6 - India and Sectoral Variation

Summary

The Strategic Value Framework explicates the dominant sectoral patterns of market governance in India today. Historical process tracing from sectoral origins of labor-intensive textiles and capital-intensive telecommunication in this chapter shows how Indian state leaders intersubjectively respond to objective economic and political pressures. The political basis and evolution of the perceived strategic value of national self-reliance and neoliberal development are the successively elected governments’ interpretations of Independence legacies in response to external and sectarian conflicts and economic crises. The joined imperatives in the Emergency period through Big Bang Liberalization in the 1990s have profound implications for the Singh and Modi governments alike in 2004 and beyond. Interacting perceived strategic value and sectoral structures and organization of institutions shape the decentralized role of the state and the dominant distribution of public and private economic actors of regulated governance in high-tech, globally integrated sectors, such as telecommunications. The more centralized state coordination and numerically dominant small-scale industry and politically dominant business groups of centralized governance operate in more rural, labor-intensive sectors, such as textiles, associated with the nationalist imagination of Gandhian Swadeshiism. The dominant sectoral patterns of market governance have given rise to Indian-style capitalism of bifurcated liberalism shaped by neoliberal self-reliance.