Self‐limited empowerment: Democracy, economic development and rural India

Abstract

This study deals with two questions: (i) what accounts for the rise of the countryside in India's polity? and (ii) how has rural power in the polity affected economic policy and economic outcomes for the peasantry? The rural sector is typically weak in the early stages of development. A powerful countryside, therefore, is a counter‐historical occurrence. Universal franchise and a competitive democracy in a primarily agrarian India have led to the empowerment of the countryside. The power of the rural sector is, however, not unconstrained. The first principal constraint is, ironically, the size of the agricultural sector itself. Beyond a point, subsidising a large rural sector is fiscally difficult. The size of the rural population thus cuts both ways: it makes the countryside powerful in a democratic political system but checks this power economically. The second principal constraint on rural power stems from the cross‐cutting nature of rural identities and interests. Farmers are also members of caste, ethnic and religious communities. Politics based on economic interests can potentially unite rural India and push the state even more: politics based on caste, ethnicity and religion cuts across rural and urban India, and divides the countryside. Both kinds of politics are vibrant, neither fully displacing the other. The refusal of farmers themselves to give precedence to their farming interests over their other interests and ascriptive identities means that the power of rural India is ultimately self‐limited. The urban bias view ignores that farmers, like most of us, have multiple selves and there is no reason to assume a permanent superiority of the economic over the non‐economic. As a result, even when farmers become powerful politically, the possibilities of which were underestimated or ruled out by the urban bias theorists, they may not be able to change the economic outcomes completely. They may certainly be able to prevent the worst‐case scenarios, but find it hard to realise the best‐case scenarios.