Introduction

Summary

Some observers of Indian politics, economic development, and social change since Independence argue that it is not state policies, the complexities of building political power in India, or the centralizing drives of Mrs. Gandhi which are principally responsible for the political disintegration and economic failures of the past twenty years. These are all rather reflections of deeper economic forces and of the dominance of particular social classes over Indian society and economy. One view is that there are structural forces in Indian society, entrenched social classes, whose actions constrain the political elites from implementing policies against the former's interests. State policies increasingly have come to reflect the interests of the dominant classes – the rich farmers who benefit from government price support and input subsidy programs, industrial capitalists who have profited from the import substitution policies and have learned to turn to their advantage the industrial licensing system, and the professional bureaucrats who have gained considerable corrupt income from their administration of programs for the benefit of the farmers and their control over the investment decisions of the industrialists and the business classes.

According to another view, the countryside has come under the increasing political and economic dominance of the landed castes. The commercialization of Indian agriculture in the post-Green Revolution period has let loose forces which have undermined traditional social relations in the countryside and have promoted class polarization and class conflict. The latter are in turn largely responsible for increased political instability and violence in the countryside.

These structural class and economic explanations agree that “accommodative politics” have failed and cannot succeed in the face of growing class antagonisms in the countryside and the increasing dominance of India's “proprietary classes.” Their prognosis, in the event of the continuation of the present regime and its policies, is for the intensification of violent class conflict in the countryside. To avert it, they propose the displacement of the dominant rural classes through more thoroughgoing agrarian reform, the strengthening of the Indian state and of its autonomy from the now dominant social classes, and a return to and a more rigorous implementation of policies of state-directed, centralized economic planning and heavy public investment in an economy dominated by the public sector.