“The roots of India’s growing problems of governability are more political than socioeconomic, that is, they are located in India’s political structure.” Discuss. (1996)
The statement restates the central thesis of Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (1990). By governability Kohli meant the state’s capacity to pursue coherent policy while accommodating competing demands. Surveying the late 1960s to the late 1980s, he argued that poverty and social heterogeneity were constants; what changed was the political structure that processed them.
The argument unpacked
Kohli adapts Samuel Huntington (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968) — disorder follows when participation outruns institutionalisation — but places the failure on the institutional side.
- Deinstitutionalisation of the Congress under Indira Gandhi: intra-party elections lapsed, Chief Ministers were chosen in Delhi, and populist appeals such as Garibi Hatao (1971) bypassed the organisation.
- Weak, fragmented parties that could neither aggregate interests nor replace Congress.
- Politicised civil and police services, whose postings rewarded loyalty and whose capacity to implement declined.
- Unmediated mobilisation: leaders activated caste, religious and regional identities without channels to absorb them, so conflict spilled into violence — Punjab and Assam in the 1980s.
Personal rule → hollowed parties → politicised administration → mobilisation without mediation → violence and policy drift.
His comparative evidence supports the claim: in The State and Poverty in India (1987) a disciplined Left Front in West Bengal did more for the rural poor through tenancy reform than loosely organised regimes elsewhere.
Critiques
- Pranab Bardhan (The Political Economy of Development in India, 1984) traces the problem to a coalition of dominant proprietary classes — industrialists, rich farmers, professionals — whose claims turned public investment into subsidies; institutional decay is then a symptom of class stalemate.
- Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) describe a “demand polity” in which organised students, farmers and workers overload the state — a demand-side account.
- Yogendra Yadav‘s “second democratic upsurge” reads lower-caste mobilisation as democratic deepening, not a governability crisis.
- The resilience literature — Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav (eds.), Rethinking Public Institutions in India (2017) — finds institutions uneven rather than collapsing, with the Election Commission and Reserve Bank as islands of capacity; Lant Pritchett‘s “flailing state” locates weakness in the limbs, not the head.
- Politics and society are not separable: institutions decay partly because social cleavages reward leaders who erode them.
Position and the present
The thesis holds in qualified form. Society supplies the demands; the political structure decides whether they become crises.
- Governability improved where political capacity was rebuilt — a disciplined, cadre-based ruling party after 2014 and centralised delivery through DBT and GST.
- Yet political handling still determines outcomes: Manipur‘s ethnic violence from May 2023 festered until President’s Rule (February 2025–February 2026).
- Deliberative institutions keep weakening — in the Monsoon Session 2026 the Lok Sabha functioned for 15% of scheduled time — and the 2024 coalition shows personalised dominance now bargaining with allies.
Conclusion
Kohli was right that India’s governability problems are primarily political, though not exclusively so: socioeconomic change generates the pressure, but whether it is absorbed or turns destructive depends on parties, bureaucracy and leadership. The remedy therefore lies in re-institutionalisation rather than in waiting for development.