Continuity amid change in India’s political economy: from “socialist” to “neoliberal” India.

The aim of this paper is to show that the social coalition that benefited from India’s central government’s economic policies remained unchanged between the pre and post economic reforms periods. More specifically, this paper will argue that the economic policies promoted by the central government between 1980 and 2004 – irrespective of the political party heading the Cabinet – mostly benefited the middle class and the corporate sector, while the poor and the rural world were clearly relegated to a secondary position in the governments’ policy priorities.
The paper will highlight six important lines of continuity in India’s economic policy and will argue that if we look at who the “winner” and the “losers” of these policy processes are, the economic reforms of the early 1990s do not separate two different phases of India’s development path. From this point of view the election of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2004 might constitute a more important break with the past.