Is the Indian state acting in the best interests of its common citizens? Many will say it is not. Income insecurity is increasing while GDP is growing. Violence within the country is rising between religious and ethnic groups, and against women and vulnerable people, while the national government is trying to prevent imported terrorism and secure national borders.
How does the state operate? Who is the state? How are public policies made? Who makes them?
Sarthak Shukla, a scholar of public policy at the Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences, and I analyse the state as a "system" of institutions--official and unofficial; and policy making as a process of contention amongst aspirations and ideologies. We examine India's recent history in an article in The Print today.
https://theprint.in/opinion/who-really-runs-indias-policy-the-dangerous-grip-of-sarkar-bazaar-nexus/2262440/
We explain how, with the increasing influence of consultants and business lobbies on government policy, the hybrid apparatus of the state and its policy making have been captured by forces of the "bazaar", weakening the voices of the "samaj" (civil society). Ease of doing business has become a measure of the performance of the government, overriding the ease of living of less wealthy and less powerful citizens. Measures to attract FDI by weakening the accountability of the state to its own citizens are now considered good economic policy. Policies to nurture domestic employment and to expand government funded welfare are denigrated as a return to the bad old days of "socialism" and as "anti-capitalist".
The people are speaking up. The ideology of minimum government and maximum business, which swept through the West and India too, has not delivered for them, even in the West. Citizens movements from the Left and the Right are speaking up against the capital favouring consensus in the Middle which prefers the status quo.