In India, a growing number of political leaders are threatening to withdraw their support for the governing coalition of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the face of new economic measures that, among other changes, allow for greater foreign investment by global retail giants in India’s heretofore protected domestic retail sector.*
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Mamata Banerjee, the populist chief minister of West Bengal, announced that her party, the Trinamool Congress, would formally leave the government. Meanwhile, Kunal Ghosh, a member of the Indian Parliament from the same party, suggested that Singh should resign.
“India is passing through a turbulent time, as are many other countries,” Bharat Karnad, a research professor in national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, told Trend Lines. “The real danger is that the country will relapse into its bad economic habits of a dominant state-controlled economy.” That, Karnad said, could cause India to lose its “economic momentum and energy, and accordingly blight its prospects of rising to great power status.”