Class, Politics, and Agrarian Policies in Post-Liberalisation India by Sejuti Das Gupta is a valuable and timely contribution to a political economy analysis of state and agrarian policies in India during the period of neo-liberal economic reforms. That Indian agriculture has slipped into some kind of a persistent crisis, leading to rural distress since the late nineties is something that has been amply written about and recognized. What however happened to the strong erstwhile rural proprietary classes which had emerged after Independence from colonial rule, under economic reforms has remained an interesting question.
The strong big capitalist farmer lobbies which had led the accumulation process under the ‘Green Revolution’ regime were faced with changed circumstances with the whole range of market-friendly economic measures that were introduced in the Indian economy since the early 1990s. This book tries to develop an understanding of the new relations between the agrarian ruling classes and the state or what is the new political settlement that allows the continuation of neoliberal economic policies in spite of the agrarian crisis. This, therefore, goes into the heart of the functioning of a diverse political democracy like India.
Based on a skilful amalgamation of Poulantzas’s concept of ‘relative autonomy’ of the state and Mushtaq Khan’s ‘political settlement’ idea, the author adopts a framework of differentiated classes and their relation with the state, in a broad Marxian tradition. This is useful in answering the central question raised in the book regarding the traditional rural proprietary classes’ response to economic liberalization. The analysis in the book is based on a rich assortment of field-interviews of and group discussions with various stakeholders in agriculture, collected through fieldwork in three States, Chattisgarh, Gujarat and Karnataka.