My purpose in creating this web page is to give access to readers to my writings on the Indian political system, its economy, and the interconnections between the two. These are subjects I have studied for the past 38 years. However, only articles since 1999 are readily available in electronic form.

After studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, I joined the United Nations in 1961, and spent the next nearly five years in the UN Special Fund/ UNDP. Two of these years were spent in New York as a Special assistant to Paul G. Hoffman ,  the managing director of the Special Fund, and later first administrator of the UNDP. The remaining three were spent in  Damascus Syria.

I returned to India in 1966 and entered journalism as an Assistant Editor, ( Leader writer) in the Hindustan Times, Delhi's main English daily. In 1969, I shifted to the Times of India, then regarded as the newspaper of record for India, all over the world. Between 1979 and 1981 I was first the Deputy editor of the Economic Times and then Editor of the Financial Express, two of India's three main economic dailies. In 1981 I returned to the Times of India as its economic editor and in 1986 became editor of the Hindustan Times.

In 1990 I spent just under a year as the Information Adviser to the prime minister, V. P. Singh, in his short-lived government. In that year I witnessed the calculated stoking of communal ( anti-Muslim) passions  by the right wing Bharatiya Janata party from the Prime minister's office , and wrote a book on that experience.

Since 1991, I have been a columnist in several publications. These include the Hindu, The Hindustan times, The Business Standard, and Outlook ( India's premier weekly newsmagazine).  Between 1986 and 1990, I was the India correspondent of The Economist. I have also written for the op-ed page of the New York Times.

In 1995 I was a visiting fellow at the Centre for International Affairs, Harvard University. That experience sowed the seeds of a book on the impact of globalisation on the International order that will be completed in 2004.From 1997 till 2000, I taught one semester a year at the Universities of Virginia and Richmond.

Over the years I have written several books. The first, published in 1980 was "India: A PoliticalEconomy of Stagnation". This summed up and fused  my writing on India's politics and economics  in the Times of India. Its main thesis was that India's slow growth was not the result of faulty but well meaning economic policies but the rise of an 'intermediate' class of petty entrepreneurs and well-to-do  farmers which created a regime of permanent shortages to extract 'quasi-rent' from it to fuel its growth. Slowing down growth by not allowing efficient producers to grow freely was a consequence of this political class struggle.

A list of my books is given below.

1. India : A Political Economy of Stagnation: Oxford University Press 1980.

2. Management of Public Enterprises in Developing Asian Countries: The UN Asian and Pacific Development Administration Centre. Kuala Lumpur, 1980.

3. In the Eye of the Cyclone: The crisis in Indian Democracy. Viking , New Delhi. 1993.

4. Kashmir 1947: Rival versions of History: Oxford University Press. 1996.

5. A Jobless Future: Political causes of Economic crisis
(in India). Rupa books, New Delhi. Feb. 2002.

6.The Perilous  Road to the Market: The Political economy of reform in Russia, China and India. Pluto Press U.K.  August 2002 .

7. Kashmir 1947: the Origins of a dispute (much enlarged second edition of the 1996 book) OUP 2003.

I am currently finishing the eight -year study of globalisation and its impact upon society mentioned above. It is tentatively titled:
"The Fifth horseman--Globalisation, Chaos and War".  

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