This look at economic development in India focuses on interactions between the central state and regional elites. India is widely regarded as a "failed" developmental state, seemingly the exception that belies the prediction of a triumphant Asian century.

Seminar papers.

James Manor is acknowledged as one of the world's leading experts on Indian politics, especially how it is affected by caste, political economy -- particularly poverty and its alleviation -- regionalism and modes of political leadership. This book distills his six decades of research, scholarship and writing on these topics, presenting the reader with a definitive collection of chapters covering the full spectrum of Manor's expertise. The first section is a commentary on the emergence of a consolidated democracy in India, and discusses political awakening and political decay, which, together with political regeneration, form the three key processes at work in Indian politics over the past forty years. If one aspect of the management of democratic affairs is linked to the Indian voters and their shifting political choices, the other is where political leaders step in; and Manor is equally interested in both. He devotes three sections to the nature of political parties, the trends of regional politics, and how, at all these levels, political actors manage the challenges of governance. He addresses the regional dynamics of politics through the lens of political leadership in the fourth section. And in the last section, he comments on the more recent and turbulent phase of Indian politics, as Hindu nationalists took power in the regions and at the center.

Exploring regionalism from a political economic perspective, this text investigates why regional arrangements are formed, the conditions under which these arrangements solidify, and why they take on different institutional forms.

Today, regional parties in India win nearly as many votes as national parties. In Why Regional Parties?, Professor Adam Ziegfeld questions the conventional wisdom that regional parties in India are electorally successful because they harness popular grievances and benefit from strong regional identities. He draws on a wide range of quantitative and qualitative evidence from over eighteen months of field research to demonstrate that regional parties are, in actuality, successful because they represent expedient options for office-seeking politicians. By focusing on clientelism, coalition government, and state-level factional alignments, Ziegfeld explains why politicians in India find membership in a regional party appealing. He therefore accounts for the remarkable success of India's regional parties and, in doing so, outlines how party systems take root and evolve in democracies where patronage, vote buying, and machine politics are common.

The last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed, for the first time, the demand for a federal polity premised on the principle of linguistic provinces. The regional Chambers of Commerce in the Telugu, Bengali and Tamil linguistic regions were the first to put forth such a demand before the Congress and the colonial state. The Indian National Congress agreed to it in 1920 and reorganized provincial Congress organizations, which had been earlier based on politico-administrative boundaries of the British Indian provinces, on linguistic lines under a new party constitution under Gandhi's influence. However, once it came to power at the Centre in 1947 the national Congress leadership changed its stand. In 1953, under the pressure of a mass upsurge, the Nehru government was compelled to set up a State Reorganisation Commission to consider the question of the creation of linguistic states. In the past 63 years, several works have been published on the theme of 'state politics', but most writers have concentrated on electoral politics. This book, however, discusses different aspects of politics in the 27 states and 2 Union Territories with legislative assemblies (with some minor omissions which are regretted). For example, it analyses the different social structures, levels of economic development, landholding patterns, party systems, voting behaviour, political culture and governance and politics of each state. It discusses their internal dynamics which are influenced by the size of the population, demography, territory and topography, economy, and the power structure of the different classes and communities. The book also takes into account the commonalities across the boundaries at both, the micro and the macro levels, such as the expansion and intensification of capitalist social relations into the innermost areas, breakdown of old structures and social mores, emergence of civil society, development of administrative transparency, growth of alternative party systems and the linkages of each state/region with the nation and global capital. The liberalization of economy over the last few decades has accelerated the growth of commonalities across the states through a growing uniformity of production processes and consumer culture.