Abstract The largest democracy in the world is threatened by clear signs of democratic backsliding. The dominance of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014 has brought about some worrying developments that undermine the functioning of democracy, above all the guarantee of civil rights for all citizens. In 2021, three major international organizations that monitor the condition of democracy worldwide—Freedom House (USA), the Economist Intelligence Unit (UK) and V-Dem (Sweden)—issued reports that downgraded India’s ranking as a democracy and its rankings on rights and liberties. This chapter discusses the challenges that liberal democracy in India faces in the light of these reports and the role of political parties, principally that of the ruling BJP but also that of opposition parties.

E. Sridharan (ed.), Eastward Ho? India's Relations with the Indo-Pacific. Orient BlackSwan, 2021, pp. 487+ Bibliography and Index, ?1825, ISBN 9789354420542.

Pradeep K. Chhibber and Rahul Verma, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India. Oxford University Press. 2018. 320 pages. ₹1195.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the slow and Pakistan-centric pattern of India's nuclear behaviour and argues for the explanatory power offered by Mohammed Ayoob's subaltern realist reading situated in Barry Buzan's and Ole Waever's regional security complex theory, in which state- and nation-building processes are central to conflict. It describes three issues: the credibility of Pakistan's implied first-use doctrine in the context of a conventional war which it is losing; whether nuclear deterrence stability creates incentives for low-intensity warfare and limited conventional warfare; and whether United States (US) presence will enhance Pakistan's nuclear deterrence capability or undermine it. The book provides a foundation based on international relations (IR) theory for the doctrine of credible minimum deterrence which, despite being the official Indian as well as Pakistani nuclear doctrine, has never had its assumptions and principles clearly enunciated.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I thank Pranab Bardhan for detailed comments, Vijay Joshi for useful conversations, and D. L. Sheth, George Mathew, and Pronab Sen for pointers to data. 1 See, for example, Atul Kohli's argument that the growth of the number of shareholders in India provides a mass base for capitalism, in Kohli, “The Politics of Economic Liberalization in India," World Development Vol. 17, No. 3 (March 1989), pp. 305–28. 2 For example, Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985); Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott, eds., The Petite Bourgeoisie: Comparative Studies of the Uneasy Stratum (London: Macmillan, 1981); Dale L. Johnson, ed., Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class(Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1982); Dale L. Johnson, ed., Middle Classes in Dependent Countries (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1985). 3 Wright, Classes, p. 19. 4 Aijaz Ahmad, “Class, Nation and State: Intermediate Classes in Peripheral Societies,” in Johnson, Class and Social Development, p. 44. 5 Chris Gerry and Chris Birkbeck, “The Petty Commodity Producer in Third World Cities: Petit Bourgeois or ‘Disguised’ Proletarian?” in Bechhofer and Elliott, eds., The Petite Bourgeoisie, pp. 121–54. 6 Satish Deshpande, “The Centrality of the Middle Class,” Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 125–50. 7 On these last two points see Zoya Hasan, “Changing Political Orientations of the Middle Classes in India,” in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, eds., Middle Class Values in India and Western Europe (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2002), pp. 152–70; and Suhas Palshikar, “Politics of India's Middle Classes,” in Ahmad and Reifeld, eds., Middle Class Values, pp. 171–93. 8 Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India, 4th ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 51. 9 Bardhan, Political Economy of Development, p. 51, n. 8. 10 Pranab Bardhan, “The Third Dominant Class,” Economic and Political Weekly, January 21, 1989, pp. 155–56. 11 Pranab Bardhan, “A Political-Economy Perspective on Development,” in Bimal Jalan, ed., The Indian Economy: Problems and Prospects (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 333. 12 Bardhan, “Political-Economy Perspective,” pp. 333–4, and for the quote see Bardhan, “The Third Dominant Class,” p. 156. 13 Kohli, “Politics of Economic Liberalization in India.” 14 E. Sridharan, “Economic Liberalization and India's Political Economy: Towards a Paradigm Synthesis,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics Vol. 31, No. 3, (November 1993), pp. 1–31; Vanita Shastri, “The Politics of Economic Liberalization in India,” Contemporary South Asia Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 1997), pp. 27–56; Jorgen Dige Pedersen, “Explaining Economic Liberalization in India: State and Society Perspectives,” World Development Vol. 28, No. 2 (February 2000), pp. 265–82; Arun Shourie, “When Spirit is Willing, Flesh has a Way,” Indian Express, February 4, 2004; Ashutosh Varshney, “Mass Politics or Elite Politics? India's Economic Reforms in Comparative Perspective,” in Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ashutosh Varshney and Nirupam Bajpai, eds., India in the Era of Economic Reforms (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 222–260. 15 Andre Beteille, “The Social Character of the Indian Middle Class,” in Ahmad and Reifeld, eds., Middle Class Values, p. 76. 16 For a comparison of the MISH and NSS data with respect to the debate on post-reform decline of poverty, see Deepak Lal, Rakesh Mohan, and I. Natarajan, “Economic Reforms and Poverty Alleviation: A Tale of Two Surveys,” Economic and Political Weekly, March 24, 2001, pp. 1017–28, in which they argue that NSS data in the 1990s is less reliable and greatly overstates poverty. 17 National Council of Applied Economic Research, India Market Demographics Report 2002 (New Delhi: NCAER, 2003), p. 5, for details of coverage and comparability across time of the MISH data. 18 NCAER, India Market Demographics, Chapter 5 and Annex 4, pp. 91–9 19 Computed from Table 4.3, in NCAER, India Market Demographics, p. 22. The distribution of households in the five income classes by household head's occupation is only available for 1999–2000. 20 We assume that female employees are one-sixth of all employees as per organized sector employment data for 1998–99 in Government of India, Ministry of Finance (Economic Division), Economic Survey 2003–-04 (New Delhi: Ministry of Finance, 2004), Table 3.3, p. S-50, and a multiplier of 5.6 persons per household as per NCAER. 21 India Yearbook 2001: Manpower Profile (New Delhi: Institute of Applied Manpower Research, 2002), Table 3.2.20, p. 158. 22 India, Economic Survey 2003–04, Table 3.3, p. S-50. 23 India, Economic Survey 2003–04, Table 3.3, p. S-50. 24 See Table 6 of Government of India, Ministry of Labour (Directorate General of Employment and Training), Census of Central Government Employees, 2003 (New Delhi: Ministry of Labour, 2003), p. 7. 25 Government of India, Ministry of Industry, Public Enterprises Survey 2001–2002 (New Delhi: Ministry of Industry, 2002) Vol. 1, Table 1.28, p. 32; and Public Enterprises Survey 1996–97 (New Delhi: Ministry of Industry, 1997), Vol. 1, Statement 28, p. S-214. 26 I assume the same 28% share for group D in the central quasi government sector other than public enterprises, a 50% share of group D in local bodies, then from Table 5, get 11.459 million non-manual public employees in 1998–99. Further assuming the 17% women employees are evenly distributed among groups A to D, and assuming that each of them is part of a male-headed household, not necessarily in public employment, I get the final figures above. I have relied on informal information from the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, for this assumption, in turn based on the fact that (urban) municipalities, not (rural) panchayats, dominate local bodies and in the former about 60% of employees would be in group D. There is no available breakdown by groups A to D for local bodies; we use an estimate of 50% for group D. 27 For the lowest category of group C employee following the fifth Pay Commission report, at the bottom of the scale of Rs. 3200 basic pay, plus two increments of Rs. 85 by 1998–99, plus 30% house rent allowance, plus city compensatory allowance and traveling allowance, the total emoluments come to Rs. 4,781, or Rs. 57,372, at the very bottom or entry level of the scale. This means that the overwhelming majority of group C public employees, especially if there is more than one earner in a household, joint families being the norm even in urban India as one goes down the income ladder, would be in the 1998–99 MISH-derived definition of broadest middle class. Deflating the roughly estimated 9.5 million non-group D public employee households by a quarter to eliminate female-headed and some additional households to get 7.13 million non-manual public employee-headed households, we get 40 million non-manual public employees. Ministry of Finance, Government of India, Report of the Fifth Central Pay Commission (New Delhi: Ministry of Finance, Government of India), pp. 459–461 and p. 727. 28 India Yearbook 2001: Manpower Profile, Table 3.2.20, p. 158. 29 See Tables 1–4 in Satish Deshpande, “Caste Inequalities in India Today,” Contemporary India, pp. 112–13. 30 D. L. Sheth, “Secularisation of Caste and Making of New Middle Class,” Economic and Political Weekly, August 21–September 3, 1999, pp. 2502–10. For a more detailed account see D. L. Sheth, “Caste and Class: Social Reality and Political Representations,” in V. A. Pai Panandiker and Ashis Nandy, eds., Contemporary India (New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill, 1999), pp. 337–63. 31 Scheduled Castes (ex-untouchables) and Scheduled Tribes (aboriginal peoples) are groups for whom there have been quotas in public employment and legislative representation in proportion to their population since the Indian constitution was adopted in 1950. Other Backward Classes are caste-defined groups consisting of small farmer and artisan castes for whom there have quotas in public employment since the early 1990s. 32 Yogendra Yadav, Sanjay Kumar, and Oliver Heath, “The BJP's New Social Bloc,” Frontline, November 19, 1999, p. 32. 33 Radhika Desai, “Hindutva's Gujarat: The Image of India's Future,” Slouching Towards Ayodhya (New Delhi: Three Essays Press, 2002), pp. 137–63. 34 Desai, “Hindutva's Gujarat,” p. 146. 35 Sanjay Kumar, “Impact of Economic Reforms on Indian Electorate,” Economic and Political Weekly, April 17, 2004, pp. 1621–30, Table 1 and Table 5. For instances of middle class ambivalence toward liberalization see Baldev Raj Nayar, Globalization and Nationalism: The Changing Balance in India's Economic Policy 1950–2000 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001), pp. 124, 151, 175, 185, 197. 36 Yogendra Yadav, “Urban India More Polarised” and “Economic Reforms in the Mirror of Public Opinion,” The Hindu, June 13, 2004. 37 See, for example, opinion poll, “NDA Shining: 290 Watts”, Outlook, March 15, 2004, pp. 24–25. 38 See David Denoon, “Cycles in Indian Economic Liberalization, 1966–1996,” Comparative Politics Vol. 31, No. 1 (October 1998), pp. 43–60.

This paper attempts to place the issue of cross-state learning and borrowing experiences in service delivery in India in the specific context of political incentives in India's federal democracy as well relating it to the findings of the comparative literature on subnational policy diffusion in federal systems. It presents four types of borrowing experiences from a selection of six case studies of the past few years, and point towards ways in which learning/borrowing across states can be usefully incorporated into policy.

This paper looks at how multiethnic countries accommodate diversity. This is especially pertinent when the minority ethnic group might remain underrepresented due to the absence of any compensatory mechanisms. This paper looks exclusively at the representation of the Indian Muslims in both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. The focus here is on the Muslim representation in the Rajya Sabha in relation to the Lok Sabha, and whether the Rajya Sabha offers a corrective mechanism to the underrepresentation of the Muslims in the Lok Sabha.

This chapter surveys the legal and regulatory history of political finance in India, situating it in the context of India’s political economy. It devotes special attention to recent developments, including new reforms implemented by the Modi government in 2017. It also discusses possible areas of reform, including the regulation of political parties, which can lead to increased transparency and help the country break out of a corrupt equilibrium.

This chapter examines the evolution of one of the world’s most powerful elections bodies, the Election Commission of India (ECI). Blessed with a legal status as a permanent, independent body under the Constitution, the ECI has used its broad mandate to develop wide-ranging powers to regulate the conduct and management of elections. A series of skilled leaders have further pushed the agency to undertake consistent organizational and technological innovation. In spite of this progress, the agency has struggled mightily to curb the twin influences of money and “muscle” (serious criminality) in electoral politics. Unless the ECI is given more substantial legal authorities to address these challenges, the credibility of the electoral process will likely suffer. Legal ambiguity also makes the body vulnerable to political interference, although the multi-polar distribution of political power—coupled with widespread popular support and a sympathetic judiciary—mitigate this risk.

This chapter analyses how the middle class and the other classes voted in the 2014 election. It focuses on the voting for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress ; voter preferences along the caste or community and age groups within classes, to the extent relevant; and economic policy, particularly as concerns economic liberalization. The chapter attempts to engage with certain theoretical formulations on the middle class, economic liberalization, the BJP and party system change. The chapter differs from author's own earlier estimates of the middle class at the start of the 21st century and around 2005–6 in that it is much broader. Even those of the middle classes who are self-employed persons or private employees are, like public employees or rich peasants, the beneficiaries of a range of state subsidies including water, electricity, fertilizer, credit, fuel, higher education, public transport and even food.

This paper analyses the defeat of the Congress party in the India's 2014 election in which it plummeted to its lowest ever vote share (19 per cent) and seat tally (44 of 543). We argue that the defeat is the end result of a gradual decline punctuated by recoveries that began much earlier. We show that the Congress was gradually becoming less competitive in more and more states and constituencies as indicated by its falling to third position or worse. We try to relate this to the desertion of the party by social groups that once supported it in a number of states and other factors. The larger question is whether a Congress-type, encompassing, umbrella party can survive the sharpened politicisation of social cleavages, in the Indian case, religious, caste and regional cleavages since such a party will tend to lose out to parties based on religious, caste and regional identities in identitarian outbidding.

This paper analyses whether the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s 2014 general election in which it won a majority of seats after seven successive elections from 1989 to 2009 that resulted in hung parliaments and minority governments, mostly minority coalitions, means the end of the coalition era in Indian politics and the beginning of a new era of one-party majority dominated by the BJP, reminiscent of the Congress-dominated one-party majorities that prevailed during the pre-1989 period. It argues that for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons, including the dependence of the BJP’s majority on pre-electoral coalitions, its need for such coalitions for winning state assembly elections and expanding its base for the next general election, and its need for allies in the Rajya Sabha for passing legislation, that the era of coalition politics will continue, though with some changes.

This article lays out the overarching context of economic cooperation in Asia and discusses the two big questions: the strategic consequences of economic integration in Asia and the economic consequences of the lack of a security consensus in Asia. The rise of China is central to both. China's economic rise has led to the rapid growth of Asian economic integration as well as given rise to security rivalries, both land and maritime, all around its borders. The article examines whether economic integration will mitigate security rivalries or whether the absence of a regional security arrangement instead of the hub-and spokes US-centred security system in the Asia-Pacific will impede the growth of economic and political cooperation. Much depends on the unpredictable and evolving interaction of Chinese behaviour and the US and Asian responses to it.