India's post-1991 liberalization has sped along at the pace of a
glacier. At times, such as now, the glacier has played hare to
India's turtle. To foreign observers the nation can sometimes seem
paralysed, unable to move forward and in danger of stumbling
backwards.
Thanks to its preference for seclusion, India can be a difficult
nation for outsiders to understand. It is a nation of contrasts. It
has a large, well-educated, English-speaking middle class, but
foreign investors are scrambling over each other to get out of the
country. It is keen to join the WTO, but cannot muster the
political will to liberalize — the government has demonstrated
monumentally an inability to privatize anything.
Conversely, neighbouring China, the world's largest communist
state, has been praised for its privatizations, has just joined the
WTO, is attracting record levels of foreign investment, continually
pushing for greater influence throughout the region and indeed the
world, and yet has...