Already people leaving the countryside in Andhra Pradesh have nothing to go to: private sector employment is declining, and the state has stopped recruiting. When the unemployed are joined by a further 20 million, almost everyone's prospects are likely to decline. The state government appears to be proceeding on the grounds that enclosures lead to industrial revolutions: a kind of doctrine of historical signatures.
The second possible explanation for Clare Short's support for this scheme is that, like everyone else in the Cabinet, she has succumbed to corporate pressure and the neoliberal ideology associated with it. Her enthusiasm for corporate protectionism in the form of global intellectual property rights suggests that this is at least partly true. It is also clear that governments tend to club together against their people. Short's deputy Hillary Benn recently made the extraordinary assertion that "the future is a matter of political will and choice, and only governments have both the legitimacy and the opportunity to exercise that will." Development policy, in Britain and elsewhere, has often been a matter of brokerage between global elites, at the expense of everyone else. But this doesn't really answer the question. Why has she aligned herself with power against the people of India, but not against the people of Iraq or Tanzania?
The second possible explanation for Clare Short's support for this scheme is that, like everyone else in the Cabinet, she has succumbed to corporate pressure and the neoliberal ideology associated with it. Her enthusiasm for corporate protectionism in the form of global intellectual property rights suggests that this is at least partly true. It is also clear that governments tend to club together against their people. Short's deputy Hillary Benn recently made the extraordinary assertion that "the future is a matter of political will and choice, and only governments have both the legitimacy and the opportunity to exercise that will." Development policy, in Britain and elsewhere, has often been a matter of brokerage between global elites, at the expense of everyone else. But this doesn't really answer the question. Why has she aligned herself with power against the people of India, but not against the people of Iraq or Tanzania?