The Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) has completed more than a decade. The Indian state brought upon itself an acute intensification of the chronic fiscal and balance of payments difficulties. The statist economic growth model in force during the 1950-1990 in its various avatars was increasingly made nominal, friendly and subservient to the market forces: it was demonised as the root cause of the crisis of macro-economic management in early 1991. The steadily worsening crisis of the denial of a secure livelihood and basic democratic rights formed no part of this perspective. Ignoring this wider social goal, the economic and financial ‘crisis’ was used as a ploy to trigger off a series of far-reaching changes in the policy objectives, instruments and directions desired by global multinational agencies and organisations and a large chunk of India’s big capital. It was an attempt to make India speedily and stealthily redesign her economy, polity, society and culture bypassing mass political approval. This represents, in a nutshell, an unfortunate saga of the disempowerment of popular forces and an emptying of Indian politics of its limited democratic content, leaving only the form. For a no-holds-barred execution of these unjust hegemonic designs, a sustained campaign of disinformation, regimentation, cultural conditioning and severe street violence is deployed with a systematic regularity. The official Economic Survey of the government is increasingly being used for sugarcoating the bitter pill of liberalisation.
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