Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 134

India’s Search for Economic Prosperity and Global Power
The Interplay of International
and Domestic Factors in
India’s Global Integration
Joshi’s book follows a significant
portion of the scholarship in Indian
political economy that tends to
view India’s transformation as well as its
economic future primarily through the
lens of national or domestic variables.
The scholarship has largely focused on
the role of internal economic changes
in driving India’s global transformation.
In contrast, Aseema Sinha in Globalizing
India moves away from “methodological
nationalism” and analyzes the
joint interaction of global factors and
domestic factors in a more complex
manner. In doing so, she develops a
“Global Design-in-Motion framework”
and “starts with a ‘second image reversed’
argument” that focuses on how
international variables affect domestic
politics. She goes on to examine which
specific aspects of globalization (rules
or markets) shape and change Indian
preferences and interests toward global
integration.
The empirical puzzle that Sinha
focuses on relates to India’s rapid global
economic integration after the late
1990s, specifically in the realms of trade
and multilateral engagement. Sinha
suggests that a paradigmatic shift began
occurring in the late 1990s. Catalyzed
primarily by a change in the global trade
regime and the formation of the WTO
in 1995 in particular, India witnessed
substantial and rapid trade liberalization,
and began to assertively participate
in multilateral forums after the late
1990s. Focusing on this marked shift after
the late 1990s, Sinha’s book asks how
India achieved rapid global integration,
and analyzes the factors that propelled
and facilitated this integration.
To address this central question,
the book draws on in-depth empirical
evidence from two sectors—pharmaceuticals
and textiles. The book includes
eight chapters. Chapter 1 sets
the stage for the analysis and offers a
brief preview of the argument, while
Chapter 2 elaborates on the theoretical
framework. Chapter 3 meticulously
documents the changing nature of
tradecraft and state capacity in India
necessitated by changes in the global
trade regime. Chapters 4–6 include empirical
evidence from case studies of the
pharmaceutical and textile sectors. After
outlining the changes in these two
sectors, Chapter 7 addresses the role of
market and nonmarket mechanisms in
driving these changes, and Chapter 8
concludes.
In answering what propelled
India’s substantial and deep global integration
after the late 1990s, the book
highlights the critical role played by
international institutions and rules in
transforming the Indian state, the private
sector, and in affecting the nature
of state–business relations. The catalyst
for change in India’s trade policies was
external effects related to the WTO as
well as global markets and geopolitics.
These external levers, in turn, initiated
“changes in state capacity and a new tradecraft”
(15). After the loss of two major
cases at the WTO in 1998, “India’s
trade policy regime changed radically
in the late 1990s (after 1998)” (15). The
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