Inderjeet Parmar, a member of the Global Disorder research group, has published a new article with Atul Bhardwaj that rethinks India’s turn to market liberalisation, highlighting the long-term influence of elite knowledge networks and philanthropic foundations in shaping economic policy.

Titled “The Architecture of Consent: the Ford Foundation, ‘Brain Irrigation’, and the Making of India’s Neoliberal Transition,” the article argues that India’s liberalisation in the early 1990s was not just a response to economic crisis and the failure of the “license raj.” Instead, the authors show that decades of elite network building and ideational cultivation created the conditions under which liberal economic reforms gained durable intellectual and political traction.

Using original archival records, Parmar and Bhardwaj foreground the role of the Ford Foundation (FF) from the early 1950s through the early 1990s. They describe Ford’s influence as a process of “brain irrigation,” a concept drawn from Gramscian theory that refers to the building of institutional capacity, elite networks, and professional consensus that normalised liberal economic thinking as “common sense” within India’s policy community.

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