c# - ODP.NET Oracle.ManagedDataAccess causes ORA-12537 network session end of file -

India, truly, is a land of paradoxes. For forty years political scientists have been debating how we became a vibrant democracy despite our poverty, low literacy and ethnic violence. Adam Przeworski's empirical study of 135 countries recently concluded that, given everything, India ought to have been a dictatorship (in his "Democracy and Development"). Indeed, the late and gracious Myron Weiner of M.I.T. wrote a charming book called "The Indian Paradox", in which he wrestled with the contradiction of how democratic politics could endure in our diverse and violent society. Now, here is another paradox. By any yardstick, the 1990s have been the best years in our recent economic and social history. Yet, it was also the decade of the greatest political instability. How does one begin to explain this contradiction? Conventional wisdom says that prosperity and stability go together and economic growth needs political stability. Does this mean that our economic sphere is slowly becoming autonomous from the political realm? Is this another example of Indian exceptionalism? There are five good reasons to believe that the last decade was our best, economically. First, our wealth or GDP grew at an average real rate of 6.4 per cent per year (and crossed 7.5 per cent for three years). No wonder President Clinton said the world's best-kept secret is that India has been the second fastest growing economy in the world. Second, our population growth has begun to slow down for the first time in decades--against a 2.2 per cent growth rate it had come down to 1.67 by 1998. Third, literacy growth doubled in the nineties--from its historic climb of 0.7 per cent a year to 1.4 per cent--hence, literacy rose from 52 to 65 per cent during the decade, with the biggest gainers being women and the backward states. Fourth, at least 90 million Indians rose out of poverty as the poverty ratio declined from 36 to 27 per cent between 1993-99--this is almost the same pace as China's in the 1980s. Fifth, we may have finally found our global competitive advantage in our booming software and IT services--what the economists call the "lead sector" that can transform the whole economy. These hopeful numbers offer a dramatic contrast to our political instability. We had six prime ministers in the nineties. Between 1989 and 1999 we changed our government every two and a half years compared to every four and a half years between 1951 and 1989. No single party has won an overall majority since 1984. Roughly half the incumbent representatives lost their seats in the nineties. And the once mighty Congress Party, which ruled the republic for almost forty years, has been humbled. Today, we have forty weak and silly parties and the ruling coalition has around 20 partners. Compared to India's vibrant economic space our political stage is a comedy, peopled by clowns, who do everything except govern. Not only is our economic sphere alive, our social sphere is humming. Lower castes have risen through the ballot box as a social revolution has taken place in the north. (The south experienced its social revolution decades ago.) We may laugh at Laloo and Mayavati, but they have given a new confidence to the backwards, and you can see it in the "walk" of the Yadavs and the Dalits. Cable television and other interventions have also decolonised millions of young, urban minds. Daler Mehndi, A.R.Rehman, Arundhati Roy, and Aishwarya Rai are products of this liberated mindset. More women are working outside and this is gradually liberating them from the old tyrannies of the family, the caste, and the village. We have also lost our hypocrisy about money, as the sons of Brahmins and Kshatriyas are getting MBAs and becoming entrepreneurs--this social revolution is, perhaps, rivalled only by the ascent of Japan's merchant class during the 1868 Meiji revolution. How, then, does one begin to explain the paradox of an economic and social revolution happening in the midst of political instability and poor governance? Professor Devesh Kapur at Harvard has found an answer in our polymorphic institutions which, he says insulate our political system. While the old formal institutions--the bureaucracy, the parties, public enterprises--have decayed or got clogged by interest groups, new institutions have emerged and old moribund ones have been rejuvenated, such as the Election Commission, CVC, the judiciary, NGOs, and the new regulatory agencies. This simultaneous cycle of decay and rejuvenation gives our system a certain resilience when political actors keep changing. Weak parties mean unstable coalitions, but they have also brought more federalism, less misuse of the evil Article 356, and a dilution of the BJP's economic nationalism and identity politics. Certainly, it a believable answer to another Indian paradox!