Since the early 1990s, a lot has been written on the changing nature of welfare state &its replacement with the market economy. For example, in India, liberalization has been considered a “crucial turning point” in economic growth story, a great transformation of political economy, & an elite revolt. In the wake of the expansion of global capitalism, scholarship has explored transformations in the welfare state, reshaping of institutions, moral principles,& emergent forms of political economy. In doing so, scholarship has delved into paradoxical growth of state welfare programs; states’ dealing with poor; how inherent inequalities & disparities of global capitalism widen existing gaps; how new system replaces dominant block politics with policies favoring growth of global capitalism; and, how transforming state redistributes “power, wealth & status” linking it with rights, equality, freedom, citizenship & subjectivity. However, scholarship remains engrossed with the elite, the rural poor, urban slum dwellers & the disadvantaged. For the scholars, it seems, state & market occupy disparate & discrete domains and don’t mutate to form a state market.
This panel aims to expand the idea of the twin movement which attends to the formation of state-market & how the non-elite middle-class deal with reducing welfare coverage that continuously pushes them out of the welfare net &simultaneously, exposes them to market processes. The idea of twin movement revises Polyanian double movement & carefully traps people’s situatedness where state & market simultaneously empower & enfeeble people, produce desires &dangers, aspirations & failures, protection & freedom, possibilities & impossibilities.
This panel aims to engage with political economic transformations in post-liberal phase in India & other countries through following issues pertinent to non-elite middle class:
• social & economic vulnerabilities
• interactions with state institutions & market processes for services
• the ideas of democracy in post-liberalization phase
