India Embraces Market Reforms? The Real Story...

India opens its markets to competition. Big news. It's quite revolutionary - for India. Will the new India be able to finally fulfill its promise and become an economic powerhouse to rival China, as many have predicted for years? I'm not so sure. In fact, this could very well be yet another promise broken.

The Congress Party - the party of the Ghandi family that has ruled India since 1948 - may yet succeed in holding on to the failed socialist policies that have hogtied the Indian economy since it independence from Great Britain. It would seem its more important that they hold onto power, even as India continues to wallow in poverty and mediocrity.

The latest chapter in India's economic drama begins thusly:

(Reuters) - It had been a brutal August for India's Congress party: economic growth was wilting, the monsoon rains were failing and the opposition had it cornered on yet another corruption scandal.

In stepped Sonia Gandhi to revive the morale of the ruling party's lawmakers, exhorting them at a meeting to "stand up and fight, fight with a sense of purpose and fight aggressively". It was a stunningly assertive speech from the normally temperate matriarch of a dynasty that has ruled India for most of its post-independence era.

But, alas, at the end of the day, what's most important is that the Ghandi family retains its power. Like all politicians, power trumps all. And for all their "compassionate" socialist policies, it will be the retention of power that carries the day:

Gandhi's ambition in all this is to ensure that the Congress party returns to power in 2014, with her son - Rahul - at the helm of the government after eight years waiting in the wings.

"What she is concentrating on is really the need to be re-elected," said M.J. Akbar, a former Congress party lawmaker and once a trusted Gandhi family insider. "

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