Analyze A.R. Desai’s views on India’s path of development. (2018)
The title of A. R. Desai‘s India’s Path of Development: A Marxist Approach (1984) is itself the argument. India after 1947 did not take a third way between capitalism and socialism; it took a capitalist path, laid by the state and described in socialist vocabulary. Analysing it means separating the claim, the mechanisms it rests on, and the evidence since accumulated for and against it.
The claim
For Desai the Constitution is a bourgeois constitution and the leadership that framed it represented the capitalist class; the “socialistic pattern of society” is an illusion, while practice is geared to capitalist lines. The dominant class is the bourgeoisie and the dominant culture is its culture. Indian capitalism was itself a by-product of imperialist capitalism, born in the declining phase of world capitalism — hence dependent, and incapable of the democratic tasks a classical bourgeoisie performed.
The mechanisms
- Planning as subsidy. Public investment in power, steel, transport and credit socialised the costs and risks private capital would not carry. The public sector did not displace the private sector; it underwrote it. The “mixed economy” is thus a statement about who is subsidised.
- The bourgeois–landlord alliance. Zamindari abolition succeeded because removing intermediaries suited the new state. Ceilings and tenancy reform failed through benami transfers, “voluntary surrender” and unrecorded holdings. The rural propertied class was conciliated, not expropriated.
- The Green Revolution as class differentiation. The new technology was scale-neutral but not resource-neutral, and was concentrated in irrigated districts and on capable farmers. Owner-cultivators accumulated, tenants were evicted, labourers gained wages but no assets, and a rich peasantry emerged organised around price and subsidy rather than redistribution.
- Welfare as ideology. The claim that this is a neutral welfare state is, for Desai, the decisive mystification; the state apparatus protects the propertied and suppresses the exploited, which is what Violation of Democratic Rights in India (1986) set out to document.
Testing the thesis after 1991
Much of it has aged well. Liberalisation ended the vocabulary without changing the direction; contract workers now form 42% of organised manufacturing employment; the four labour codes, in force from 21 November 2025, consolidate twenty-nine statutes while raising the thresholds at which protections apply; and the top 1% holds 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth, the highest concentration since 1922.
Yet the prediction of class polarisation has failed. The workforce has not proletarianised: 56.2% remain self-employed and 43% are still in agriculture. The state Desai called purely bourgeois also built the largest transfer programmes in the world — free foodgrain for 81.35 crore people for five years from January 2024 — and an employment guarantee. Mobilisation, meanwhile, runs through caste and region, and the farmers’ movement that forced the repeal of the farm laws in November 2021 was led by the propertied peasantry seeking a larger share, exactly as Desai described agrarian struggle after independence, but not towards socialism.
Conclusion
Desai’s account of the direction of Indian development has been substantially confirmed; his account of its destination has not. What he supplied was less a prophecy than a durable test — read development by who appropriates the surplus and who is prevented from contesting it.