Contradictions of Democracy, Development and Inequality: A Case of India

Identity politics has widened representation for the marginalised groups in democracies, while neoliberalism has deepened inequality. This volume finds answers to the paradox of widening representation and worsening inequality especially in India exploring the themes of development and identity in recent times.
Inspired by Caesar Basu’s works as a political thinker, this volume weaves in economic concerns with the socio-cultural aspects of identity and contends that representation is not sufficient. Further, it highlights the importance of reinstating redistribution to serve both democracy and development. It looks at neoliberal policies and how they maximise negative liberty by focussing on the individual thereby obliterating the question of the social location of individuals. The contributors to this volume investigate these issues through the lens of religion, gender, caste, and raise interdisciplinary questions concerning ecological conditions of labour, the institution of democracy and capitalist regimes, linkages among multiple sectors of the Indian economy, devaluation of women’s work in the care economy, material distribution of resources, and liberty and civil rights. This book creates a much-needed conversation between the study of development through the economic perspective and the cultural or political sociology perspective.
It will be of interest to students and researchers of politics especially identity politics, economics, sociology and social justice, development studies, and social geography.

Sejuti Das Gupta is an Associate professor at the Michigan State University, USA. She has also taught at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. Her research is interdisciplinary and based on primary data and aims to contribute towards combining theory and practice for a better understanding in social science. Her most recent publication is called, Class, Politics and Agrarian Policies in Post-liberalisation India (2024).

Shouvik Chakraborty is an Assistant Research Professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. He specializes in environmental and energy economics, climate finance, job creation, and macroeconomics and is committed to addressing the urgent challenges posed by climate change. His recent research projects include analyzing the employment effects of President Biden's initiatives in green energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure in the United States.

Taposik Banerjee teaches Economics at the School of Liberal Studies, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, India. His research interests include social choice, law and economics and network theory. His recently published work is ‘Characterization of a k-th best element rationalizable choice function with full domain’, in the journal, Theory and Decision.