To live free

In a corny old British TV series, Red Dwarf, a shape-shifting alien invades a spaceship and imperils its resident humans. Each time the humans figure out the form it has currently assumed – a sausage, say, or a fluffy rabbit – and try to slay it, the creature changes into something else to avoid detection and waits for a fresh chance to attack. In Southasia, imperialism is evidently one such monster: whenever it is chased off, it slips into another, seemingly benign, form in order to re-insinuate itself and ultimately smother its hosts. It used to be 'civilising the savages'; now it comes as 'development'.

Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India explains the processes by which Indians have again lost their economic sovereignty, and the devastation this new conquest has wrought upon the lives of the country's poorest. In the early 1990s, when India needed a loan, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) used the opportunity to impose constraints on its domestic policies. These 'structural adjustments', followed by India's entry into the World Trade Organisation, remodelled the country's economy to conform with the profit-making imperatives of international and domestic corporations. The result has been enormous wealth for a few, which has trickled down to an extent in cities and towns, but a disaster for rural areas, in which two-thirds of the Indian people reside.