In response to my previous article, ‘The assassination that changed India’, published last Sunday, I received many emails from India and Pakistan, particularly from readers who felt I had been too lenient towards the BJP and unnecessarily harsh on the Congress.
Some argued that while discussing the political consequences of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and the rise of Hindu nationalism, I had overlooked the sweeping economic and institutional reforms introduced by PM P V Narasimha Rao and finance minister Manmohan Singh between 1991 and 1996. Pakistani readers also noted that any appreciation of India’s liberalisation should acknowledge the earlier reforms undertaken by Nawaz Sharif.
The criticism is fair. The years from 1991 to 1996 reshaped South Asia more profoundly than many realised at the time. What began as India’s response to a balance-of-payments crisis evolved into a far-reaching transformation of its economy, state and political outlook. Across South Asia, the collapse of the Soviet Union forced governments long committed to state planning and non-alignment to adapt to globalisation, deregulation and a US-dominated world order.
For me, these transformations were not merely political abstractions. In the early 1990s, I was working as a copywriter at International Advertising Ltd/Saatchi & Saatchi in Karachi, as Pakistan pursued economic liberalisation under Nawaz Sharif. The language of nationalisation and state controls was giving way to that of brands, private investment and consumer aspiration. Sharif projected himself as a businessman determined to reduce state inefficiency, and Pakistan began embracing privatisation, deregulation and multinational corporations even before India’s 1991 reforms.
The changes were visible everywhere. Banks expanded rapidly, telecom ventures appeared futuristic and imported consumer goods became symbols of a rising urban middle class. Advertising agencies became showcases of this new economy. Among our major clients were Procter & Gamble and Instaphone, both emblematic of an emerging consumer culture.
Looking back, it felt as though South Asia itself was opening up to a different future. Satellite television was expanding. Western brands were becoming aspirational. Urban professionals increasingly imagined themselves as participants in a global economy rather than citizens of tightly controlled postcolonial states. There was also, briefly, a sense that economic openness might soften political hostility within the region itself. For one commercial, we were even able to hire the Indian actor and model Sonali Bendre. At the time, it did not seem extraordinary. India and Pakistan remained rivals, certainly, but there still existed a fragile hope that commerce, media and cultural exchange might reduce some of the bitterness of Partition politics.
Looking back from today’s climate of hardened nationalism and perpetual television warfare, that moment now feels almost innocent. Yet history rarely belongs to individuals alone. India’s reforms were not born solely of vision. They were also born from compulsion. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The cold war order had ended. From Moscow to New Delhi, old certainties were evaporating. India had long pursued a mixed economy with a heavy state presence, import substitution and bureaucratic controls that came to be known collectively as the Licence Raj.
By 1991, India stood on the brink of financial disaster. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi during the 1991 election campaign added political instability to economic panic. Narasimha Rao, a cautious and underestimated politician, inherited a country in crisis. His greatest achievement was perhaps not ideological brilliance but political dexterity. Manmohan Singh became the technocratic face of reform. His famous budget speech in 1991 announced tariff reductions, industrial delicensing, financial sector reforms and the opening of India to foreign investment. The reforms were gradual by East Asian standards but revolutionary within the Indian context. India did not suddenly become a free-market paradise. Its bureaucracy remained vast and its poverty immense. Yet the direction of travel had unmistakably changed. Ironically, Pakistan had embarked on a somewhat similar journey earlier.
Pakistan’s reforms suffered from chronic political instability and weak institutions. Liberalisation became entangled with patronage politics, uneven privatisation, and mounting debt. Governments rose and fell with alarming speed. Presidents dismissed prime ministers. The military remained an ever-present force in politics. Economic policy, therefore, lacked continuity and credibility. Karachi’s corporate culture projected confidence and cosmopolitan ambition while the wider political system remained deeply fragile. There were glossy campaigns for multinational corporations alongside ethnic violence, sectarian tension and growing insecurity in the streets of the city itself.
India, despite all its contradictions, retained institutional depth. Its civil service, judiciary, election machinery and federal framework continued to function with relative resilience. Rao headed a minority government but still managed to complete a full term. That alone distinguished India sharply from Pakistan during the 1990s. Yet the Indian transformation carried immense social and political contradictions of its own. Liberalisation coincided not with social harmony but with fragmentation. The Mandal Commission recommendations on reservations for backward castes reshaped electoral politics. Regional parties became more assertive. Coalition politics weakened Congress’s dominance. Most dramatically, the BJP expanded rapidly by mobilising Hindu nationalist sentiment around the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 revealed the darker side of India’s political transition. Economic liberalisation and religious polarisation advanced almost simultaneously. The old Congress consensus that had once combined secular nationalism with state-led development was breaking apart. In its place emerged two powerful forces: market economics and identity politics. Television expanded rapidly during these years, reshaping mass culture and political communication. Satellite channels entered Indian homes. Middle-class India increasingly imagined itself not through Gandhian austerity but through global capitalism.
Pakistan experienced similar cultural changes but under more constrained conditions. The Afghan war had militarised society during the 1980s. Sectarianism deepened. Ethnic conflict in Karachi intensified. Economic liberalisation occurred alongside rising insecurity and institutional decay. Unlike India, Pakistan lacked a sufficiently broad industrial base or a stable democratic framework to absorb the shocks of transition.
The broader global context mattered enormously. The 1990s marked the triumph of neoliberal confidence worldwide. Francis Fukuyama famously spoke of the “end of history”. Western institutions promoted deregulation, privatisation and free trade as universal solutions. The IMF and World Bank exercised tremendous influence over developing economies facing debt crises.
South Asia could not remain insulated from these pressures. Yet the region responded unevenly because its states possessed different capacities. India liberalised while preserving a strong central state. Pakistan liberalised amid chronic political instability.
The writer is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: [email protected]
