Why Poverty Hasn't Led To Social Unrest

It's a puzzle why the immiserated haven't risen in popular revolt. Disaggregated govt handouts have helped in patches. It isn't utopian to consider a more stable solution

- AKEEL BILGRAMI

To read the pervasive commentary in the economic sections of the world's newspapers on what the globalising neoliberal turn in political economy has wrought in the last few decades in India, one would think that it has all been for the good—its economy has been growing, as has the middle class, and poverty has been reduced.

Yet, serious economic analysis has fundamentally challenged this as, in one crucial respect, downright false. Measurement of poverty in India, by criteria that are sound rather than skewed, points to increased immiseration of the worst-off in numbers as large as ever, despite a swelling middle class.

A puzzle arises then as to why, given this growing immiseration, there has been no explosion of social unrest. A familiar answer points to how people are deflected from their suffering by the Hindutva politics of identity. There is, no doubt, some truth in this. But deflections of that sort cannot for long prevent the intolerability of the suffering—especially if it is as extreme as studies have shown it to be—from prompting popular anger and agency. So, the puzzle remains.

In recent years, the influential work of economist Kalyan Sanyal implies a different explanation. Its argument in summary is this. Capitalism of recent decades in India dispossesses the peasants from their land, but cannot absorb them in industrial labour, as was done in Europe in earlier centuries (nor even in what Karl Marx called the 'reserve army'). It thus creates a very large population which is outside of the corporate capitalist political economy, hence unable to morph into a unified class formation with the familiar potential for forging the agencies of resistance attributed to the 'proletariat' in an earlier phase of capitalism.