A nation on the edge

A retrospective of how India’s growth has been precocious in many ways, managing enduring contradictions

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book’s core themes is the nature of the Indian state and its role in development and society. For example, the book says, India’s default ideology is statism, best understood in its Indian rendition—‘mai-baap sarkar’ or ‘mai-baapism’.

This is more than the narrow ideology of the Left, with its belief in state-driven industrialisation or welfarism. It is more all-encompassing and shared well beyond the narrow elite, a sort of mass ideology that includes the Right as much as the Left. It connotes the State as provider and protector, refuge and comfort, even as it has also been the apathetic parent, absentee landlord, tormentor and a Wizard of Oz-like figure, projecting an illusion of power sans its reality. The Indian ecosphere is almost universally mai-baapist.

While aspects of mai-baapism were motivated by a sort of elite paternalism, a central feature has been a deep-rooted control mentality. By making the State the locus of all change, it disincentivised other forms of societal collective action.