68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that the SEP package "does not constitute a radical departure from the policies being pursued by the present government".3 This seems to me to be rather overstating the case, but at least it serves to focus attention on the policies themselves rather than on who formulated them). The issue of sovereignty was raised in Facts and Issues essentially with respect to two different questions. Firstly, as an immediate and 'practical' consideration, the conditions attached to the loan would leave the government with very little freedom of manoeuvre if, on the one hand, it commits itself to a strategy revolving around the availability of the loan and, on the other, contingencies ('exogenous factors') necessitate a violation of the conditions. Secondly, the package as a whole amounts to a major shift in priorities and positions, and this is a matter which should have been discussed openly within the country first, rather than being allowed to emerge piecemeal in a series of apparently small shifts in the years since the mid-1960's with the imprimatur of "the binding conditions of a supposedly absolutely essential foreign loan"4 now being allowed to set the seal to the last stage of the shift. Further, there is not necessarily any disagreement about each and every objective set out in SEP. As Nayyar says, who could possibly disagree that the attainment of balance of payments equilibrium or the control of inflation, ceteris paribus,5 are desirable? Nor need there be any disagreement about some of the policies in SEP if they are stated singly and in general terms. The growth of non-Plan expenditures is to be curtailed in order to redirect resources towards the Plan. Domestic petroleum production is to be expanded. The performance of the public sector enterprises is to be improved. Again, who could possibly disagree? We are all on the side of the angels. These are all very simple matters, and normally one would not belabour in this way the obvious point that the objections raised in Facts and Issues are directed at the policy stance as a whole, and the set of policy measures in SEP—except that Brahmananda conducts his argument at places as though the contributors to Facts and Issues, for example, positively oppose control of inflation. All this said, what are Brahmananda's arguments against Facts and Issues^ To begin with, bethinks that "what most of the West Bengal Government White Paper authors seem to be opposed to is conditionality" (p 19). If what I have said above is correct then this statement should be regarded as, at the very least, incomplete. Anyway, on this point he is at great pains to emphasise that the 'condi-tionality' of the IMF relates only to the binding 'performance clauses' (in paragraph 4 of the IMF decision). The much wider-ranging set of policy measures included in SEP and discussed at length in the IMF memorandum, should not be regarded as 'conditions'; the Letter of Intent is neither a contract nor a binding unilateral declaration, and the failure to implement any policies set out there does not automatic