Our reforms clamour: pining of the naive?

For many months now, I have been reading with much amusement the statements of India's top business leaders and best brains voicing their concern about the near-stalling of the economic reforms process. Some of them talk about the present PM being the fther of economic reforms and find the current situtation an irony. A person can't take such a line of thought seriously beyond a certain point. If you consider the popularly acknowledged reforms flag-off point of late-June 1991, you also need to know that it was a flag-off out of compulsion rather than love for reforms. India's precarious forex reserve situation is well-documented as well as its other woes. India had little choice but to do the things it had to do to get IMF assistance. That is also how Manmohan Singh who was the secretary general of South Commission headed by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyrere suddenly found himself as India's finance minister and in the hot seat, talking and doing things that completely went against his intellectual and other leanings. In fact, many leftist economists accused Manmohan Singh of being "intellectually dishonest", a charge he took pains to defend himself against. What is also forgotten is that the V.P.Singh, Janta Dal and Chandrashekhar governments kept sitting on the decision to go for the IMF loan letting the economy go for a tailspin--in the backdrop of the first Gulf War of 1990 as Iraq invaded Kuwait and later was attacked by US and NATO-- even as they went overdrive working out their political fortunes in the backdrop of Mandal disturbances and BJP's Rath Yatra. If you need evidence you could go through the archives of Business India magazine during that period. It may sound terrible but unless pushed to the wall, we can't really expect a reforms burst from ths government. Neither do we have across the spectrum political consensus that gives these issues primacy nor do we have a leadership that can muscle the agenda  through.

Worldwide, in democracies, in the first two years of a government's term, one finds the boldest moves since the governments are high on confidence since they have just got the people's mandate. They go slow subsequently since they want to get re-elected and thus prepare the ground for it by populist measures and or paying lip service to some reform measures. What I find odd in case of UPA-II is that they have screeched to a halt very early on. Can they break this typical trend of democatic governments? Time will tell.