RESET: Regaining India’s Economic Legacy

Reset: Regaining India’s Economic LegacyIn 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 Nehrus 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.Electronic Voting Machines: Unconstitutional and TamperableAre Indian Elections Free and Fair in the Age of EVMs? EVMs have already been banned in many countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Italy, and the list is getting longer. Thus, there is a growing lack of confidence in EVMs the world over. Why should India persist with a failed system that has been abandoned worldwide? The risk of wholesale rigging inherent in EVMs, howsoever small, cannot be accepted in a democracy where the stakes in winning elections are so high. The book brings together a panel of political, constitutional and technical experts and makes a powerful and substantive case for the discontinuation of EVMs in Indian elections if these cannot be safeguarded to public satisfaction. The book is an eye-opener and a must-read for all Indian politicians and citizens alike.