Few democratic states offer the opportunity to study the array of political issues that India affords. The vast, multilingual, polyethnic polity, riven with every conceivable political cleavage from social class and ethnic diversity to regional disparities, provides social scientists an extraordinary array of subjects to study. Even the very success of its democracy constitutes a compelling puzzle. It has defied a range of contentions that a certain level of economic development was a prerequisite for democracy to emerge, that it depended on the presence of a bourgeois class, and that it would be consolidated at a particular level of income.
Indeed, some scholars of Indian politics have persuasively argued that India became democratic long before it became prosperous. Even today, after nearly two decades of steady economic growth, its prosperity remains highly uneven. Some states and regions of India have indeed witnessed significant gains while others remain mired in abject...
