India's liberal “pro-market” reforms began, rather hesitatingly under the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the mid-eighties and gathered momentum from 1991 under the leadership of his successor P V Narasimha Rao.This papers analyses the strategies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in India and in a few other countries and shows that, after abandoning the principle of strict conditionality for the approval of loans and apparently distancing themselves from the US government, the IFIs applied subtler and more effective methods to recruit allies within the Indian political and administrative system in order to secure the adoption of the policies they required and engineer the liberalisation of the country's economy.
