Abstract
The success of India’s democracy has evoked widespread interest. It is rightly regarded as a postcolonial success story—a functioning democracy that has held free and fair elections and managed to remain pluralist and inclusive. Indian democracy has offered huge opportunities to confront and address the challenges on the development front through policies and practices evolved in the past six decades. Its numerous achievements notwithstanding, the failure to remove the division between the privileged and the rest is largely responsible for the inability to extend the reach of India’s economic and social development. The persistence of inequalities of various kinds is a major contributory factor in holding back the full potential of democratic politics. What follows is not a comprehensive account or stocktaking of India’s democratic experience and its impact on inequalities and vice versa. This lecture attempts to situate issues of inequality in the wider context of political democracy to explore the interaction between the two processes. It concludes with a brief discussion on the emerging relationship between democracy and inequality in the contemporary moment.
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