Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 135

Indian Politics & Policy
nature of changes were extensive, and
involved transformations in policies,
the policymaking process, and state/
institutional capacity. In addition, “reformist
woodwork politicians” emerged
with reformist bureaucrats disrupting
vested interests, and new institutions,
new collaborations, and new coalitions
in support of trade reform were forged.
Importantly, global changes resulted in
the state collaborating more closely and
actively with business.
Through what mechanisms did
global factors transform India’s domestic
political economy? Sinha points
to three global factors—geopolitics,
global markets, and the WTO. Geopolitics,
and the changing balance of
power, created new sovereignty costs
and changed the external environment
for India. These changes resulted in a
pro-U.S. shift and a wariness of China,
and were the initial necessary conditions
for domestic policy change. Such
systemic factors combined with new
opportunities and threats arising from
global markets, which mobilized private
sector actors as well as state actors
to design new policies and institutions
to deal with external changes. The third
set of influences arose from global institutions,
specifically the WTO, which
generated nonmarket effects, pushed
against policy autonomy, and resulted
in onerous transaction and implementation
costs that catalyzed new domestic
responses and capacities.
In addition to driving domestic
changes in policies, the policymaking
process, and state capacity, the process
of external integration also changed
the nature of coalitions and interests
domestically. Global changes disrupted
vested interests and coalitions that favored
protectionism and, importantly,
“new winners and incipient reformers
emerged from the woodwork within
both within the state and the private sector”
(19). In addition, new losers were
unable to mobilize the state. For Sinha,
“more coherent and strong actions by
Indian policy and private actors at the
global level ... are the consequence not
the cause of global integration” (19).
Sinha marshals extensive empirical
evidence from a variety of sources,
including interviews, newspaper archives,
and a variety of primary sources
to support her argument. She offers a
detailed analysis of how global integration
played out in the pharmaceutical
and textile sectors, which support her
claim of the causal role of global factors
in driving domestic changes.
State, Business, and
Globalization
In many ways, Sinha’s incisive and
empirically meticulous analysis
contributes significantly to the current
political economy literature. For a
start, as mentioned earlier, Sinha’s book
successfully accomplishes her aim of
moving away from ‘methodological
nationalism’ and she makes a convincing
theoretical and empirical case for
analyzing the joint effect of global and
domestic factors in certain questions of
Indian political economy.
A second contribution involves
her treatment of the reforms process.
A bulk of the political economy scholarship
tends to view economic reforms
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