Ascending India–Its State-Capacity Problems and Prospects

This concluding chapter focuses on India's state-capacity problems and prospects. Its population may become the world's largest, its economy is becoming one of the world's largest, and its military power will probably move along at least a similar upward trajectory. Yet just about everything concerning India is characterized by developmental handicaps of one sort or another. Too many people are poor, infrastructure is lacking, and demands on the state for action to remedy these problems are multiplying. The Indian state, on the other hand, is characterized by a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. It scores high on its democratic attributes but much less so on its overall effectiveness. It has been and continues to be plagued by peripheral insurgencies and separatist movements. Moreover, its extraction capacity has improved but still has a long way to go, given the tasks the state needs to undertake.

Democratic Institutions

This chapter looks at Indian democratic institutions. Contrary to popular belief, the British did little or nothing to promote the growth of democratic institutions in India. Instead, Indian nationalists from the late nineteenth century onward successfully appropriated liberal-democratic principles from the United Kingdom and infused them into the Indian political context. Under the influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi in the 1930s, these beliefs and principles were disseminated to a broad swath of India's population via the Indian National Congress, the leading nationalist political party. As this was occurring, the British colonial regime was losing few opportunities to thwart or at least contain the growth of democratic sentiment and practice in India. The Indian nationalists can justifiably claim that each step toward self-rule and democratic governance was the result of sustained and unrelenting political agitation against authoritarian colonial rule.

Violence Monopoly

This chapter examines violence monopoly. Violence monopoly refers to whether the state is capable of establishing an order in which its claim to be the ultimate and principal employer of coercion goes largely unchallenged. The more often states are challenged, and the more intense the nature of the challengers, the less likely the state is to survive as the central institution of a political system. A poor showing in the violence monopoly category is one of the Indian state's greatest vulnerabilities in terms of state capacity. It will need to be improved upon simply to maintain order. Yet it is doubtful that the Indian state will improve in this area rapidly.

The Economy

This chapter focuses on the economy, which provides a critical foundation for or potential roadblock to expanding state capacity. A state's economy is an important factor in assessing possibilities of ascent to great power status. This is because a state with a weak economy is highly vulnerable to external pressure. To gain more autonomy and insulation from external pressures, one must develop the economy so that resources are available for both resisting other states' influence and pursuing one's own state goals. If these goals include gaining membership in the elite club of states, considerable resources are needed to pay for the requisite military-political capabilities. If the starting point is far behind the competition, that means that the catch-up will require considerable and rapid economic growth.

Conceptualizing and Measuring State Strength

This chapter focuses on conceptualizing and measuring state strength. Measuring anything in politics, let alone state strength, is never straightforward. By and large, state strength measurements usually arise in analyses of civil war and in studies discussing failed states. Multiple indicators have been used to capture three different emphases on state capacity or strength: military, bureaucratic/administrative, and political institution quality and coherence. Military capacity refers to the standard Weberian focus on the state's monopoly of the use of legitimate force within the state's boundaries. Bureaucratic/administrative capacity stresses the ability of the state to monitor problems and to address them in a way that is considered to be fair and unbiased. Lastly, in political institution quality and coherence, the measurement emphasis has usually been placed on assuming that regimes that are neither consolidated autocracies nor democracies are likely to be less coherent and to be characterized by poor-quality institutions.

Ascending Major Powers

This chapter examines the ascent of states conventionally accorded great power status in the past century and a half. These states include Italy, Germany, the United States, and Japan. What is clear from the survey of previous ascents is that strong states are not a prerequisite for achieving elite status in world politics. Yet the absence of this institutional capacity may constitute a major domestic constraint. Continued economic growth and resource mobilization hinge on effective state interventions. Thus, problems with state capacity should be expected to hinder the rise of states to great power status. Similarly, once higher status has been achieved, problems with state capacity should be expected to get in the way of operationalizing an elite position in world politics.

Inequality

This chapter examines the state of income inequality in India. A vigorous debate is currently underway in India and abroad about the question of economic inequality, especially in the wake of spectacular economic growth in the aftermath of the country's embrace of liberal economic policies. The debate has focused on whether or not growth should be seen as the principal engine for reducing inequalities. Atul Kohli, a noted political scientist, proffers a third view. He focuses on the shift to more market-oriented policies and their myriad shortcomings. According to Kohli, the persistence of poverty and the growth in inequality stem from the policy choices of a number of regimes, starting in the 1990s, to favor corporate entities at the cost of addressing public and social needs.

The Indian State’s Capacity to Get Things Done

This introductory chapter assesses state capacity in India. There is little question, as many boosters of India's rise have argued, that the Indian state has exhibited considerable ability to tackle diverse challenges since its emergence from the collapse of the British Indian Empire. It has, for the most part, successfully fended off external challenges to its territorial integrity; it has worn down a series of secessionist insurgencies and has managed to cope with the many fissiparous tendencies of ethnic, class, and religious cleavages that some analysts thought would tear the country apart in the 1960s. However, state capacity remains paradoxical in India. India does not possess a weak state, but neither does it have a strong state. Its state capacity falls in between the conventional weak-strong continuum. As a consequence, the Indian state manifests both strengths and weakness, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently.

Defense and Security Policies

This chapter examines defense policies and movements toward acquiring capabilities that will permit India to project its influence over longer distances than has previously been the case. Despite institutional slackness and bureaucratic hurdles, India is acquiring significant military might to cope with a range of threats. It is also developing a power-projection capability, as can be inferred from some of its military acquisitions. Unfortunately, cost overruns, poor results, and persistent deals characterize the vast majority of its domestic military programs. Even its foreign-weapons-acquisition process evinces a process that is extremely cumbrous and unwieldy. Nevertheless, India has managed to suppress, or at least contain, all domestic challenges to its security and territorial integrity.

Grand Strategy

This chapter discusses changes in India's grand strategy over time and weaknesses associated with its future plans. India has long had a grand strategy and a largely stable set of goals. One of its most consistent features has been the quest for great power status. It initially sought to achieve this through the pursuit of an ideational foreign policy. Ideational foreign policies stress leadership in promoting ideas such as nonalignment or third-world solidarity. Subsequently, India's grand strategy adopted a mix of ideational and material approaches in pursuit of those ends. In the wake of the Cold War, it has tilted quite significantly toward acquiring the requisite material capabilities to pursue that goal. Nevertheless, a segment of its policy-making apparatus seems unable and indeed unwilling to completely shed its attachment to some ideational concerns, however atavistic and very possibly counterproductive to its goal of achieving great power status.