India, May 20 -- This year marks 35 years since India embraced large-scale economic reforms. India had been moving toward economic liberalisation since the 1980s, but the quantum jump occurred when the economy faced the prospect of a sovereign default and suffered the ignominy of shipping its gold to London as collateral for an emergency loan. There have been periodic downturns in India's economic journey since. But the broad direction has only been upwards and onwards. We seem to be at the cusp of another such crisis at the moment. A terms-of-trade shock from the war in West Asia has combined with pre-existing capital flow headwinds to pose a balance-of-payments threat to the economy. There is no point in predicting how bad things can ge...