Economic development is a primary means by which the Indian democratic project has legitimated itself. Given an electorate of mostly poor people, no government has been elected without making development — the uplift of the downtrodden through service provision, the creation of individual freedom, and collective opportunity inherent in economic transformation — its primary objective. Unlike archetypal developmental states such as the Republic of Korea, the Indian state after Independence had to accomplish its mandate of development in the context of a diverse and fissiparous democracy that had endured centuries of British colonial domination and the expropriation of its wealth.
This historical context, and the bureaucratic and political processes surrounding the delivery of development outcomes have generated growth but also created significant structural inequities that have taken different forms across India’s post-Independence history. The inequity associated with the actions of the developmental state, the corruption, and moral outrage that constitute the state’s broken promises to the people has been the driver of waves of political conflict in the Indian polity since Independence. The moral failings of different phases within the trajectory of India’s developmental state have inspired collective challenges to the establishment throughout its history.
Critiques of underdevelopment and the promises of development were at the heart of the nationalist movement against colonial rule. For early nationalist thinkers, the idea of India itself was suffused with a claim that it was one economy and one nation, suppressed in the fulfilment of its destiny by an imperial apparatus that sought to keep it divided, while draining its wealth and sending it overseas. The Congress party, when taking the reins of power, legitimated its rule primarily through a solemn promise that it would redress structures of political, economic, and social inequality by deploying the state to implement far-reaching programmes of development. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his famous “Tryst with Destiny” address, pledged the service of a sovereign government to “the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity”.
