Why can't we get rid of 1991?

It is 25 years since 1991. Obviously, so what? In 1991 India nearly went bankrupt and was close to defaulting on its debts. This was a crisis in balance of payments which is a balance of exports, imports and investments. As a result of the crisis the Reserve Bank had to sell 67 tons of our gold reserves to secure $2.2 billion in loans from the IMF to steady the ship of state. From the flood of articles in news media 1991 is being celebrated as 1947, the year we became independent from the brutal British rule. The credit really goes to Narasimha Rao who was the Prime Minister at the time although the Congress has airbrushed him out of history because of the contrast with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which was responsible for the mess we were in. Instead the Congress conspired to give all the credit to Dr Manmohan Singh because of his unquestioning devotion to The Family, but we know that Singh could not have been responsible for the reforms 25 years ago because of the way he presided over a near repeat of 1991 in his 10 years as Prime Minister. Unlike Narasimha Rao, he chose to hang on to his kursi, or chair, rather than go for reforms, to improve the eonomy. Politicians do not have the courage to take on the pit bulls of socialism who keep snapping at their heels to increase handouts to the poor, leading to inflation, which hurts the poor the most. The result of slow creeping reforms is that jobs are not being created. In 2012, 23.53 million men were employed in the organized sector, where wages and benefits are much higher, compared to 23.61 million in 1997. The number of women in the organized sector has increased. Total number of employment in the organized sector has increased marginally from 26.73 million in 1991 to 29.58 million in 2012. The share of manufacturing was 16.4% of GDP in 1989-90 but, despite muscular efforts by the government, it was lower at 16.2% in 2015-16. The combined fiscal deficit of state and center was higher in 2014-15 than in 1995-96 while tax-GDP ratio was slightly lower than in 1991-92, despite rising incomes. One reason why the tax base is not increasing is that most of the employment has been in the unorganized sector where all payments are in cash. Craftsmen earn more than engineers. Government is spending more on salaries and social schemes than on infrastructure. Job creation is weak because manufacturing is stagnant which was supposed to boom with the dismantling of the license/permit raj. It has not happened because most of the growth has been in real estate because of the phenomenal rise in property prices, which probably accounts for the increase in earnings of artisans. The real estate market is comatose, partly because properties are too expensive, partly because the circle rates have been increased too high, demanding a higher share of the price in white money, and partly because of the crackdown on black money. So the hysterical demands for lower interest rates. But that will only increase inflatinflation. Shades of 1991 still haunting us.