this moment, the burden of Speshnev's words, in one form or another, refused thereafter to go away. In a letter to A N Maikov of 25 March/6 April 1870 about his plan for The Life of a Great Sinner he wrote, ‘The main question, which runs through all the parts, is the one that has tormented me consciously and unconsciously all my life, the existence of God’ (XXIX, I, 117).

On 26 January 2000, India marked the fiftieth anniversary of its Constitution. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of 22 political parties that formed the Union (federal) government in September 1999, chose to mark the milestone in an unusual way. On February 22nd, it established a National Commission of recognised experts of various political persuasions whose explicit purpose was to review the workings of the Constitution. The body was set up to consider ways in which the Constitution might be reformed in order to serve the interests of the country in light of its present imperatives. One particular issue was vigorously debated in public discourse: the instability of the Centre. The reason for this was quite simple. Since 1989, India had conducted five general elections, none of which produced a singleparty majority Union government. None of the eight multiparty coalition governments which emerged – with the exception of the minority Congress administration under Narasimha Rao (1991–6) which engaged in horsetrading and vote-buying to gain a parliamentary majority in 1993 – survived for the mandated five-year term in office. Simply put, they either broke into rival factions during their tenure in power or succumbed to political blackmail exerted by parties providing external parliamentary support. Given this, the issue of governmental instability and its presumed negative effect upon the formulation, execution and implementation of public policy (which is contested by certain studies of economic liberalisation), assumed great importance in the minds of many observers and citizens.

This essay examines the dynamics of development and growth in post-Independence Bombay. It examines the manner and extent to which the Indian planning enterprise has been implicated in the wider domain of societal ‘structures’ within which the state apparatus operates, and outlines the analytical grid within which Indian development planning ought to be located. It situates the dynamics at work within an active geographical arena, pertinent to a particular set of people in a particular place – in this case, the country's largest urban enclave.

Urban Development Planning : The Indian Context

Planning, here, is contextualised as the Indian state's attempt to lay the groundwork for capitalist growth and enhancement. The Bombay Plan of 1944, promulgated by eight prominent captains of industry, unequivocally viewed the strategic control of the key sectors of the economy by the public sector as an essential means to the primary accumulation of capital. Cooperating with the state in this project has been the ‘modern’ sector, comprising the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, the landholding classes, and the whole panoply of professional, service and small-scale sectors within the domain of industrial production and the reach of its markets.

Functionalist readings of the Indian state regard it, variously, as a neutral entity providing a socialist, ‘developmentalist’ impetus in its role as central allocator, or (in Miliband's sense of the term) as a willing ‘instrument’ of class rule. The Rudolphs' Weberian notion posits the view of a technocratic ‘self-determining’ state, as does the neoliberal ‘dogmatic dirigisme’ model.

Liberal-utilitarian projects in colonial India were not based solely on the optimistic assumption that modern metropolitan strategies of intervention in the societies, bodies, minds and habits of undisciplined populations would produce modifications that were desirable to the colonizer. In the case of the child-correction project, we find that the optimism was accompanied from the outset by serious doubts about whether modifications could be induced in even the ‘softest’ of all native populations. As experiments with reformatories for juvenile delinquents and boarding schools for savage princelings continued into the twentieth century, these doubts accumulated into a pervasive sense of failure. This, in itself, is not surprising. It is overwhelmingly established in the post-Foucauldian historiography that disciplinary strategies rarely worked as expected, either in the peripheral space of the colony, or in the enclaves of juridical power within the metropole. Much of the time in India, reformatories and boarding schools, like prisons and hospitals, did not produce a discernible modification; they were, therefore, ‘failures’. Colonial disciplinary institutions, from this familiar perspective, were defeated by the resistance of inmates, the autonomy of their native staff, the apathy or hostility of the wider society of natives, and the British need to negotiate constantly with inmates, staff and outsiders.

The appearance of a defeated discipline is, however, misleading; there are One is to use the ‘rock / water’ analogy that Sudipta Kaviraj has used to describe the interplay between strategy and tactics in the politics of marginal urban populations.

As far as the history of the family in Europe is concerned, it can be told in a number of different ways and there are considerable variations in family patterns across the continent. One dimension concerns the family's size, another dimension what sorts of people and how many generations the family has included. Both dimensions are quantifiable and the changes taking place over time are easily summarized. Over the last 500 years the size of the family has constantly gone down, and there is a particularly sharp dip in the twentieth century. In England, for example, the average family size was 4.75 members between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, but it was 4.49 members in 1901 and only 2.4 in 1996. As far as the kinds of people the family has included, the nuclear family – the parent-and-children group – seems to have been firmly established at least since the twelfth century, and few important changes have taken place since then.

However, an understanding of the family as a protective arrangement requires more than an analysis of numerical data. What matters is not the size and composition of the family as much as its nature. The question is how it is regarded by its members and what relationships obtain between the family and the rest of society. What is important above all is the way in which the family provides individuals with a place they can call ‘home’.

But perhaps everything we have said up to this point is of little but historical interest. Today, developments are afoot which have the potential of radically recasting the entire analysis we have presented. Today, old-fashioned laissez-faire, in the guise of a ‘new economy’, is once again turning things upside-down and melting that which is solid into air. The globalization of markets is intensifying competition and putting pressure on social models to conform to a standardized norm. As a result, many of the arrangements we have previously relied on for protection have come under severe pressure. It is possible to exaggerate these changes, to be sure, but it is also possible to extrapolate from current trends. Doing this, the results are nothing short of alarming. Today, families, associations and states are all changing, weakening and eroding. But if such trends persist, what is going to happen to us? Who or what will protect us in the future?

A first task is to assess the damage done, and a second task is to figure out what, if anything, we can do about the situation. Even if the damage is substantial, there would be no emergency as long as substitutes are readily available. The question is what these substitutes would look like and whether they are likely to do their job. Who knows, maybe we will even be better off in the future than we were in the past?

While the second RS Act allowed for girls to be included in the category of the ‘juvenile offender’, neither of the RS Acts provided for the incarceration of female children in reformatories. The 1897 legislation might be seen as a tentative half-measure, but the extension of the infrastructure of juvenile punishment to girls was explicitly discouraged by both laws, and it was not until the 1920s that systematic efforts were made to import native girls into the penal archipelago. Nevertheless, like the child of the Criminal Tribe, the girl child was a persistent shadow within the reformatory, rendered marginal but all the more interesting by the ideological and political dimensions of her exclusion. There was, in fact, a substantial body of opinion in colonial child-correction circles that held female children to be especially delinquent and endangered in the native context. That girls were not ‘reformed’ on a larger scale reflects the peculiar place of females and families in an evolving vision of Indian society. The delinquency of native girls was perceived by experts as too great a problem for the reformatory to manage. Furthermore, administrators overwhelmingly believed that locking up girls would destabilize the native family, and thus create more disorder than order. In the process, they aligned themselves with Indian men who, in Partha Chatterjee's well-known phrase, sought to implement a ‘nationalist resolution’ of the problem of women and the colonial state.