Reset: Regaining India’’s Economic Legacy

In 1970, at the request of a few Jan Sangh leaders including Nanaji Deshmukh and Jagannathrao Joshi, Subramanian Swamy prepared and presented a Swadeshi Plan. The monograph vociferously demanded that socialism be sacrificed for a competitive market economic system, so India can grow at 10 per cent per year, achieve self-reliance, full employment and produce nuclear weaponry. The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi denounced the plan as dangerous. Fifty years later, Swamy redefines his path-breaking ideas on India-specific economic development in his seminal work, Reset. It undertakes a nuanced analysis of the manner in which the highly prosperous Indian economy witnessed a long, accelerated decline due to persistent British imperialist aggression, and compares the distinctive manner in which Asian giants-India and China-suffered at the hands of imperialism. He critically analyses the highs and lows of the Nehruvian model of centralized economic planning borrowed from the Soviet Union, and the debilitating circumstances that impelled him, as Commerce Minister in Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s government, to draw up a blueprint for economic reforms.