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.
About the Author
Dr Subramanian Swamy is an economist with a PhD from Harvard University, with Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets and a jointly published research with Nobel Laureate Paul A. Samuelson. He taught graduate-level courses for several years at Harvard University after receiving his doctorate. He returned to India to be Professor of Economics at IIT, Delhi, but his scathing criticism of socialism and communism as being inapplicable in a democracy, invoked the ire of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and his professorship was terminated in 1973. However, a Delhi court held the termination as null and void in 1991, but he resigned after resuming his Chair for a day to participate full-time in politics. Dr Swamy has been elected six times to the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, three times each respectively. As a Cabinet Minister twice in 1990–91 and 1994–96, he helped Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar and Narasimha Rao to launch economic reforms. He is well versed in law and has successfully argued for a large number of public interest litigations. Dr Swamy is a renowned scholar of the Chinese economy and is highly respected in China for his contribution in improving bilateral relations in the 1990s.
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