Democracy, Development, and the Countryside
Urban-Rural Struggles in India

This book examines how the rural sector in India uses its numbers in a democracy to further its economic and political interests.

Ashutosh Varshney (Author)

9780521646253, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 September 1998

232 pages, 16 b/w illus. 8 tables
22.9 x 15.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.357 kg

Several scholars have written about how authoritarian or democratic political systems affect industrialization in the developing countries. There is no literature, however, on whether democracy makes a difference to the power and well-being of the countryside. Using India as a case where the longest-surviving democracy of the developing world exists, this book investigates how the countryside uses the political system to advance its interests. It is first argued that India's countryside has become quite powerful in the political system, exerting remarkable pressure on economic policy. The countryside is typically weak in the early stages of development, becoming powerful when the size of the rural sector defies this historical trend. But an important constraint on rural power stems from the inability of economic interests to overpower the abiding, ascriptive identities, and until an economic construction of politics completely overpowers identities and non-economic interests, farmers' power, though greater than ever before, will remain self-limited.

Preface
Introduction
1. Town-Country struggles in development
2. Nehru's agricultural policy: a Reconstruction
3. Policy change in the mid-1960s
4. Rise of Agrarian power in the 1970s
5. Organizing the countryside in the 1980s
6. Has rural India lost out?
7. Paradoxes of power and the intracacies of economic policy
8. Conclusion: democracy and the countryside
Endnotes.

Subject Areas: Political structures: democracy [JPHV]