Following the global financial crisis, economic instability hit India as well and produced a crisis in its hub and circuits of global capital. From there it spread via the local–global market to the distant margins encompassing in the process the less well off sections. With the high growth rate regime facing serious sustainability threat, the trope of inclusive development/growth too became exposed to shocks, including financial/budgetary pressure; how far the purportedly ‘populist’ programs of inclusive development can be sustained has suddenly become an object of discussion. Moreover, the somewhat persistent inflation rate must have negatively affected, in the words of RBI (2013), the poor and the old (including pensioners), and also, the fixed income groups of people. High inflation and falling growth rate stand for trouble in macroeconomics. If one adds ‘jobless’ growth and exchange rate instability, the problem is accentuated. Overall, India's micro economy, macro economy and social program have become vulnerable to the combined effects of external and domestic forces in a manner that has, at least temporarily, reversed India's high growth rate track record, and threatens to undo the very idea of inclusive development. It amounts to a disruption of the new order of things as it stands now. How has the Indian state responded? What was and is its strategy of exiting from the current economic crisis? Does it map a new transitional trajectory? What became of India's policy paradigm?

At this point, it will be topical to discuss two related matters of significance. The first is the response of developed countries to the global economic crisis (by no means uniform), and then counterpoising India's policy response in that broader context. India's crisis management will be one topic to be covered here. Second, we will examine problems in the basic consensus of macroeconomics in the backdrop of economic crisis, and ask what it entails for the policy paradigm? It may invite an attack on the neo-liberal form of the circuits-camp of global capital either by justifying the active role of state in the economy (a supposedly modified Keynesian position), or by surpassing the system itself to create a new order (a more radical position).

If judged by everyday experience, it is a paradox that it is the earth which revolves round the sun. It is also a paradox that water is composed of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth, perhaps, is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches the delusive appearance of things. Is India's economic transition, touted as India's emergence as a global superpower – ‘shining India’ – such a bitter paradox? What then is the truth of transition? What is it that the transition narrative is hiding? What are its secrets? What is buried behind the success story of transition? What is behind the everyday experience of transition? How does one work through the delusive appearance of things? It has taken the three of us years to think through these questions; think through in dialogue, debate and reflective deliberation. Mentors and friends have over the years left their indelible imprint on our work, on our journey through the thorny walkway of concepts, categories, texts and experiences. They have stood by our liking, surprise, anger and despair at how India's economic transition was being represented by academics and popular media. They have also offered hope and alternatives. We begin by thanking Arup Kumar Mallick, Ashis Nandy, Stephen Cullenberg, Richard Wolff, Ian Parker, Erica Burman, S Charusheela, Sarmila Banerjee, Sunanda Sen and Anirban Chattopadhyay. They have interacted with us over the years, and also commented upon and criticized many aspects of our thinking. We have learnt a lot from them. It is a pity, late Stephen Resnick, late Kalyan Sanyal and late Julie Graham shall not read this preface; we lost them as we worked through the maze: India's economic transition. We must also thank Joel Wainwright, China Mills, Mwangi Githinji, Ranabir Samaddar, Ranjita Biswas, Asha Achuthan, Olga Nieuwenhuys, David Ruccio, Rajesh Bhattacharyaa, Kausik Lahiri, R S Deshpande, Sankar Bhowmik, Yahya Madra, Ceren Özselçuk, Shatakshee Dhongde, Wrick Mitra, Deepti Sachdev, Shyamolima Ghosh Chowdhury, Rajesh K P, Gurpreet Kaur, Imran Amin, Sabah Siddiqui, Rakhi Ghoshal, Maidul Islam, Anindya Purakayastha, Shraddha Chatterjee, Swagato Sarkar, Nandan Nawn, Rukmini Sen, Shubhra Nagalia, Bhavya Chitranshi, Anshumita Pandey and Satyaki Roy for having followed our work closely, for having made critical comments on our position and for suggesting improvements.

Exclusion and inclusion are perhaps two concepts most in vogue presently, certainly in development and especially in the context of India. In fact, the concepts of exclusion and inclusion are being deployed to redefine in turn the concept development, and in the process form an axis in the transition path of India. This will form the backdrop to the interrogation of ‘inclusive development/growth’ in Chapter 8. Our examination concerns interrogating exclusion and inclusion in relation to the concept development, and demonstrates how the three come to intersect and reinforce one another.

Exclusion and inclusion are intimately connected to the way the idea of the other/Other has taken shape. At a somewhat preliminary level, the ‘small other’ is that which is included in discourse; it is inclusion in terms of the logic-language-ethos of the Self that makes it ‘small other’; while the ‘big Other’, one could call it the Levinasian Other, is that which exceeds inclusion in discourse. At another level, the former is the citation of the Self, the latter is not; the former is assimilated in the discourse of the Self, the latter is that which remains inassimilable, which limits assimilation; more on this as we go along. Preliminarily, let us denote third world as the ‘small other’ and world of the third as the ‘big Other’. Specifically, one could say development fundamentally works over (not with) the other/Other where the other/Other is modelled into various kinds of developmental configurations, inclusion and exclusion being one. However, the concepts of exclusion and inclusion, at least in development literature, seem to rely on some simple, at times naive conception of the other. The domination of the idea of empirical exclusion in institutionalized literature (such as the World Bank) sets the terms of locating, marking and including the excluded; the ‘excluded other’ is as if just ‘out there’ (it is a list, changing with time but a list nevertheless), and so, include ‘it’.

During the planning era, the ability to choose between import substitution and export promotion policy paradigm indicated the political freedom of national governments within the broader ambit of a cold war divided world order; postcolonial nation-states, thus, enjoyed a degree of freedom unprecedented in the colonial period. This altered following the advent of the new global order. Neoliberal globalization, in conjunction with global capitalism, has transformed the way in which the hitherto ‘national’ economies and policies, including that of India, came to be seen and represented. Erosion of the extant freedom of the state to enact nation specific policies followed the fallouts from debt crisis, balance of payments problem and consequences of the collapse of Soviet Union and its satellites. By early 1990s, the developing countries and erstwhile ‘socialist’ countries surrendered their policy independence to the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank (China being an outstanding exception), which, via the structural adjustment program (as symbolized by the Washington Consensus), propelled the shifts of the kind discussed in Chapter 4.

Before proceeding further, we place before the reader one clarification. India's economic reforms have often been notified as the complex of liberalization, globalization and privatization (Nayyar, 1993; Panchmukhi, 2000). This was certainly the case. Others described it as a movement from import substitution to export promotion strategy (Mukherjee, 2010). That also was certainly true. However, from today's vantage point, especially in the backdrop of economic reforms in tune with neo-liberalism, these distinctions do not matter. As explained in Chapter 4, economic reforms following neo-liberalism would telescope some of these elements (liberalization and privatization) and more, make the choice between export promotion and import substitution strategy irrelevant and ideally propose a symbiotic relation, as in current times, with globalization. Our reference to these terms should, therefore, be placed within the broader rubric of neo-liberalism that we have already elaborated.

Let us begin by tracing some of the points of reference and departure from the planning period in order to see why and how neo-liberal globalization came to be seen as the most rational panacea to India's problems. Later, we shall explore some of the substantive reforms, with far reaching societal consequences, introduced by this new neo-liberal order. Our analysis will show why India's ‘political economy of reform’ takes the colour and character of neo-liberalism.

Following the birth of neo-liberal globalization in India, the erstwhile centrisms of capitalism and modernism both got reiterated–rekindled and revised–displaced. This was accompanied by the re-location of the otherwise decentred and disaggregated class focused reality into a hegemonic formation, a delusional appearance of things in the everyday, as Marx would say, that worked over and in tandem with two covalent–coeval domains: the circuits and camp of global capital, and its constitutive outside, world of the third. The relocation is also reflective of how in capitalist development the foreclosed world of the third got displaced by a substitute signifier, third world, as precapitalist and pre-modern; and how the ‘transition’ of contemporary India is scripted on the privileged centricity accorded to global capital (capitalocentrism). This reality, as we showed in Chapter 2, ‘itself initially contains a hole that the world of phantasy [and delusions] will subsequently fill; metaphorically the rent in the Lacanian Symbolic introduced by foreclosure is sutured, stitched together, closed off, provisionally through the production of a ‘delusional appearance of things’.

At a somewhat basic level, foreclosures of class, world of the third and original accumulation gives consistency to what we could call global capitalist hegemony; which is the same as what one calls global capitalism; global capitalism includes the circuits-camp of global capital, but which is more than the circuits-camp; it is the delusional cosmology that gives consistency to global capitalism through the foreclosure of these three organized in turn through the foregrounding of other substitutes. This chapter is an unpacking of the anatomy of global capitalist hegemony, and its relation with the transition story of India.

In terms of the transition story, the ‘living dead’ in this new hegemonic formation are class (process of surplus labour), world of the third (capturing a language–logic–experiencing–ethic, at times a non-capitalist praxis, at other times a post-capitalist ethic that cannot be accounted as such from with[in] the hegemonic) and original accumulation (epitomizing the assault on the inassimilable Other, where the assault is legitimized by presenting the Other either as the lacking other of the Developed or the pre-history of Capital or the archaic fossil of Tradition/Oriental Despotism).

This work is on India's economic transition. In that sense, this work is as much about ‘India’, as it is about ‘economic transition’. It is as much about an emergent India, as it is about an extant and an imminent economic transition. It is as much about the idea of India, as it is about the idea of (economic) transition. This work is also about the ‘static’, as it is about what could be called ‘movement’. It is about what is static in what is seen as movement, as it is about micro-movements in what is seen as static. It is about the overdetermined and contradictory relationship between staticity and movement in India's economic transition, or for that matter, any transition.

This however is not the first work on transition. The contemporary is a season for popular paperback on India, on the idea of India, and especially on India's post-reform, post-globalization, transition, even more on the path(s) ahead. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya (2013), Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (2013) and Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari (2012) are three that immediately come to mind. Taking the risk of a mild smoothening of their respective positions, one can say that the first represents a defence of the classical growth-induced path of progress, the second once again intends to capture the essence of progress, but from the functionings-capabilities approach, and the third a post-developmentalist critique of progress.

This work, like the three mentioned above, is also on India's post-reform transition. However, this work is not just a re-description of post-reform transition from one's own perspective/standpoint. It is also premised on the question: what is transition? What do we mean by transition? What is our understanding of transition? What qualifies as an experience of transition? When and in which context do we say, this is indeed transition? This work, thus, engages with the concept of transition. It relates the somewhat abstract conception of transition to the concrete-real: India's economic transition. Or perhaps its understanding of India's economic transition helps it to make sense of the abstract concept of transition.

When the somewhat polysemic experiences, empirical descriptions, or scripts of transition are invoked or written, they are, wittingly or unwittingly, accompanied by some idea of transition, if not outright philosophies of transition. While this is in itself a complex issue whose details need not bother us here, our problem at hand, i.e., theorizing the transition of the Indian economy, transition that is always already transitory, forces us to contend with three such philosophies and scripts of transition. We shall also ask in this context: Is transition a trope, a trope to silence, to render ‘unutterable’ and ‘unknown’, to ‘shroud’, ‘hide’, ‘exclude’, or ‘prohibit’ some key word(s)?

The script(s) of transition: Transition as big bang change

The first script views transition as ‘big bang change’. This assumes that transition indeed happens, usually in a ‘big bang’ way.

‘Winning over people’ is a political question. On the other hand, development, on the face of it, seems to be an economic matter. It is a reconstruction of the economic, a master remedy, which must subsume the political and the cultural. The point of development is also not to exclude, but to include people. The point of inclusion is to win over people, to hegemonize the masses into the delusion of the new Order of Things. One, thus, cannot detach the question of (inclusive) development from the larger economicpolitical agenda, and the cultural effects, although in the process, it opens up new avenues of contestation and conflict. As such, inclusive development takes the state and Indian economic transition to an ambiguous place. Why? Primarily, because while the stated agenda of development is inclusion, people at the grassroots could be experiencing exclusion (and marginalization). So, something needed to be done; something in excess of the circuits of global capital and neo-liberal globalization; something in addition to growth. Inclusive development was that ‘beyond’. It was a way of ‘winning over people’, winning over the majority or the aam admi; because the aam admi does count in liberal political democracy. The manner of winning over people is though costly; this cost becomes a bone of contention especially in the face of faltering growth. The gainers of reforms are led to believe that this cost is a social waste that could be avoided. Moreover, it imposes distortionary effects on the functioning of the real economy. Due to contradictory pressures from various segments of social pyramid, inclusive development emerges as a contested and contentious category. This is one reason why it has exhibited so much difficulty in generating a ‘social settlement’ among various stakeholders.

For convenience sake, from today's vantage point, we can divide the postreform era into two periods: 1991 to 2004–2005 and thereafter. By the end of the first period, a realization dawned: while one side of India's post reform story is rapid income growth and prosperity, the other side is about increasing income, social and structural divide.

This work begins with ‘labour’, with the question of labour, as also with the ‘framework’ to analyze the condition of labour in contemporary India. The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels (1845) focused on worker's wages and their living conditions, which offered necessary empirical ground for the subsequent writing of Capital by Marx. The framework of analyzing the ‘condition of the working class in India’ could be a prelude to the possible writing of Capital in the contemporary. It is a prelude towards making sense of a triadic and split contemporary, marked by the overdetermination and contradiction among capitalism, development and neo-liberal globalization.

This chapter intervenes in the question of labour in four ways. First, it lays down a window to look at labour; a close look at labour encompasses diverse labouring practices, including gender and caste imbrications, and the equally varied ways in which wealth resulting from labouring practices is appropriated, distributed and received. This decentered and disaggregated perspective to labour gives way to a new meaning of the economy. The new meaning builds on a particular Marxian approach that has developed in the last three decades. More specifically, known as the class-focused theory (not class specific or class centric), this approach seeks to produce an alternative economic cartography in terms of ‘class defined as processes of performance, appropriation, distribution and receipt of surplus labour’ and the epistemology of overdetermination, which argues that class processes are in a mutually constitutive relation with non-class processes. Second, class focused rendition of the economy produces in turn the possibility of a number of coexisting social formations and labour relations, with capitalism being one (not the only) form. This entails that capitalism is a part and not the whole of an otherwise disaggregated, decentered and complex class focused whole, called the economy; as a result labouring processes are also polymorphous (not just multiple); the same labouring individual may move from one kind of class process to another, and occupy multiple class positions at the same time. Because, the capitalist class process, capitalism and the economy are conceptually distinct, any attempt to reduce the economy to either capitalism or the capitalist class process is moot.

Let us end the book, a book that has tried to make sense of the overdetermined and contradictory triad: neo-liberal globalization, global capitalism and inclusive development, with a somewhat larger and ambitious reflection. The reader by now must have seen that this book was about the ‘contemporary’. Or perhaps is about the contemporary; a contemporary that is ongoing; that was and is changing, as we wrote or write the book; including the fact that a new government comes to power on May 16, 2014 with its own economic framework and policy. We have also shown how ‘neo-liberalization is not (only) about “cutting off” some social welfare and/or getting less money for ones work’, how neo-liberalism ‘constitutes a completely different conceptualization of (organized) society and, along with that, new forms of subjectivity, grounded on a new – a neo-liberal – anthropology’ (Marvakis, 2012, as quoted by Dafermos, 2013). We have asked, are we ‘witnessing a Great Experiment in the making of a new neoliberal humanity through the crisis?… Will the neo-liberal model of what it is to be a human being become definitive for the next fifty years’ (Caffentzis, 2012, as quoted by Dafermos, 2013)? However, we have also shown in Chapter 5, something remains unchanged even in changing times.

We have shown in Chapters 2, 3 and 5 how India has featured in Marx in two ways: first, in young Marx, in writings on British rule in India, as ‘lacking-in-capitalism’ and in late Marx, in Ethnological Notebooks, as different, different in terms of the historical materialist telos of British or west-European political economy. Building on the two meanings of India in Marx's work, building on how India offered two very different perspectives to Marx, young and late, we have tried to explore in this book what contemporary India can mean to Marxist's today, as also what sense can contemporary Marxist's make of India today.

This book is of course not about the whole of the contemporary; but about a particular aspect of the contemporary; an aspect marked by the changing nature of economic processes including ‘capitalism’, ‘globalization’, ‘development’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘the condition of the working class in India’, the changing and the unchanged in labour relations, discourses of inclusion–exclusion and emergent neo-subjectivities, like human capital.

Neo-liberalism, like ‘globalization’ in the early 1990s, is a term that has come to hog much of Indian intellectual space. The term however needs a much clearer positing. Moreover, the term needs to be understood in the context of its appearance and evolution in the Indian context; all the more, because ‘India’ is the window through which we are trying to understand contemporary (global) capitalism. In further examining the relation between neo-liberalism and globalization, we will forward ‘neo-liberal globalization’ (as against other forms of globalization), as one of the important axis of India's transitional logic.

We have seen in Chapters 2 and 3 how the South is looked at through a dualistic framework (p, ∼p) with the destitute/devalued ‘third world’ represented by, first, traditional pre-capitalist agriculture (∼p) and modern capitalist industrial economy (p), and later on, additionally by informal economy (∼p) and formal capitalist economy (p). Correspondingly, development came to be understood as a transition from an overwhelmingly pre-capitalist agrarian economy to a capitalist industrialized economy. Before the advent of the current phase of globalization, the adopted developmental strategy split typically, into ‘state planning’ and the ‘market route’; some countries even combined with whatever unease both state planning and market. In the course of their evolution, two further strategies (or strategic nodal points) became a matter of choice: imported substitution industrialization strategy or ISI (adopted by countries like India, Brazil and Mexico) and the export-led industrialization strategy or ELI (adopted by countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore). In India's context, state sponsored planning (within a market economy) combined with ISI gave form to the strategy of facilitating the transition towards industrial capitalism. The ‘choice’ between planning and market, and that between ISI and ELI has become irrelevant since the advent of globalization and the end of the cold war; this is what has changed; the choice between these have now become redundant. Given the reconfigured setting that took shape with the advent of the new economic policies (also known as liberalization policies), a new strategy has evolved to transit towards a modification of the capitalist economy.

One of the defining axes of India's (economic) transition is capitalism. However, approaches to and the context and framework of the term ‘capitalism’ are diverse; diverse are the meanings of capitalism; diverse are the ways in which it is invoked. Clearing somewhat the air on the different ideas and interpretations of capitalism is the objective of this chapter (just like, we had problematized existing ideas and understandings of labour in Chapter 1, and had set up a frame of analyzing labour). Such a ground clearing is necessary to make sense of India's transition. Our subsequent usage of the term capitalism will remain circumscribed by the interpretations presented in this chapter. A parallel concern is the relation of the class-focused approach (elaborated in the previous chapter) to these interpretations of capitalism. We have already seen one interpretation of capitalism in the context of the approach in Chapter 1. Interesting is the question of how class fare in relation to the other interpretations. What is its place in these other interpretations of capitalism? We begin by recognizing three broad conceptualizations of capitalism (which in turn are also related to three ways of conceptualizing ‘reality’).