Attention New York Reasonoids: Sign Up Now For a Dynamite Reason Panel on India Next Tuesday

India watchers know that the country’s explosive economic growth
after it ended its daft autarkic policies and rolled back the
License Raj lifted nearly 300 million people out of poverty. The
country’s IT sector became the global outsourcing hub. And Indians
started harboring delusions of grandeur, talking loosely about
India becoming the next super power.

That was then.

Now, the country’s growth has plummeted to a mere 4 percent,
raising fears that India might be headed back to the days of the
dreaded Hindu rate of growth of 2 percent. Given that every one
percent drop in GPD growth consigns millions of Indians to poverty
– defined as living on $1.25 a day —jumpstarting India’s economic
miracle is not merely an academic question but a vital human
issue.

Given such stakes, it is no overstatement that national
elections this spring are the country’s most momentous since
Independence in 1947. The Congress Party, that formed a coalition
government in 2004, is facing a serious challenge from the
opposition Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Narenda Modi. Although
tainted by his failure to prevent a massacre of the minority Muslim
population in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, where he remains chief
minister, Modi’s promise to fix India’s abysmal infrastructure,
tackle its hidebound bureaucracy, attract foreign investment and
end affirmative action has made him the darling of business.

But a new threat emerged in the form of the Aam Adami Party
(literally: Ordinary Man’s Party) in the state assembly elections
in December. AAP’s leader, Arvind Kejriwal, a political neophyte,
ran a populist campaign promising relief from inflation and rampant
corruption of the established parties, riding to victory in New
Delhi.

But do any of the parties or candidates have what it takes to
reignite India’s economy? Are they campaigning on the right issues?
Will this election produce a government that can fix India’s broken
governing institutions and restart its economic miracle? Will any
party gain the moral authority to enact the next wave of
liberalization? Or will the elections produce more political
fragmentation with no political party obtaining a clear mandate to
enact a bold reform agenda?

These are the questions that Reason Foundation plans to address
at a panel it is co-sponsoring with Asia Society and the South
Asian Journalists Association on Feb. 4, Tuesday, 6.30 p.m., at the
Asia Society’s Park Avenue premises. I’ll moderate a stellar lineup
that includes American Enterprise Insitute’s Sadanand Dhume, a
Wall Street Journal columnist, Arvind Panagariya, a
Columbia University economist who has co-authored several books
with the inimitable Jagdish Bhagwati (and Amartarya Sen’s nemesis)
whom reason.tv interviewed here,
and Carnegie Endowment’s Milan Vaishnav.

Reason still has a few complimentary tickets to give away that
you can get if you rush to this
website and register now.

Bonus material: My column on the
noxious Narendra Modi and why India ain’t going to catch up with the
West any time soon.