The rhetoric of disagreement in reform debates

Abstract

This paper is about the discursive aspects of reform debates, more particularly about their rhetorical forms. In the debates on economic reforms in India, communities of scholars seem to have been talking past each other, each side equally convinced that it has the ‘Truth”. Persistent disagreement among economists on important public policy issues sounds disconcerting to others. We argue that an appreciation of the rhetoric (i.e. the art of persuasion) might help us understand the nature of disagreement in reform debates. Through a close reading of the literature on economic reforms in India we attempt to examine the rhetorical devices – logic, facts, metaphor and story – that the participants in the reform debates have been using to persuade their audience.