Adnan Naseemullah

The contested capacity of the Indian state

ABSTRACT State capacity is often seen as simply the resources and capabilities of state organizations to perform those functions that are seen as essential to monopolizing coercion, maintaining legitimacy, and providing key public and social goods. As such, it is often conceptualized as value-neutral and comparable across national contexts. By contrast, this article posits that in the Indian context, state capacity is a politically contested concept, because there is deep and enduring political conflict in India over the appropriate roles and related capabilities of state power. This conflict is grounded in disagreements between those who wish to use the state as a tool to transform society and those who see it as a means to preserve and protect social relations. As a result of this conflict, the state in India is not weak or captured but internally divided and thus disarticulated. This article demonstrates these dynamics through an examination of state intervention in the statist and post-liberalization political economy of India.

Pakistan’s military elite

ABSTRACT The Pakistan Army is a politically important organization, yet its opacity has hindered academic research. We use open sources to construct unique new data on the backgrounds, careers, and post-retirement activities of post-1971 corps commanders and directors-general of Inter-Services Intelligence. We provide evidence of bureaucratic predictability and professionalism while officers are in service. After retirement, we show little involvement in electoral politics but extensive involvement in military-linked corporations, state employment, and other positions of influence. This combination provides Pakistan’s military with an unusual blend of professional discipline internally and political power externally – even when not directly ruling.

The Political Economy of Economic Conservatism in India: From Moral Economy to Pro-Business Nationalism

Economic conservatism in India today is associated with the BJP’s embrace of markets and competition. This article argues that conservatism within the nationalist movement was founded on rejecting both the market and the planned economy, embracing instead ‘moral economy’ principles of economic life guided by social norms, and development founded on small-scale craft production. After independence, conservative nationalists, while acknowledging the need to enhance state power through industrial growth, protected the moral economies of craft-based and agrarian production. But as the Congress party fractured, farmers’ movements asserted interests in market-based agricultural transformation and liberalization shifted the issue space of economic debate, new pro-business conservatives presented a new vision based on enhancing national wealth and strength through capitalist enterprise.

The Contested Capacity of the State in the Indian Economy

How might we understand the capacity of the state to intervene in the economy, in India and elsewhere? I contend that ‘state economic capacity’ is an ‘essentially contested category,’ one in which any definition of the term relies on assumptions on the role of the state that are hotly fought over, such as whether the state is an instrument of economic transformation or the guarantor of extant economic structures. I argue that essentially contested categories are adjudicated not be conceptual clarification but by political conflict, and trace out the conflicts and settlements of the Nehruvian state, and the nature of incoherent state capacity in contemporary India. I offer some tentative suggestions of how we might understand the scope of debate in understanding the roles and capacities of the contemporary Indian state.