NO! This is not 1991!

Yes this is NOT 1991. India is not in the same position as 1991!

Why don’t people get this!! It’s just shocking!

India, today, is in a much worse position than it was in 1991.

Obviously to analyze this any better we have to start comparing the situations of 91 and present.

1991.

After decades of Nehruvian policies and Indira Gandhi’s emergency and nationalizations and those infamous gangsterous licence-rajs’; there wasn’t much of an economy left in 91. Add to it the turmoil surrounding the Russia, Berlin-wall, Bush Senior’s Iraq war and the bust of HM bubble; there wasn’t much left. India was a closed economy, the bamboo economy! There were no foreign investors and those who came were frowned up on and/ or fleeced and sent away. Probably, the only foreign investments were the round-tripping of the money. The only foreign flows that came were probably from the World Bank-IMF aid funds or Japan / US donor funds.

What do you get when you are in this type of an economic situation? India goes bust! Obviously. There is nothing new in that.

Going bust then was a given and was a not a surprise, let alone a shocker.

2010-2013

The situation now is much different. Lots of water has flown past Ganges since we took the IMF loan and had to restructure the economy under PV Narasimha Rao. 

[Yes, Yes, Yes, the so-called architect of privatization and liberalization was Mr. PV Narasimha Rao and not Manmohan Singh. Manmohan Singh was just following the orders from PVN and IMF.]

Lots of things have happened in between 1991 and present. Liberalization, Privatizations, GATT, WTO, Dot com bubble, Information technology boom [aka the COBOL, Y2K boom], followed by serious Information Technology boom [Services, Call centers, BPO, KPO, Server-side, Java, Web and some products etc], Ketan-Parekh boom and bust, 2006-2007 stock boom, 2008 bust, Indian companies acquire abroad, business confidence at highs, Rupee has gall to appreciate! FDI flows in droves, we are part of BRIC, we are growing at 8%+ every year, infrastructure boom happening everywhere – super highways being built and every village connected, every one hops on the mobile phones, sectors like textiles find new legs, gems and jeweler exports boom, and everyone wants to be here – from new babies to foreign investors …. 

Looked like nothing could go wrong!

Then it went wrong. Dramatically. We fell off the cliff. Scams after scams after scams … infinite numbers of them. The value of these stretches a long way. Exchequer was looted and country was poorer. And what happens when it happens? Obviously, India goes bust.

Now dear reader is there a difference between what happened in 1991 and 2010-2013? Yes there is. It is that of one impoverished country going bust and a prospering ‘emerging’ country going bust.

THEY ARE NOT SAME!

Nobody cares if a rank newcomer score ten ducks in a row. It’s a very different matter if Sachin Temdulkar scores ten ducks in a row. They are two different individuals, coming from different levels of competency and fundamental authority.

What UPA government squandered over past term was the prosperity (albeit small) but growing very rapidly, leads among the emerging country peers and a good chance of redeeming the fortunes of half a billion poor and impoverished citizens. They will never be able to explain its way out. They can never be forgiven for having blindly neglected the well-being of country’s poor or the aspirations of its young.

The failures of UPA government of crashing the cruising Ferrari to a blinder stop and accident is much different from the buggy cart we were on in 1991.

Unfortunately, the biggest difference between the 1991 and 2010-2013 was that there was no PV Narasimha Rao.

Rest, as they say, is history. Rain forests have been chopped down to eulogize the performance of Manmohan Singh and his crew, and few more rain forests will be chopped to post-mortem it. But nobody can give back India and its people, the lost time and decade of opportunity miserably spent