The return of land hunger
The Economic Survey released last February predicted that India would grow at 8.7 percent over 2007-8 – somewhat lower than the 9.4 percent by which it grew in 2006-7, but not very different from the average of 8.6 percent growth rate over the past four years. Perhaps even more impressive, over the same period per-capita income growth averaged 7.2 percent, more than twice the average rate of 3.4 percent experienced during the 1980s and 1990s. The review also noted that India's manufacturing growth remained robust, predicted to grow at 9.5 percent during 2007-8, albeit somewhat lower than the 12 percent of the previous year. It is reasonable, therefore, that the Survey should conclude that the Indian economy is in good health.
India's stock markets, even though they have been very badly roiled by the sub-prime crisis of US markets, are still in positive territory as far as 2007-8 is concerned. The Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, which is currently around 15,000 having lost 5000 points since January, is still more than 13 percent higher than where it was in the beginning of the fiscal year, in March 2007. The Sensex had crossed 13,000 for the first time only in October 2006. But more important than the stock market, Indian private capital finally came of age, showcasing itself in the USD 12 billion takeover of the Anglo-Dutch company Corus by Tata Steel in April 2007, and the fact that Tata Motors is currently the leading bidder for the purchase of the Jaguar and Landrover brands from Ford Motors. But it was not just the Tatas: Videocon, Suzlon, Ranbaxy, Mahindra & Mahindra and the A V Birla Group were all involved in major acquisitions abroad. Corporate India was on a buying spree, spending 60 percent more on acquisitions abroad than foreign firms spent on acquisitions in India in 2006-7.
And it is not just Indian capital. That perennial stepchild, science and technology, seemed finally to find its feet. On 22 January 2007, the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully retrieved an orbiting satellite, a technology previously possessed only by China, the EU, Russia and the US. Three months later, ISRO put an Italian scientific satellite into orbit, heralding the organisation's entry into the competitive international satellite-launch business that also recently saw the launch of an Israeli spy satellite. With all this going on, from economic growth to foreign acquisition to satellite successes, little wonder that middle- and upper-middle-class Indians, both resident and non-resident, feel that India's moment has finally arrived – that it is time to redeem the country's pledge to destiny not just "substantially" but "wholly and in full measure".
Ineqality rises
But for all of these headline-grabbing celebratory events, there were less-wholesome events taking place as well, revealing the darker, contradictory aspects of this Indian transition in the making. Despite the phenomenal growth noted above, the agrarian crisis of livelihoods, income, employment and profitability that has beset rural India for the last several years saw no sign of abating. In Vidharbha District of Maharashtra alone, more than a thousand farmers have committed suicide every year since 2001. Similar trends can be tracked in many other parts of rural India, as well.
According to a recently released report by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, 86 percent of India's workforce is employed in the unorganised sector, the bulk of which has gained little from the rapidly growing economy. The report also details the close correlation between unorganised work, poverty, vulnerability and marginalisation in today's India. According to the Commission, 88 percent of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes population, 80 percent of Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and 84 percent of Muslims belong to the "category of the poor and vulnerable". The Sachar Commission, which studied the status of Muslims in India, tabled its report in Parliament in November 2006, and likewise pointed out that both the absolute and relative position of the average Muslim in India is very poor, and has actually worsened over time. This deterioration in the status of Muslims is nowhere more evident than in the fact that, five years later, victims of the Gujarat pogrom still live in refugee camps, unable to return home, and it is only recently that a very small number of perpetrators have been called to account (see Himal Oct-Nov 2007, "In a small, dark corner of Gujarat").
Meanwhile, the fight over land has become increasingly violent, and increasingly public. On 2 January 2006, 12 Adivasis and one policeman died in Kalinganagar, Orissa, when police opened fire on demonstrators protesting the manner in which their lands had been acquired for a Tata Group steel plant. On 14 March 2007, 14 people died in Nandigram, West Bengal, when police opened fire after their attempts to end a standoff between villagers – again resisting purported land acquisition – and the local administration went awry. On 28 July, seven people were killed in Mudigonda, Andhra Pradesh, as police opened fire on a group of farmers and left party workers agitating for land reform and land rights. 'Land hunger' is indeed alive and well.
If land hunger has resurfaced, that old bugbear of caste is alive and well, too. The September 2006 rape and murder of Dalits in Khairlanji, in Maharashtra; the March 2007 burnings of Dalit establishments in Saalwan, in Haryana; the May 2007 Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan – again, the roll call is endless. If these heinous acts and violent confrontations remind us of how casteist Indian society remains, perhaps of much greater import for democratic politics are the innumerable examples of the uncompromising attitude of the upper castes towards sharing power with Dalits. In November 2006, P Jaggaiyan, a poor Dalit agricultural worker who had been elected president of the Nakkalamuthanpatti village panchayat, in Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu, was killed because he refused to oblige his deputy, an upper-caste vice-president, and become a rubber-stamp head. This is not an isolated instance, but rather part of a broad pattern of India's upper castes attempting to manoeuvre around the reality of Dalit mobilisation and democratic politics.
It is not just that inequality has increased, which it has (India's 'gini coefficient' has gone up from 32.9 to 36.2 between 1993 and 2004). But in addition, over the same period the per-capita expenditure of the bottom 20 percent of the population has grown at 0.85 percent per year, while that of the top 20 percent has grown at more than two percent per year. In China, where inequality has increased as well, the comparable statistics are 3.4 and 7.1 percent – that is, per-capita expenditures of China's bottom 20 percent rose four times faster than India's. It is this lack of growth at the bottom that makes increasing inequality so problematic in India.
To use the journalist Ian Jack's words, outside of the "bourgeois triumphalism" of the middle classes, this unsustainable increase in both inequality and marginalisation has, of course, gone neither unnoticed nor un-discussed. Indeed, in any media discussion on the Indian growth 'miracle', it has become de rigueur to talk about the unsustainable increase in inequality, if not marginalisation. Meanwhile, the new buzz phrase is 'inclusive growth', with everybody from Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen to your run-of-the-mill economist, talk-show host and news reporter now talking about it. But all the while, with a few notable exceptions, there is hardly any discussion on how India arrived at its current juncture, nor how the country might actually get to that fabled land of inclusive growth.
Radical constitution
In the popular re-telling of India's struggle for independence, 15 August 1947 dawned due to the efforts of a group of redoubtable personages, led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whose wisdom and political acumen humbled the mighty British Empire. In truth, by the 1930s and 1940s India was an ungovernable and seething mass of myriad revolts and rebellions. Gandhi's perspicacity was the ability to understand how widespread this resistance to oppression and empire truly was. His greatness lay in his ability to channel this resistance into a successful, democratic and largely non-violent independence struggle.
It was this democratic rebellion that underpinned the progressive and radical core of the Indian Constitution. It gave voice to the aspirations of a newly free people by enshrining universal adult suffrage, primacy of the legislature in lawmaking, and laying the foundations for a decentralised polity with strong local self-government, the Panchayati Raj. It recognised extant social and economic inequality, and therefore sought to operationalise "equality of status and of opportunity" through constitutionally guaranteed reservations (in elected bodies, government and public-sector jobs, and education) for Dalits and Adivasis, and through land reform.
But if the Constitution reflected the radical aspirations of the people of India, it also reflected the fact that the struggle for independence had left elite formations and rural power structures relatively untouched. Therefore, the federal government was constitutionally denied powers to tax agricultural incomes, and agriculture was to remain a purely 'state subject' in terms of legislative domain. On the other hand, state autonomy and local self-government were both circumscribed by the small but influential urban bourgeoisie, which pushed for a strong federal government. Hence, the Indian Constitution's quasi-federal structure. The contested nature of this relationship is demonstrated by the continuing struggles between the federal and state governments for political space. It is a marker of the changing nature of India's elite that among the biggest proponents of state autonomy today are the country's regional urban bourgeoisies.
Similarly, a move to introduce constitutionally guaranteed reservations for OBCs faced strenuous opposition from upper-caste elites, and was finally scuppered. Since then, India's economic and social growth has been shaped by the pushes and pulls of these two forces, conservative upper-caste elites on the one hand, and middle and, more recently, lower castes on the other. Conservative, upper-caste, elite strategies have sought to retain control over socio-economic levers of power, and to disproportionately appropriate gains of growth and development. At the same time there is the radical grassroots mobilisation by middle and lower castes and other marginalised groups, in their quest for a prosperous but also more equal society.
Passive resistance, elite pushback
If, in 1950, India's upper-caste Hindu elite, largely rural but with a small and influential urban bourgeoisie and middle-class segment, had to yield to the toiling masses in the shaping of the Indian Constitution, they were not quite as ready to simply walk away from power and pelf. This elite, both rural and urban, used its domination of the judiciary and the bureaucracy as mechanisms of passive resistance in its continuing battle to retain control.
They used this domination to snuff out at least two radical public-policy agendas of the Indian Constitution – land reform and the Dalit/Adivasi quotas. Whereas zamindari and absentee landlordism was successfully abolished, the distribution of land declared 'surplus', or beyond legally permissible holdings, was effectively stymied as land transfer became caught up in a maze of litigation, bureaucratic obfuscation and lack of political will. With the rural elites managing to retain control over the bulk of their acreage, the most regressive aspects of landlordism, including the use of the caste system as a mechanism of social and economic control, were slow to change.
Likewise, any transformative potential in affirmative action was also thwarted by using control over the bureaucracy to ensure that Dalit and Adivasi quotas remain unfulfilled. Not only were the upper castes successful in ensuring that OBC quotas were not constitutionally mandated, but in 1963 the Supreme Court, in its famous Balaji decision, struck down OBC quotas in what was then Mysore state. The Court argued that caste was an insufficient basis for positive discrimination quotas, and that an overall quota of more than 50 percent went against the spirit of the Constitution. The Balaji decision was then used to roll back reservations in favour of OBCs already in place in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.
By the late 1960s upper-caste Hindu elites, using a combination of co-option and blocking strategies, had been able to ensure that the transformative agenda inherent in the Indian Constitution had been substantially weakened. Passive resistance was an effective blocking strategy, because co-option and the Congress party's umbrella politics ensured that in most states there was insufficient grassroots political mobilisation around these issues.
The rural bourgeoisie
The inability to implement land reform meant that agricultural productivity remained fettered by landlordism. Consecutive droughts during the early 1960s left the economy facing an acute shortage of food crops, and sharply underlined the question of agricultural productivity. Unable (or unwilling) to effect institutional change, the Indian state responded to the issue of lagging productivity with a technological solution: the Green Revolution, in which the state underwrote agricultural productivity and profitability by subsidising the costs, as well as risks, of new technology.
Of course, institutional and technological change need not be an either-or phenomenon, and under certain circumstances one can reinforce the other in terms of impact on agricultural productivity. (The most recent example of this is West Bengal, where a combination of tenancy reform and Green Revolution technology ushered in a new phase of agricultural growth during the early 1980s.) However, whereas land reform is aimed at removing pre-capitalist fetters to agricultural productivity, in its absence technological change can reinforce the longevity of those fetters, or at least may be insufficient to overcome them. This is one of the reasons why land reform has been a part of the transition to capitalised agriculture in most episodes of successful development.
In the absence of land reform, the acute land hunger that resulted from slow-growing agriculture (in the early stages of the Green Revolution) and insufficient non-farm opportunities did not go away, manifesting itself in the armed rebellion of the Naxalbari movement of the late 1960s for an agrarian revolution (see Himal December 2007, "Naxalbari and the continuous rebellion"). The might of the Indian state crushed the Naxalbari movement, and subsequently sidelined, until very recently, land reform from the political agenda, barring in a few states with leftwing pluralities.
But the Indian state also responded by investing in agriculture in particular (irrigation) and rural areas in general (rural electrification, etc). In 1969, private banks were nationalised and bank credit channelised to rural areas. On the backs of these measures, driven by both public and private investment and rural credit, Green Revolution technology spread, allowing for a revival of agricultural growth and profitability from around the mid-1970s. This, in turn, led to the growth of agrarian capitalism and the rise of a nascent rural bourgeoisie that was willing to invest in agriculture in the expectation of profit. Alongside public and private investment was also expenditure by the central government on poverty-alleviation programmes. Rural growth generated both agricultural and non-agricultural employment opportunities; as a result, for the first time, the economy during the 1980s saw a sharp and sustained decline in poverty, as well as a significant decline in inequality. It was therefore felt that sustained rural growth had solved both the food-supply question and, because of growing rural non-agricultural opportunities, that of peasant land hunger as well.
There was another factor at work, as well. If technological change and expenditure on poverty alleviation allowed the Indian economy to bypass constraints that the lack of land reform imposed on agricultural productivity and poverty alleviation, the lack of land reform and the power of the rural elite posed another constraint that was more difficult to shake off: inadequate resource mobilisation, tax and non-tax resources on the basis of which the state needed to finance investment and expenditure. Because the taxing of agricultural income had been placed beyond the purview of the central government, even as former landlords increasingly turned to capitalist farming they remained outside the tax net. Furthermore, as economist Ashok Mitra has suggested, the ability of the rural landlords to move terms of trade in their favour was one of the reasons behind the industrial stagnation of the 1960s and early 1970s.
In the non-agrarian sector, partly as a result of the narrowness of the home market, the private corporate segment of capital, largely in manufacturing, grew relatively slowly. It therefore proved an inadequate base on which to mobilise tax resources. Furthermore, what taxes corporate India could have been forced to pay were evaded by means both fair and foul. At the same time, the public sector, mired in conflicting objectives, proved an inadequate source of surplus generation. That left a small group of public- and private-sector salaried workers to resentfully bear the burden of progressive taxation. Little wonder, then, that during the mid-1980s, V P Singh, as Rajiv Gandhi's finance minister, began a rollback of progressive taxation with cutbacks on personal and corporate tax rates, the legacy of which remains to this day.
Against this backdrop, the government was forced to finance the increased levels of investment and consumption expenditure underlying the spurt in growth that took place during the 1980s through domestic and foreign debt. But foreign-debt-fuelled growth strategies are inherently unstable, and this one was no different. Ultimately, the economy came to grief on the back of a liquidity squeeze that manifested itself as India's balance-of-payments crisis of the early 1990s.
The urban bourgeoisie
It is now accepted that economic reforms introduced as a result of the economic crisis of the early 1990s did little to alter the economy's rate of growth, which continued to expand at roughly the same rate as during the previous decade. But the reforms initiated in 1992 by Narasimha Rao's Congress government were nonetheless epochal, because they marked the rise to dominance of the urban bourgeoisie. The cautious deregulation of the 1980s, alongside a return to robust economic growth driven in part by private investment, meant that by the early 1990s the urban bourgeoisie was as confident as it had ever been – and was chafing at the bit of state control. (This is quite unlike its predecessors of the 1930s and 1940s, which had advocated state regulation and state control as being necessary in a poor, developing economy.) The macroeconomic crisis of the early 1990s then provided an opportune moment for the urban bourgeoisie, in alliance with international capital through the International Monetary Fund, to establish its dominance over economic policy formulation.
The 1980s had privileged rural growth, the capitalisation of agriculture and rural non-farm employment generation. Consequently, the economy witnessed sharp and, for the first time, sustained declines in poverty levels. This growth in general, and the capitalisation of agriculture in particular, had been made possible by increased financial intermediation, through 'directed credit' lending to rural areas, as well as the allocation of substantial budgetary resources. Rural financial intermediation, then, was key not only to rural growth but also to the creation of a nascent rural bourgeoisie. The rise to dominance of the urban bourgeoisie essentially stood this model of growth and financing on its head – putting them at odds with the rural bourgeoisie, if not the rural upper-caste elite.
Not only did the urban bourgeoisie want a liberalisation of the rules governing domestic investment, it also wanted a much closer integration with global capital markets. For the urban bourgeoisie, financial liberalisation opened up the possibility of raising relatively cheaper resources in global capital markets. Rules regarding the integration of goods markets were set by India's accession to the World Trade Organisation in 1994, where developed countries successfully negotiated asymmetric market access – ie, getting far greater market access than they gave, outmanoeuvring developing countries (including India) by using a policy of divide-and-rule, and left India's urban bourgeoisie watching from the sidelines.
The lynchpins of India's reform process therefore became domestic deregulation, financial liberalisation, the easing of restrictions on the inflow of foreign capital, and a dismantling of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Fortuitously, previous, largely public, investment in higher technical education, specifically engineering, meant that Indian software firms were ideally placed to leverage their low-cost information-technology skills, and ride the global IT boom that began during the late 1980s. As a result, service-sector-driven growth meant that urban economic growth was privileged, unlike during the 1980s.
It was not simply the case that the urban economy grew much faster than its rural counterpart. One consequence of financial liberalisation was the starving of agriculture in particular, and rural India in general, of resources, as financial intermediation swung sharply in favour of the urban economy. Not only did intermediation to rural India drop significantly, but as a consequence of the macroeconomic stabilisation process – ie, to narrow the budget and balance-of-payments deficit – allocation of budgetary resources to the rural economy also saw a sharp fall. This was partly because less money was available, and partly because fertiliser and other subsidies were slashed, which adversely affected agricultural growth.
On the demand side, global agricultural prices went through a prolonged slump. Faced with the lack of credit, falling output prices and rising input prices, Indian agriculture, specifically foodgrain production, went into a slump out of which it has yet to recover. The alignment of domestic and global agricultural prices, the deepening of agrarian capitalism and the associated change in cropping patterns, the starving of financial resources, the withdrawal of the state as a de-facto socialiser of risk (by ensuring reasonably stable profitability levels) alongside the slump in profitability – together these factors have produced the most prolonged agrarian crisis in the history of independent India. The nature of financial liberalisation in India and the agrarian crisis are therefore are two sides of the same coin – one is incomprehensible without an understanding of the other.
For both the urban economy and the urban bourgeoisie the agrarian crisis has meant little, due to the fact that they are much more insulated from agriculture than in earlier years. As a result, not only did urban economic growth have few spill-over effects on rural growth; but because terms of trade moved against agriculture, the rural economy, despite the agrarian crisis, still contributed to resource mobilisation. Therefore, a significant proportion of agricultural incomes end up as non-agricultural profits.
It took the defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance coalition in the 2004 general elections for the urban bourgeoisie to understand that the status quo, in terms of economic policy, could not continue. As a result, the incoming Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition was able to introduce such legislation as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the Right to Information Act. The UPA has also adopted a defensive posture in the ongoing Doha round of international trade talks with regard to the possibility of opening up agriculture to further import competition. But it speaks volumes about the hold of the urban bourgeoisie on policymaking that the UPA government has been unable to switch financial flows towards the rural economy, the lack of which is an important reason for the continuing agrarian crisis. But it also speaks of the depth of the crisis and its financial nature that that the UPA government, as a response, was forced to announce in its last budget a INR 600 billion loan waiver for small and marginal farmers.
The agrarian crisis and the lack of adequate non-farm rural opportunities did, however, affect the urban bourgeoisie in an unexpected fashion. Rapid urban growth meant an increased demand for land for both business and residential purposes. Of course, along with that came speculation in land, adding to demand pressures. But for the most part, it was felt that the state's acquisition of land would be reasonably straightforward, given the dire straits in which the agricultural sector had found itself. Indeed, in some quarters it was seen as one way of putting money back into the rural economy.
What was not factored in was that, in the face of a lack of non-farm opportunities, rural or otherwise, for many small-scale farmers access to land was the only insurance against starvation. Many farmers therefore, despite the agrarian crisis, were simply unwilling to sell the little land that they owned. The previous inability to push through land reform then came back to haunt the urban bourgeoisie, for with such reform would have come a different pattern of agrarian output and demand growth. Similarly, Adivasis, long frustrated by lack of development and opportunities in their areas, were now unwilling to sign away their traditional rights to common property – just when the urban bourgeoisie wanted, and needed, land the most.
Lower- and middle-caste mobilisation
If land hunger has come back to haunt the urban bourgeoisie, the political rise of the middle and lower castes has taken place despite the best attempts of the upper castes to ensure that the social justice enshrined in the Indian Constitution came to naught. Even as the upper castes were successful in ensuring that the lower castes had very limited social mobility despite affirmative-action programmes, one area in which they were forced to give ground was in political representation – from the Parliament down, now, to the panchayat level.
Affirmative action has been used as an effective mobilisation tool by middle and lower castes. It is this mobilisation and the consequent access to political power that most likely explain one of the most remarkable aspects of India's democracy: the fact that, in India, it is the poor and not the rich who are more likely to vote – which means the middle castes, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims. Perhaps of equal importance, this political mobilisation has come alongside a deepening of democracy, as institutions of local self-governance and accountability have been strengthened.
The upper-caste response to this mobilisation, which began during the late 1980s, was the BJP's religion-based identity politics. The BJP used the notion of an aggressive pan-Hindu identity to form an umbrella coalition, led by the rising middle and business classes, which attempted to paper over contradictions of caste and class. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism, as the BJP's ladder to political power, and the hypocrisy of the Congress party's variety of secularism, led to a demonising of Muslims that ultimately led to the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid and the riots that followed, as well as the anti-Muslim pogrom of Gujarat in 2002. Even while seriously threatening the idea of India as a secular, pluralist, democratic state, this approach paid electoral dividends, as the BJP came to power at the head of the anti-Congress NDA coalition in 1999. The party subsequently carried forward the urban bourgeoisie's programme of economic liberalisation and reform that the Congress had initiated in 1992.
If the return of the Congress in 2004 was an assertion of the continued salience of class and the more plural characteristic of India's polity, then middle- and lower-caste identity politics played no small role in the defeat of the BJP-led coalition. This was accomplished by sharpening the caste and class contradictions that existed within the pan-Hindu coalition. Perhaps the best example of this is the election in Uttar Pradesh of Mayawati, a Dalit, as chief minister, and the eclipse of the BJP in the very state where it had risen to electoral power on the back of rightwing Hindu identity politics almost two decades ago. But if it was eclipsed in UP it was voted back to power in 2007 in Gujarat, supported by a rising Gujarati middle class.
Surely this political mobilisation and participation in the democratic process of the middle and lower castes – and, hence, of the poor – has some role to play in what Amartya Sen calls "the mainstreaming of economic discontent in regular politics rather than leaving it to find violent outlets in irregular crime". In all of this, it is important not to forget that it is the participation of the poor that gives Indian democracy its legitimacy.
Something has to give
The radical intent of the Indian Constitution, then, has manifested itself in the political space, and the rhetoric of equality enshrined in it has been partially delivered – though perhaps in ways not envisaged by its framers. Political space today is much more plural, and parties and groups dominated by the upper castes play a much less hegemonic role than even 30 years ago. Access to political power is more equitable across social groups, and at least some socio-economically marginalised groups have achieved legislative majorities and formed governments to an extent unimaginable in 1950. And all of this has taken place not least due to (to quote the French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot) the "silent revolution" from below, which has almost certainly contributed to the making of what the historian Ramachandra Guha has so felicitously called "the unnatural nation".
Of course, the fact that the political space is today more representative of India's socio-economic spectrum does not mean that the social-justice agenda enshrined in the Constitution has been, or is being, fulfilled. If anything, quite the opposite is the case. The urban-biased growth of the last decade and a half, changing labour-market dynamics and privileging access to high-quality tertiary education, has meant that upper-caste Hindus have dominated access to the best jobs in the urban economy. As a result, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs are similarly situated in the urban economy, at a great distance from the elites. The continuing agrarian crisis hurts the social mobility not only of the landless Dalit and Adivasis, but also the nascent rural bourgeoisie, which today includes landowning OBCs.
Little wonder, then, that both economic inequality and social mobility have considerably worsened. More than anything else, this is behind the demand for an expansion of affirmative action in institutions of higher learning to include OBCs (which is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court). And even though the latest employment data suggest that the rural economy has once again become a net generator of jobs – and, more particularly, of non-farm rural jobs – these are of the sort that may help keep heads above water but which do not afford social mobility. However, the opening of political space for marginalised groups cannot coexist indefinitely alongside shrinking space for social mobility and widening economic inequality. Something has to give – either the political space narrows, or economic inequality reduces and social mobility improves. In the current context, it is not at all clear which of these will take place.
Be that as it may, the rise to political power of parties representing marginalised groups also forces the people of India to face up to the radical agenda around land and caste inherent in the country's Constitution. If, on the one hand, the issue of poverty cannot be solved without addressing land hunger, then the dynamics of capitalist growth necessitate changing patterns of land use. Similarly, issues related neither to social exclusion nor social mobility can be addressed without first confronting caste-related inequalities and broad-basing education and employment opportunities to include the millions of uneducated landless labourers, who are also mostly Dalits and OBCs. And, if the middle class continues to be dominated by upper-caste Hindus, then as it grows the greater the likelihood will be of the return to power of Hindu fundamentalism.
It is useful to remind ourselves that, wherever the issue of land (Kerala and West Bengal) or caste (Kerala, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu) has been addressed, if even partially, it has been the result of popular movements and political mobilisation from below. Of course, the fate of Naxalism in Andhra Pradesh reminds us that popular movements and political mobilisation from below is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for change (see Himal December 2007, "Naxalite be not proud"). What exactly entails 'sufficient conditions' is difficult to delineate with any degree of generality, but would certainly include elite engagement, or at least accommodation.
Engagement and reform
Today that is perhaps India's most significant stumbling block – the lack of elite engagement in a process of socio-economic transformation. In the 60 years since Independence, India's socio-economic elite has undergone substantial change. Indeed, when India seems to have entered a new phase of sustained economic growth, its elite is perhaps the most disengaged from the toiling millions that populates the country.
At the time of Independence, India's elite was largely upper caste and comprised a large rural landed segment, a small but influential urban professional middle class, and an even smaller but equally influential urban bourgeoisie. It was an elite that largely supported state intervention and the mixed-economy capitalist growth model espoused by the Congress. A sizable segment of the urban professional middle class had organic links with the rural landed elite, which was one of the reasons why the elite was so successful in using passive resistance to counter the radical agenda of the Constitution.
However, as a result of the nature of economic growth of the last few decades, the urban bourgeoisie has emerged from the shadows of the rural landed elite, and today dominates it. As noted earlier, of equal importance is the fact that this urban bourgeoisie has actively worked towards shrinking the role of the state in the economy, and making it much more market-driven. There has also been significant growth of the urban middle class; but at the same time its links with the rural elite have either vanished or are greatly attenuated, more as a process of generational change than anything else. If anything, today it clearly identifies with the urban bourgeoisie.
Penetration of agrarian capitalism into the countryside has resulted in the emergence of a rural bourgeoisie, but one that is as likely to be middle caste (and perhaps even lower caste) as it is to be upper caste. Perhaps this is why the rural bourgeoisie no longer has a substantial voice in the upper-caste-dominated urban-bourgeoisie-led elite. In any case, today's urbanised elite in general and the urban bourgeoisie in particular feel that they do not really need the rural bourgeoisie.
Having come of age on the back of state support, today's elite is unwilling to accept that addressing the radical agenda inherent in the Indian Constitution is in the self-interest of both the urban and rural bourgeoisie. It is likewise unwilling to accept that to address this agenda will require collective action, state actors and public policy, and that it cannot be left to the logic of the market. It is this disconnect that is most disconcerting and damaging today. It is unfortunate that this is so, because today's elite, like yesterday's, is mistaken if it believes the radical agenda set forth in the Indian Constitution can simply be swept beneath the carpet. It cannot and will not, as the return of land hunger has demonstrated.
The fact of elite engagement in and of itself does not solve anything. Addressing the radical agenda inherent in the Constitution does not yield straightforward answers any longer, if indeed it ever did. For example, the deepening agrarian crisis pits the interests of the rural bourgeoisie against that of the rural poor – one of the reasons for the increasing caste violence in so many parts of the country. But land reform alone will also not solve the agrarian crisis. For that, one also needs a return to profitability of foodgrain production. The urban bourgeoisie might support the first but certainly not the latter, particularly if it means channelling financial resources to rural areas.
Similarly, land reform alone will not solve the issue of poverty. For that, people need to be able to move towards better-paying non-agricultural jobs. A rural-biased growth strategy might deliver this while also being in the interests of both the rural bourgeoisie and the rural poor, but is still unlikely to be supported by the urban elite. And, of course, the continuing penchant of the upper-caste Hindu-dominated middle class for religion-based identity politics constantly threatens India's secular fabric. The simple point is that the conflicts of interest between elites and non-elites (as well as among elites themselves) within the confines of a plural democratic set-up complicate decision-making and tradeoffs. If this is not bad enough, there is also global capital and its allies to contend with, further narrowing the possibilities and complicating the trajectory. But even so, the relative equality of access to political space and the deepening of the very same plural democracy also make brushing away the radical agenda much more difficult today. Elite engagement would undoubtedly make that dialogue a bit easier and less politically fraught.
India can choose to emulate Latin America, where growth has indeed taken place but only with increasing inequality, social polarisation and endemic violence. Or, to paraphrase the poet Robert Frost, it could take the path less travelled: engaging with democratic political mobilisation from below, to devise democratic mechanisms that allow for social mobility, and thereby deliver inclusive social growth. Sixty years on, as the radical agenda of the Indian Constitution comes back to confront the country, India once again stands at a crossroads.
~ Mritiunjoy Mohanty is assistans professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, on leave as a visiting scholar at the University of Quebec.