Trees and plants have been venerated for centuries in India as cosmic providers of life and energy. In the modern periods, these sentiments have dominated literary and cultural works. In Toru Dutt’s poetry, we see a heartrending call to trees as fabricating nostalgia for family histories. From Jagadish Chandra Bose’s epoch-defining scientific discovery that plants have life to Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and ecological meditations on preserving forested life-systems, Indian writers in the twentieth century have paid respect to trees as meaningful antidote to expansive agricultural and industrial-based deforestation. In the late colonial and post-colonial contexts of aggressive material development and prophetic resistance in literature, plant-based prose work by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ismat Chughtai, or Bama, poetry of Gieve Patel or Mamang Dai, or experimental works by Sumana Roy or Kalpna Singh-Chitnis have variously offered significant imaginative mediums through which to reflect upon the complex and sacred dynamic of human–non-human relationship in India.

This chapter offers an introduction to Making India Work. It presents a snapshot of India’s welfare regime today and outlines its distinctive features in comparative perspective. The chapter establishes that the development of social policies has been a significant component of the building of India’s national economy and polity. Historical decisions have had longer-term implications for the shape and size of the country’s social provision, yet social policy has been curiously marginalised within classic scholarship on India’s political economy. The introductory chapter defines the term ‘welfare regime’ as distinct from a ‘welfare state’ and introduces the analytical tools necessary to identify the components of a welfare regime in a context of high economic informality. It provides an overview of methods and historical sources and summarises the book’s main arguments before providing an outline of the book structure.

This chapter provides an overview of the origins, expansion and reform of India’s welfare regime since the early twentieth century. It outlines the contributions of the book to wider literatures on the histories and politics of social policy in developing countries. The chapter demonstrates interventions in three bodies of literature: firstly, to histories of labour and of the mid twentieth-century democratic and developmental Indian state at the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial eras; secondly, to the literature on the political economy of democracy and development in postcolonial India; thirdly, to the comparative politics literature on welfare regimes beyond Europe and North America. The chapter highlights three factors for their role in shaping the nature of India’s welfare regime over the past century: firstly, the changing shape of India’s model of capitalism; secondly, the gradual deepening of democratic participation; and thirdly, the multi-level territorial articulation of both capitalism and electoral politics.

This chapter offers an overview of the arguments and key contributions of the book. The book has shown that while clientelism and resource constraints have rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, across the past century, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian ‘welfare state’ should look like. The ideas and principles on which earlier policies were conceived have remained influential. India’s welfare regime today is shaped by decisions taken and resources allocated in the past. Even moments of expected rupture such as the onset of economic reforms in 1991 - or, as this chapter goes on to show, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections which brought the Narendra Modi-led BJP to power on a platform promising an end to a culture of ‘entitlements’ - have seen underlying stability in the context of India’s welfare regime. This said, there have been substantial areas of divergence over time in both the approach to social policy implementation and the philosophy of citizenship that underpins welfare commitments. The chapter ends by looking ahead to the future of welfare, underlining the continued significance of state-level policy innovation.

The framers of the Indian Constitution laid explicit foundation for horizontal application, specifically in Articles 15, 17, 23, and 24. The constitutional debates reveal deep disagreements about the country’s future. At the same time, the textual provisions for horizontal application evince a clear vision on the part of key framers, such as B. R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, to combat entrenched systems of caste and discrimination. These and other framers aimed to instill a new fraternity across the polity, in part by holding private actors accountable for constitutional commitments. In the ensuing years, the Supreme Court vacillated between emphasizing the constitution’s conservative and transformative elements, often under the watchful eye of other governing institutions. For example, the Court largely yielded to Indira Gandhi’s excesses during the Emergency Era of the 1970s, and later to the Hindu-nationalist BJP’s agenda. Likewise, the Court’s development of horizontal application has been somewhat uneven, applying constitutional duties to private actors in a handful of cases. In those instances, involving such salient issues as labor, sexual assault, housing, and education, the constitutional discourses that emerge echo republican rationales from the founding era.

There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.

In April 2023, the Government of India amended a set of regulations called the Information Technology Rules, which primarily dealt with issues around online intermediary liability and safe harbour. Until 2023, these rules required online intermediaries to take all reasonable efforts to ensure that ‘fake, false or misleading’ information was not published on their platforms. Previous iterations of these rules had already been challenged before the Indian courts for imposing a disproportionate burden on intermediaries, and having the effect of chilling online speech. Now, the 2023 Amendment went even further: it introduced an entity called a ‘Fact Check Unit’, to be created by the government. This government-created unit would flag information that – in its view – was ‘fake, false or misleading’ with respect to ‘the business of the central government’. Online intermediaries were then obligated to make reasonable efforts to ensure that any such flagged information would not be on their platforms. In practical terms, what this meant was that if intermediaries did not take down flagged speech, they risked losing their safe harbour (guaranteed under the Information Technology Act).

Máire ní Fhlathúin considers how colonial narratives circulate in India, and how they intersect with British power. We read of the East India Company’s annexation of the state of Awadh in 1856, and the outbreak of revolt that brought about the Government of India Act’s transfer of powers from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1858, precipitating a massive mobilisation of British soldiers and their families to India. Ní Fhlathúin revitalises this familiar story by examining contemporary para-literary texts and poetry published in British Indian newspapers and periodicals during and immediately after the rebellion. Much of this material is newly available, and enables us to gain a more holistic view of events across the subcontinent. This broad range of texts and writers bears witness to the inherent instability of British representations of its Empire, and exposes the shaping influence of the British imagination on accounts of India

Dinah Craik’s 1851 novella The Half-Caste tells the story of how a half-Indian heiress, Zillah Le Poer, faces manipulative attempts by the greedy British side of her family to control her fortune which she thwarts by marrying her older Scottish guardian. This reading of Craik’s novel examines the production of race at a period when dominant British imperialism was believed to depend largely on hierarchies of race allegedly constructed by heredity. Walters argues that Craik describes how new racial identities can be produced by the ‘affective capacity of brown, Eurasian, female bodies to feel connection with – and dependence on white women’, with resulting implications for racial hierarchies and Empire itself. The chapter examines the idea of race in part as a function of feeling and reveals a ‘slippage between affective and racially scientific methods of assessing difference’.

The imperial Guptas became the dominant power in India during the fourth and fifth centuries. Though the focus of this chapter will be on Gupta military strategy, I will occasionally peep into grand strategy and tactics. This is because superior tactical elements (horse archery and armoured lancers) allowed the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II to follow an aggressive military strategy. Also, non-military issues which are part of grand strategy (like the fiscal crisis in the mid-fifth century) forced the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta to adopt a passive defensive policy. First, we lay out the scope and objectives of the chapter and analyse the sources available to us for chalking out Gupta strategy. Second, we explore the offensive military strategy which enabled the Guptas to rise from a petty regional polity to the most formidable power in the subcontinent by AD 415. Third, the spotlight is shone on the failure of Gupta defensive strategic policies against the Huns after AD 467. The fourth section discusses the shortcomings of military and non-military strategies followed by the Gupta emperors in maintaining coherence within their domain. The empire was dependent on the co-operation of the samantas (feudatories) and landlords. Further, continuous success against external enemies was essential for maintaining royal supremacy. When the emperors failed against external invaders, then the internal props of royal power started disintegrating. The last section discusses strategic failures against both external and internal enemies which resulted in the collapse of the empire in the last decade of the fifth century.

Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, despite coming to power in similar circumstances, approached their rule in very different ways. In particular, it suggests that along with a contrast of style, in Keegan’s terms Alexander being a ‘heroic’ leader, his father an ‘unheroic’, one their approach and, as a consequence, the aims and practice of their strategies were quite different. While it could be argued that Philip’s was simply one of survival exacerbated by ever more ‘mission creep’ towards the south of Greece, here it is suggested that instead Philip had from very early on a firm proactive vision of ruling all Greece and used an integrated strategy of diplomacy, financial subversion, and military force to achieve that end and on its success established a firm method of retaining his rule. In contrast, Alexander, while tactically brilliant, unlike his father was a reactive rather than a proactive strategist and his campaigns are best seen as a series of micro-strategies responding to specific circumstances as opposed to an overarching vision. This approach explains the lack of a firm political strand to his strategy and the subsequent collapse of his empire on his death.

In a world of weaponized interdependence, middle powers have policy choices that can enhance their autonomy. However, having this policy space is not enough. In order to turn the policy space into policy enactment, domestic politics has to align in a particular way. This chapter considers India and Brazil as examples of “middle powers” and analyzes their capacity to enact autonomy and safeguard their digital sovereignty. The authors argue that when independent institutions’ interests are incorporated into the policymaking process and are not usurped by the parliamentary (political) process, they observe the enactment of autonomy-enhancing policies. Brazil’s and India’s data localization policies are illustrative case studies. While Brazil and India are both open democracies with a technoeconomic landscapes characterized by a similar technoeconomic landscape with a hybrid mixture of foreign-owned and domestically owned companies, they have adopted different data localization policies. The authors argue that the divergent paths of Brazil and India are due to the nature of the policymaking process. India’s policymaking incorporated the interests of independent institutions. In contrast, Brazil’s parliamentary process usurped policymaking power from its independent institutions and has not yet granted the mandate and tools to either existing or necessary new institutions, such as regulatory agencies, to address this emerging and already pressing set of issues. Thus, for countries to enact policies to enhance their digital sovereignty, the interests of independent institutions must be incorporated, and their power must be increased.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.