Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India

by Vivek Chibber

Overview

Why were some countries able to build "developmental states" in the decades after World War II while others were not? Through a richly detailed examination of India's experience, Locked in Place argues that the critical factor was the reaction of domestic capitalists to the state-building project. During the 1950s and 1960s, India launched an extremely ambitious and highly regarded program of state-led development. But it soon became clear that the Indian state lacked the institutional capacity to carry out rapid industrialization. Drawing on newly available archival sources, Vivek Chibber mounts a forceful challenge to conventional arguments by showing that the insufficient state capacity stemmed mainly from Indian industrialists' massive campaign, in the years after Independence, against a strong developmental state.


Chibber contrasts India's experience with the success of a similar program of state-building in South Korea, where political elites managed to harness domestic capitalists to their agenda. He then develops a theory of the structural conditions that can account for the different reactions of Indian and Korean capitalists as rational responses to the distinct development models adopted in each country.


Provocative and marked by clarity of prose, this book is also the first historical study of India's post-colonial industrial strategy. Emphasizing the central role of capital in the state-building process, and restoring class analysis to the core of the political economy of development, Locked in Place is an innovative work of theoretical power that will interest development specialists, political scientists, and historians of the subcontinent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691126234
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/24/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Vivek Chibber is Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University.

Read an Excerpt

Locked in Place

State-Building and Late Industrialization in India

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By Vivek Chibber

Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12623-2

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Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

AMID THE ENORMOUS diversity of experience across developing countries since the Second World War, India has managed to stand out. At mid-century, in the years following its independence from British rule, there was a tremendous sense of anticipation as the nation embarked on its first development plan, perhaps the most ambitious yet witnessed in poor countries. Despite the grinding poverty of the bulk of the population, the expectations were that India had some of the basic ingredients required for a great leap forward economically: a rich stock of natural resources, an industrial base which, by the standards of the South, was fairly broad and advanced; a bureaucratic and administrative apparatus which was-again by the standards of the developing world-quite competent; and, lastly, a political leadership genuinely committed to launching an industrial transformation.

Adding to the sense of drama was that this massive nation of four hundred million, with its enormous diversity and history of conflict, was choosing to push forward within a bourgeois democratic framework-a fact of some significance in a continent that already boasted two large nations committed to Communism, hence making the Indian experimentall the more significant to the capitalist world. India was to be an exemplar, demonstrating the possibility that planning need not presuppose the abolition of property, but could, in fact, be harnessed to the engine of capital accumulation.

Fifty years later India still stands out, but only as a lesson in disappointment. Development planning, once seen as the instrument that would launch the country onto a path of industrial dynamism, is now regarded as having been an impediment toward that same end. The 1990s have witnessed a turning away from the statist economic policy of previous decades, ushering in a process of concerted liberalization, a dismantling of the vast panoply of controls and regulations that had slowly accumulated over the years. But the sense of ennui had, in fact, set in much earlier, during the 1970s, when the economy slowed down perceptibly, settling into the famous "Hindu rate of growth." It had become clear that the state's ambition of pushing the country into the front ranks of the developing world had fallen far short of its target, with seemingly few prospects of changing in the near future. By the time liberalization set in during the 1990s, India had fallen from being the prospective beacon for the developing world to what one scholar has called "the most dramatic case of a failed developmental state."

This book seeks to explain why the Indian state failed so conspicuously in its mission to transform India into an industrial dynamo. It does not pretend to offer a complete analysis of the development experience since 1947. My focus is quite narrower: I wish to provide an explanation of why the Indian state failed in the specific domain of industrial planning and policy. Why, when it boasted a political leadership of considerable quality and commitment, the apparent administrative wherewithal, and the requisite industrial base, did India not succeed in propelling a successful industrial transformation? To Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress (INC), the path to development was virtually synonymous with industrialization. That they met with relatively limited success in achieving it merits an explanation.

That the failure was a relative one needs to be emphasized at the outset. My intention is not, by any means, to portray the Indian experience as an embodiment of the caricatures that populate neoliberal strictures against interventionist economic policy. State intervention, whatever its shortcomings, did manage to widen and deepen the country's industrial base considerably and to move the economy along the technological ladder. India today can boast significant competence in many of the cutting-edge sectors of the world economy. This is an achievement that ought not to be slighted, especially in light of the numerous, and quite spectacular, development disasters that decorate the international landscape. But while the Indian state did manage to oversee a somewhat respectable industrial transformation, it cannot be denied that its performance as a developmental agency fell far short not only of the expectations of policy elites but also of the standards set by the states of other countries-in particular, those of Northeast Asia.

Asking why the Indian state failed in its ambitions presumes having some idea of what kinds of policies or choices would have been more successful. Toward this end, my examination of the Indian experience is framed by a comparison with South Korea, perhaps the exemplar developmental state in the postwar period. The fortunes of industrial policy and planning in Korea stand in glaring contrast to those of India: whereas in the latter case the state's efforts to promote a dynamic industrial sector fell prey to the twin evils of bureaucratic paralysis and capitalist rent-seeking, Korean efforts were rewarded by unprecedented success. What makes the comparison interesting and possible are not just the divergent outcomes; there are similarities in background conditions that make it possible to draw meaningful comparisons. Both countries started their development efforts soon after World War II, making their experiences largely concurrent; both were at broadly similar levels of industrial development at the start of their rapid industrialization programs, as shown in table 1.1; in both countries, the industrial sector was dominated by a small number of business houses, which accounted for a disproportionate share of output and investment; in both cases, the policy design was heavily interventionist, relying on extensive government intervention in, and regulation of, the private sector; and in each case industrial policy was directed by the central government, and nominally concentrated in a few key ministries and agencies. Hence, despite many differences in other dimensions, these similarities allow for a meaningful comparison, and indeed have generated some efforts in this direction in recent years.

The enormous success of Korea in making its traversal to a dynamic and efficient industrial economy has generated significant rethinking in development studies. When I first began thinking about the political economy of development in the late 1980s, the dominant trend among scholars evinced a strong suspicion of statist or dirigiste economic strategies. The decade had witnessed the derailment of several prominent experiments in state-led development, most notably in Latin America but also in India, Turkey, and other countries. Although there were many reasons for the downturn in these countries, it was impossible to ignore the fact that their maladies were at least partly generated by the domestic political economy. And most heavily implicated in this drama was the state itself. With a public sector that was often operating with large losses, a private sector bloated from state subsidies and virtually immune from competition, and bureaucracies rife with corruption and venality, the ground was laid for the suspicion that it was state intervention in the economy itself that lay at the heart of the crisis in these countries. The natural conclusion flowing from this position would have been that India's mistake was its very turn toward development planning in the first place, an economic strategy that relied so centrally on state intervention in markets.

At around this same time, a series of studies began to emerge that demanded a rethinking of the reigning consensus. Led most notably by Alice Amsden and Robert Wade, whose case studies have quickly acquired classical status, a number of scholars pointed to the extraordinary growth of the (North)East Asian economies, which they insisted was a fact of great significance for development theorists. For these economies-Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea-had engineered their spectacular success not through any fidelity to free-market policies but with a reliance on highly interventionist industrial planning. The Korean and Taiwanese states had actively manipulated trade and exchange rates, the allocation of finance, as well as the price structure of the domestic economy; it was also shown that both countries not only had developed a large public enterprise sector but had also been active in directing the structure of private investment.

These studies have triggered a disintegration of the consensus on the role of the state in development. It can no longer be argued confidently that a reliance on an interventionist state in developing countries was a mistake. State intervention is a phenomenon that has been common across the development experience, in the successful cases as well as the failures. This fact has led several prominent scholars to conclude that the East Asian experience differed from that of other developing areas, not in the fact of state involvement in the economy but rather in its quality. The state in the newly industrializing countries (NICs) intervened in the domestic economy just as its counterparts did elsewhere, and even toward the same ends; however, it managed to succeed in prodding local industry toward greater efficiency and productivity, whereas others, like the Indian state, did not. States in these regions thus differ not so much in their orientation toward the economy-for in both cases they were committed to "governing" the market-but in their capacity to bring about the desired results. This is not to say that the chief responsibility for the extraordinary growth rates in Taiwan and Korea goes to development planning. Observed rates of economic growth are driven by a combination of a host of factors-cultural, institutional, economic, geographical, and so on. What the scholarship under discussion stresses is that the state has turned out to be one of those factors after all, and a significant one at that.

The debate on the developmental state has thus come to a conclusion much like the one reached about capitalist welfare states a decade before: that much of the interesting variation in outcomes (in this case, success in fostering industrial development) depends on the state's having the capacity to fulfill the tasks assigned to it. State capacity itself has been decomposed into two broad dimensions: an intrinsic component, namely, the state's cohesiveness as a strategic actor, which can formulate and implement policy in a coherent fashion; and an extrinsic component, which is the state's ability to extract performance from private firms-setting standards, monitoring performance, and influencing the direction of investment-in exchange for the subsidies that are doled out to them. Alice Amsden, who has argued this more forcefully than anyone else, puts it aptly:

All governments know that subsidies are most effective when they are based on performance standards. Nevertheless state power to impose such standards, and bureaucratic capability to implement them, vary from country to country ... The state in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan has been more effective than other late-industrializing countries because it has had the power to discipline big business.

The difference in quality of intervention is thus explained in large measure by the state's ability to formulate and implement policy in a coherent fashion, and to impose discipline on private firms. Where Korea and Taiwan succeeded in this task, the states in South Asia and Latin America typically did not.

Hence, in answer to the question posed above-namely, what kind of policies or choices would have been more successful in India-the recent literature does provide us with some guidance, pointing to the centrality of adequate state capacity. And the arguments about East Asia, particularly Korea, certainly do contrast in appropriate ways with what we know about the Indian state: its excessively bureaucratic style, lack of coherence in policy, and utter inability to discipline domestic business are well known. But while I affirm this understanding of the Indian case in the analysis to come (in chapters 7 and 8), I direct much of my attention to two other questions, which flow immediately from the recognition of the state's inadequacies.

THE INSTALLATION OF THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE

First, if the Indian state lacked the capacity to succeed in its developmental tasks, how do we explain this? In other words, why did Indian political leaders and bureaucrats fail to build the institutions adequate to the task? After all, the idea that policy needs to be coherent and that governments have to be able to impose discipline on firms is hardly a deep, arcane truth known only to intrepid social scientists. It is common knowledge to every politician and state functionary, and mid-century Indians should have been no exception; indeed, as I show in chapters 4 and 6, they were keenly aware of the issue, and the idea of building such institutions was very much on the immediate political agenda. That the state ended up without the requisite institutional capacity, despite the national leadership's awareness of its necessity, and despite the leadership putting it on the agenda, requires explanation.

Let us call this-the lack of success in putting a developmental state in place-the question of the installation of the state. It is surprising that, on this issue, there has been very little discussion in the recent work on development. This is perhaps a measure of the extent to which the neoliberal challenge has been able to set the terms of the debate of late. Scholars doing empirical work on East Asia have put considerable effort into showing that states need not fall prey to the pathologies their critics predict. It is for this reason that we have accumulated so much detail on just what these states did in their "miracle" decades, and what kinds of institutions their success required. But one consequence of the dedication to this research agenda is that the anterior issue, of why the East Asian regimes were able to build such states in the first place, has suffered from relative neglect.

In the chapters that follow I offer an account of the Indian experience that seeks to explain why the political leadership did not install a developmental state, despite the fact that they were aware of the need to do so. This is set in contrast to the Korean experience, examined in chapter 3, where the outcome was very different, in that a state with the appropriate institutional backbone was put into place. It needs to be noted here that, despite the comparative frame, questions such as this-in which the concern is to explain the absence of particular institutions-are often more easily posed than answered. Such questions have rightly drawn criticism from some quarters as subtly teleological, in that they presume that there is a "normal" end state (in this case, a developmental state) toward which all paths lead, so that the divergence from such a path requires explanation. But why presume, the criticism goes, that any such end state exists, and why presume that the absence of particular institutions, or types of institutions, requires explanation? There are instances where such worries have proven to be justified; I hope to show, however, that this study is not one of them.

Two conditions suffice to defuse the charge of teleology in analyses such as this one. First, it must be shown that the institutions in question-which were not, in the end, installed-were, in fact, on the political agenda at some critical juncture; second, it needs to be shown that the actors in the drama were aware of this agenda and acted in cognizance of its implications. If these conditions hold, then we are fully justified in asking why, despite being among the menu of options, the desired institutions were not installed. The Indian case meets these conditions handily. The years immediately following Independence, 1947 to 1951, constituted just this kind of critical juncture, in which a strong developmental state was very much on the political agenda. It is therefore an ideal setting to examine the constraints that exist in actualizing the project of installing such states, and I devote chapters 5 and 6 to its examination.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

List of Abbreviations xix

PART I: The Issues and the Argument 1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction 3

CHAPTER 2

Late Development and State-Building 13

The Two Dimensions of Industrial Policy 14

Industrial Policy and State Capacity 17

State Capacity as Dilemma 23

Installing the Developmental State: Four Theses 29

Locked in Place: The Reproduction of the State 44

PART II: Installing the State 49

CHAPTER 3

The Origins of the Developmental State in Korea 51

Introduction 51

The Two Varieties of Statism 53

The Continuity Thesis 55

The Discontinuity Thesis 57

A Critique of the Statist Discontinuity Thesis 62

The Origins of the Developmental State 66

A Look Ahead 82

CHAPTER 4

Precursors to Planning in India: The Myth of the Developmental Bourgeoisie 85

Introduction 85

The Backdrop to the Bombay Plan 88

The Bombay Plan 94

The Capitalist Class and the Demise of the Bombay Plan 98

The Roots of Business Opposition 107

CHAPTER 5

The Demobilization of the Labor Movement 110

Introduction 110

Congress and the Popular Classes 112

The Postwar Labor Upsurge 116

A "Responsible" Labor Movement 118

The Significance of Demobilization 125

CHAPTER 6

The Business Offensive and the Retreat of the State 127

Introduction 127

The Commitment to Import-Substitution 129

Jettisoning Nationalization 132

Disciplinary Planning and the Business Offensive 137

The Institutional Outcome (1):

The Planning Commission 146

The Institutional Outcome (2):

The Filters on Discipline 152

PART III: Reproducing the State 159

CHAPTER 7

State Structure and Industrial Policy 161

Introduction 161

State Structure and Industrial Policy in Korea 164

State Structure and Industrial Policy in India 170

The Rationality of Non-Disciplinary Industrial Policy 183

CHAPTER 8

Locked in Place: Explaining the Non-Occurrence of Reform 193

Introduction 193

Existing Explanations for the Absence of Reform 194

The Crisis of 1957 and the Search for Solutions 196

The Attempt at Export Promotion 199

Agenda-Setting and the Declining Legitimacy of the Planning Process 206

The Reform Episode of the Mid-Sixties 212

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion 222

Bringing Capital "Back In" 222

Capital and the Developmental State 226

The Routes to and Obstacles against ELI 233

Of Possibilities and Roads Not Taken 239

EPILOGUE

The Decline of Development Models 244

Korea: The Revolt against the Developmental State 245

India: The Gradual Implosion of ISI 248

Notes 255

Bibliography 309

Index 327

What People are Saying About This

Peter Evans

This book is an excellent piece of scholarship and an important contribution both to the ongoing comparative debate on the role of the state in development and to our understanding of India as a significant and weighty case within that debate. Marked by careful, detailed historical research and unrelenting engagement with general analytical issues, it will be an invaluable resource for future scholars trying to understand the emergence of the post-colonial state in India.
— Peter Evans, author of "Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation"

Erik Olin Wright

Vivek Chibber's Locked in Place is a brilliant, benchmark study of the developmental state and its dilemmas. Over the past two decades there has been a steady move away from systematic class analysis of state strategies toward state-centric approaches. Chibber decisively "brings class back in" in a nuanced and penetrating investigation of how class strategies constrain and intersect the institutional logics of developmental states.
— Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin, author of "Class Counts" and "Class, Crisis and the State"

Robert Brenner

A truly outstanding book. Chibber presents a novel, powerful, and controversial central thesis that will be of great interest to scholars in the field. He beautifully elaborates the expected consequences of this thesis for comparative historical cases, and presents two critically important, contrasting cases to great effect, with lucidity and élan. The empirical matter is substantial, but is always presented economically and with modesty. The text is extremely well written. The provocative conclusions will, as they should, unquestionably stimulate a raft of further questions and new research.

From the Publisher

"Vivek Chibber's Locked in Place is a brilliant, benchmark study of the developmental state and its dilemmas. Over the past two decades there has been a steady move away from systematic class analysis of state strategies toward state-centric approaches. Chibber decisively "brings class back in" in a nuanced and penetrating investigation of how class strategies constrain and intersect the institutional logics of developmental states."—Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin, author of Class Counts and Class, Crisis and the State

"A truly outstanding book. Chibber presents a novel, powerful, and controversial central thesis that will be of great interest to scholars in the field. He beautifully elaborates the expected consequences of this thesis for comparative historical cases, and presents two critically important, contrasting cases to great effect, with lucidity and élan. The empirical matter is substantial, but is always presented economically and with modesty. The text is extremely well written. The provocative conclusions will, as they should, unquestionably stimulate a raft of further questions and new research."—Robert Brenner

"This book is an excellent piece of scholarship and an important contribution both to the ongoing comparative debate on the role of the state in development and to our understanding of India as a significant and weighty case within that debate. Marked by careful, detailed historical research and unrelenting engagement with general analytical issues, it will be an invaluable resource for future scholars trying to understand the emergence of the post-colonial state in India."—Peter Evans, author of Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation

Editorial Reviews

"An excellent book on political economy that will interest scholars of economics, political science, and sociology and others concerned with economic development and the state structures that aid or hinder it. . . . Chibber has laid out an analysis of the political economy of development that cannot be ignored, and may offer important lessons for developing nations—and for those who would advise them—in the Middle East, Africa, and South America."

Choice

[A] powerful assault on the intellectual assumptions, arguments and claims on which the prevailing neoliberal consensus in India rests. . . . [I]t will likely force much more serious historical research into the whole issue of the relationship of state and class in this period. [W]e have every reason to be grateful for this path-breaking work.

New Left Review - Achin Vanaik

This book should become a cornerstone in all future efforts to explain divergent paths of development, and it will serve as a model for how to understand state policymaking and implementation in all types of economies.

Social Forces - Richard Lachmann

Chibber of course has much to contribute to the state-society debate, Indian historiography, and methodology germane to industrial change. His work provokes many questions and alternative counterfactuals for future research.

Journal of Asian Studies - Anthony P. D'Costa

Vivek Chibber's book is exceptionally clear, fresh, empirically rich, and analytically tight. It clears some conventional cobwebs in thinking about developmental states. It should be read widely.

Perspectives on Politics - Ronald J. Herring

[A]n important contribution to the larger theoretical debate about the role of the state in development and the place of class analysis. A British anthropologist friend remarked after reading it, 'How did he get a job in an American sociology department? Where is the post-modernism? Where are the regressions?' Instead we have a sustained analytical argument presented in writing that is crystal-clear and entirely free of jargon, with historical narrative of 'what was' tautly balanced with counterfactual 'what might have been.' The book assaults idle prejudice on every side of the debate about markets and the role of government. It is long overdue, and deserves to be widely read.

European Journal of Sociology - Robert Hunter Wade

[A] powerful assault on the intellectual assumptions, arguments and claims on which the prevailing neoliberal consensus in India rests. . . . [I]t will likely force much more serious historical research into the whole issue of the relationship of state and class in this period. [W]e have every reason to be grateful for this path-breaking work.
— Achin Vanaik

New Left Review

This book should become a cornerstone in all future efforts to explain divergent paths of development, and it will serve as a model for how to understand state policymaking and implementation in all types of economies.
— Richard Lachmann

Social Forces

Chibber of course has much to contribute to the state-society debate, Indian historiography, and methodology germane to industrial change. His work provokes many questions and alternative counterfactuals for future research.
— Anthony P. D'Costa

Journal of Asian Studies

Vivek Chibber's book is exceptionally clear, fresh, empirically rich, and analytically tight. It clears some conventional cobwebs in thinking about developmental states. It should be read widely.
— Ronald J. Herring

Perspectives on Politics

[A]n important contribution to the larger theoretical debate about the role of the state in development and the place of class analysis. A British anthropologist friend remarked after reading it, 'How did he get a job in an American sociology department? Where is the post-modernism? Where are the regressions?' Instead we have a sustained analytical argument presented in writing that is crystal-clear and entirely free of jargon, with historical narrative of 'what was' tautly balanced with counterfactual 'what might have been.' The book assaults idle prejudice on every side of the debate about markets and the role of government. It is long overdue, and deserves to be widely read.
— Robert Hunter Wade

European Journal of Sociology

"Honorable Mention for the 2006 Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association"

"Winner of the 2005 Barrington Moore Book Award, Comparative Historical Section of the American Sociological Association"

"Honorable Mention for the 2005 Mirra Komarovsky Award, Eastern Sociological Association"

"Honorable Mention for the 2004 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association"

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2004

From the Publisher