The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan.

THE REGIONAL ROOTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL POLITICS IN INDIA: A Divided Leviathan. By Aseema Sinha. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. xxvi, 356 pp. (Maps, tables, figures.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 0-253-21681-8.

This book attempts to demonstrate that development is not the sole product of the nation-state or globalized markets. It argues that subnational units--in the case of a country as diverse as India, state-level institutions--mediate the process. It focuses on three different political units: Gujarat, a fast-growing state with high migration and weak labour unions that flexibly accommodated small-scale rural enterprises as well as large-scale urban industries and promoted joint public-private enterprises and opportunity zones; West Bengal, where communist ideological tenets and a rigid bureaucracy produced economic decline that necessitated belated concessions to industry; and Tamil Nadu, an intermediate case, whose development was retarded by its preoccupation with cultural issues.

In rejecting a dirigiste (a term never explicitly defined despite an entire chapter on the subject), or top-down model that views the central government as either a benevolent or malevolent leviathan, the book opts for a horizontal, as well as vertical, explanation. This means that there is now competition between the various states for business investment. The strategies they employ depend on the strategic choices of regional elites, regional political institutions, and bargaining with the central authorities. In this regard, a comparison between Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu would have been more revealing than the predictable outcomes the author discovered.

I recognize that the volume under discussion has been awarded the Joseph Elder Prize of the American Institute of Indian Studies, but there is little new here--either with respect to the author's sources or conclusions--that will surprise observers of Indian politics. Aside from 78 interviews with businessmen to ascertain how they have coped with state and local officials since the 1991 liberalization (they are now pursued rather than harassed by state governments), most of the sources are well known to students of India's political scene.

Sinha's scheme is not that different than the one developed by Atul Kohli in The State and Poverty in India, the Politics of Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), a resource never discussed. Kohli analyzed the role of political parties in producing divergent state policy by communists in West Bengal, the populist Urs government in Karnataka, and the backward-looking peasant-dominated Janata regime in Uttar Pradesh. Sinha mentions in passing (pp. 191-93) Kohli's discussion of West Bengal in Democracy and Discontent (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), but doesn't address his comparisons of how political institutions and economic development affect outcomes in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, as well as Bihar and Karnataka.

The emphasis of the analysis is on the roots of India's development, not the impact of the post-1991 reforms in the states. Discussion of that subject (pp. 153-58) is thin. Very little data is more recent than 1994 and most is considerably older. Given the historical character of the study, it is hard to understand the author's failure to take into account the points made by Francine Frankel's India's Political Economy, 1947-1977 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); perhaps that seminal work is characteristic of dirigistic analysis. India's federal system in the days of Congress one-party rule, as Sinha concedes, featured bargaining between the centre and the states during the planning commission process. It also had features that gave New Delhi the ability to deputize state bureaucrats and appoint state governors. All of these devices were meant to be mediating mechanisms.

The book concludes with a tacked-on comparison of the Indian case to those of Brazil, China, the former Soviet Union and post-communist Russia. As the author concedes, her comparative discussion is more of a "tease" (p. 235) than an analysis. To get a better understanding of how development in India compares to other countries--in this case Brazil, South Korea and Nigeria--readers would be advised to consult Kohli's State Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

ARTHUR G. RUBINOFF

University of Toronto, ON, Canada