The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided
Leviathan. By Aseema Sinha. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2005. 384p. $64.95 cloth, $27.95 paper.
This excellent study by Aseema Sinha is a pathbreaker in the fields of
political economy and comparative politics generally, and an especially
welcome addition to India studies. Conventional wisdom has it that low
economic growth rates in India until liberalization in the 1990s were the
result of centralized control, especially in the area of the issuance of
licenses governing investments known as the license raj. On this
view, licensing controls and cumbersome bureaucratic implementation
procedures—supported by an ideology that sought to prevent
concentration of economic power in the hands of a small group of private
entrepreneurs at the expense of the wider social good—have been a
drag on the Indian economy. Far better, the argument goes, would have been
to let the market function to determine investment patterns. In essence,
the debate about Indian growth has been framed around two
alternatives—the classical free market and the dirigiste state.