From ‘Flailing State’ to ‘Dizzying State’?
In her 1994 essay titled ‘The Gentle Leviathan: Welfare and the Indian State’, political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal argued that the Indian state is more of an interventionist state than a welfare one. According to Jayal India followed the state-driven capitalist path of development rather than the welfarist approach that the west adopted. In the 1960s, economist Gunnar Myrdal called India a ‘soft state’. A soft state has a weak law enforcement mechanism, low state capacity, and high levels of social indiscipline within the society. In their book, ‘In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The political economy of the Indian state’, the Rudolphs argued that India is more of a weak-strong state. There are dual forces that govern India, one is the centralized strong state that determines its centrist tendencies and the other is the weak state that has a complex relationship with the society. The weak state gives legitimacy to ‘highly mobilized fragmented forces that threaten governability, political stability, and national purpose’.
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