True, the daily miseries encountered by millions and millions of the poor in the country are indescribably grim. And yet, how does one ignore the reality currently unfolding in the stockyard of our stock markets, with scores of families getting ruined, persons engaged in stock-broking firms all of a sudden losing their jobs, a few desperate ones, who have seen their assets disappear in the course of a week’s hurricane, choosing to commit suicide? A sullen anger, mixed with a sense of fright on account of not knowing what is in store tomorrow, hangs in the air. In a large number of cases, those rendered paupers by the share-market devastation were more sinned against than sinning: they were led up the garden path and soon lost their bearing, prudence got juxtaposed with temptation; once they crossed the threshold, they did not know what had hit them.

But were they not, in the final count, victims of the frenzy of neo-liberal passion systematically encouraged in the country, and under official auspices? A democracy survives because it accepts as its guiding principle the onus of accountability. Those responsible for the bloodbath going on in the bourses therefore need to be identified. To pin the responsibility for all that happened and is happening on the ‘bigger players’ in the United States of America and Europe, as our prime minister has attempted to do, is sheer cowardice. The head of the government cannot be allowed to get off that lightly; he has to explain to the nation how the sorry mess we are in has come about. We were a free, independent nation. We had — although here and there a little cumbersome — at least a reasonably effective regulatory framework of economic policies, including international economic policies, which stressed the goals of self-reliance and planned economic development with the public sector in command.

That framework was made to crumble on the ground that it was not yielding enough — only a three to 3.5 per cent annual rate of gross domestic product growth. Saboteurs were assiduously at work over the years. Liberalization, heralded with much fanfare nearly two decades ago, has now doubled the GDP growth rate. But more than four-fifths of the nation have remained outside the orbit of this accelerated growth. And a great many of the lucky less-than-one-fifth have been felled by the present holocaust. The guilty crowd had impressive credentials; it included civil servants in very senior positions with their nexus with kindred souls in Western capitals and international financial institutions. It was an amoral crowd, a part of India and yet not quite belonging to it, springing from the post-independence generation who monopolized the opportunities opened up by the vacuum created by the departure of British civilians. They were in love with the steel frame the colonial administration had built; their minds had the imprint of imperial hauteur. They suffered — in the immediate post-independence phase — the ruling politicians who talked of a socialistic pattern of society and five-year plans. They had to obey the politicians but they were unhappy about it. They were particularly unhappy with an economic arrangement which discouraged foreign entry into the vital sectors of the economy, clamped a strict regime of exchange controls and discouraged consumerism.

While tucking their frustration within, the senior civil servants, however, did not mind whatever advantages they could squeeze out of this tight environment. The regimen of industrial licensing and tariff regulations, for example, enabled the top brass of the civil service to emerge as dispensers of favours to the private sector.

And since it was a full-blown democracy, the neo-liberals had never given up their hope to conquer India. The Bretton Woods institutions provided short- and long- term external credit. While extending credit, they would preach the virtues of liberal economic ideas. The civil servants were more than eager to endorse such external advice. They could not proceed beyond a point because of the reservations expressed by ruling politicians.

History cannot be rewritten. It is nonetheless useful to speculate how circumstances would have shaped up had Indira Gandhi not been assassinated in October 1984. Unlike her father, who had fond romantic notions concerning economic self-reliance built on the edifice of planning, Indira Gandhi was a cynic extraordinary; she had little difficulty in mouthing socialist clichés and going ahead to nationalize banks. while at the same time, without batting an eye, signing after-hours concordats with private tycoons. While no ideologue, she had pride, and a fierce ego. What was more, she never forgot a slight. Lyndon B. Johnson treated her with condescension, and Richard Nixon had called her a bitch. If she had to face a 1991-like situation, with the country’s foreign exchange reserves down to a couple of billion dollars and no Soviet Union in existence to hold her hand, she would perhaps have still manoeuvred her way out of a total capitulation; she would have certainly vetoed proposals from the bureaucracy to go all the way to propitiate the Western masters. The callow politicians of Doon School vintage who took over following her assassination had moved very far away from Jawaharlal Nehru’s airy-fairy ideology; they had no memory at all of the pledges of the national movement woven around the theme of independent economic development; Indira Gandhi’s personal hang-ups were not theirs either. It was triumphant hour for the ‘there is no alternative’ — TINA — brigade, who used the pretext of balance of payments difficulties to embrace full-scale globalization.

Actually, there was an alternative; it lay in cutting the country’s annual import bill by three to four per cent of the GDP. This would have called for a social and economic regime. Altogether anathema to the epicureans holding power in New Delhi at that juncture. The Congress therefore became easy prey to the allure of globalization cum liberalization. The Bharatiya Janata Party, that minor constituency of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch excepting, happily went along.

The present prime minister, therefore, need not strain himself overmuch to identify the parties responsible for our current mess. They consisted of himself and his friends who took charge of the nation’s economic affairs with effect from the beginning of the final decades of the last century.

It is too late to suggest to him that, on occasion, non-globalization can be a life-saver for a nation. Even so, consider the lines of the Great Depression. The Soviet Union was still a pariah; the Western nations would not have any economic relations with it. And that fact actually saved the Soviet Union from disaster. While the US and Europe sunk deep into recession and when long hunger marches by the unemployed comprised the commonest of sights in the rest of the world, the self- reliant Soviet Union registered a remarkably high rate of economic growth accompanied by near- full employment during the same period.

Contrast that piece of historical evidence with what is happening to fully liberalized Russia at this moment. The bottom has fallen out of its share markets, the foreign exchange reserves of the country have declined precipitously in the course of the past two months, foreign borrowings by the exciting new generation of private capitalists have catapulted, there are bankruptcies galore, and lay-offs rise every day. Economic liberalism is a hard task master. We Indians too are learning that lesson even as our prime minister goes a-hunting for scapegoats.