India
Priorities for the Future
Bimal Jalan
Penguin-Viking
256 pages; Rs 499
Bimal Jalan exercises the writer’s privilege to box his reflections between three inflection points. The first is 1980, ostensibly because 1977-79 was the first time the Congress lost power at the Centre. The second is 2000, being the start of a new millennium. And 2014 is the bookend when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) formed a majority government.
Of these, the choice of the first two years as turning points is not immediately obvious. Conventional wisdom regards 1991 to 2014 as a near continuous development
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