The previous chapter showed how by the interwar years a perception emerged of an affinity between resource development, the dual mandate, Taylorism, and civil society. This chapter covers a longer period of time, through the 1960s, a period when modernization became the key doctrine of development. Development was not seen anymore in terms of increased resource production by colonies, but as an opportunity for these colonies to gain some autonomy if not outright independence. They would do so by importing technology and acquiring technical skills to transform their societies. But committing to this changed doctrine of development also required a change in the ways in which management and civil society were understood. Management was now considered as not solely techniques to increase production but as a means to acquire modernity—in a sense, to enhance technical capacities in human beings. Civil society organizations, as agents of development, now became sites for practicing and refining these management ideas. (Though the UN had defined the term “NGO” in Article 71 of its charter in 1945, it would be much later that these organizations would acquire that label, as explained in Chapter 6.)

Both this chapter and the one that follows study the regime of state capitalism. Thanks to aid commitments from Northern countries, and through their Southern alliances, the rivalry and uncertainty of the regime of colonial resource development was replaced by an uneasy stalemate between the US and the Soviet Union. Northern industrial expansion met growing consumer demand from the North and the South, while the emphasis on technical education fed directly into the growth of factories, corporate offices, and allied specializations in marketing, public relations, and advertising. Underpinning the stability that enabled corporate expansion were states willing to intervene.

The doctrine of modernization spanned a period that stretches from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s. This chapter classifies this period into three stages—proto-modernization from 1948 to 1960, apogee from 1961 to 1968, and decline from 1969 to 1974. It is hard to pin dates to what is evidently a broad characterization of a historical period. But some key climacterics are: US President Truman's inaugural address in 1948, the “decade of development” declared at US President Kennedy's inauguration in 1960, the Tet offensive launched by the Viet Cong in 1968 and the 1974 oil shock.

In this powerful poem titled ‘Sarmayadari’ (Capitalism), progressive poet Asrarul Haq Majaz repeatedly invokes the tropes of ‘monstrosity’ to portray how capitalism sucks the blood of, strangulates, and walks on the bodies of the poor and builds with their bones the chariots of the rich. Capital devours human beings and nature in an endless drive for profits. This insatiable drive for profiteering in recent times has been particularly intensified by finance capital. We live in times when bankers and the financial elite, who are in unprecedented control of the capitalist world, take the monstrosity of capitalism to new levels (Hudson, 2015; Lapavitsas, 2013).

Never in the history of humankind has such a tiny financial elite exercised so much control over the fate of humanity and caused so much mass destruction. Phillips (2018: 31) describes how the transnational capitalist class of bankers and corporate managers speculates on human lives and profits from deathworlds,

Be it multinational corporations like Unilever, S. C. Johnson and Sons, or Procter and Gamble looking for the next growth opportunity; national governments searching for solutions to the intractable issue of poverty; non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam working with poorer communities around the world; international organizations like the United Nations Development Programme or the World Bank seeking to mitigate economic and social deprivation in the developing world – market-based solutions to poverty eradication has emerged as a viable alternative for dealing with the challenge of global poverty (Prahalad, 2006; Karnani, 2007; Hart, 2005; Roy 2010). In recent years, along with microenterprise, asset-building, social enterprise, the bottom- or base-of-the-pyramid approach has emerged at the centre of business–poverty discourses (Conney and Shanks, 2010). Propounded by C. K. Prahalad (1941–2010), management professor and consultant (along with co-author Stuart Hart, 2002), the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) approach popularized the idea of large private-sector participation in poverty alleviation – a move that aimed to reconstitute the relationship between the economic calculus of profit-making with the more socially committed goals of poverty eradication. In recent years, I have engaged with the BOP proposition from a conceptual and theoretical standpoint to illuminate what has, by and large, remained undiscussed and unremarked in the BOP scholarship, that is, the dominant assumptions and presuppositions that underwrite the BOP programmatic (Chatterjee, 2014; 2016). In the present chapter, I continue my critical engagement with the BOP proposition by examining how and to what effect the state is reimagined and reconfigured within its horizon of thinking. Where, at one level, the chapter reflects upon, clarifies, and critiques the BOP proposition insofar as the question of state is concerned, at another level, using the BOP programme as a vantage point, it offers insights into the generalized condition of the state under neoliberal capitalism.

The present chapter is based on a close reading of the BOP proposition (among others, Prahalad, 2006; Prahalad and Hart, 2002; and Hammond and Prahalad, 2004).

As India proceeds further into its eighth decade after independence, it is evidently deeply troubled. Every day the news channels shout out terrifying, gut-wrenching issues. Religious, racial, and caste hatred spawn a spate of killings and maiming, the state complicit in its eerie silence if not tacit encouragement. Air pollution epidemics affect millions. Plastics in rivers and lakes and cow's bellies, and pesticides in our food. No let-up in gender violence, domestic and elsewhere, with the rape and murder of little girls only the shocking tip of the iceberg. Adivasis and fishers and farmers and pastoralists, deliberately forgotten as the relics of the past, being displaced en masse for mines and industries and highways and amusement parks (the amusement being, of course, a prerogative of the rich). Financial scandals in which the swindling of hundreds of crores is now routine, almost boring, with how and where the swindler has escaped to becoming a point of greater interest. Species of wildlife being wiped out, and increasingly unpredictable climatic patterns. Politicians are reducing the world's largest elections (the latest in the summer of 2019) to farcical, bitter slanging matches devoid of the substance that political debates should be about. And the latest twist, the unprecedented slap in humanity's face by a tiny virus, with its own horrific consequences to the health and livelihoods of millions of Indians.

It is as if all the fundamental ills of our society were converging: caste, gender, and race-based oppressions coming to us from the past, capitalist class exploitation and state-sponsored violence against communities (in the name of ‘development’) as more recent additions, and, underlying these, an increasing alienation from the rest of nature. These ills do not necessarily locate themselves in the same set of oppressive people, nor are the oppressed always the same. Indeed, the status of ‘being oppressed’ and ‘being an oppressor’ sometimes merges confusingly into each other in the same individual or group. Therefore, it is more meaningful to locate the structures of power domination and not just individuals who currently control those structures to understand, challenge, and find alternatives to these structures and their various manifestations.

This chapter discusses People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), an open-source digital archive and a living journal dedicated to rural India. We situate PARI within the broader canvas of transformations in Indian media, especially since the 1990s. This transformation, marked by corporatization and commodification of media houses, has had a pronounced degrading effect on representations of the rural poor. Indeed, any meaningful representation of rural India is erased from the press and from deliberative democratic spaces in India. We trace how PARI attends to this gaping wound in Indian democracy by enabling rich and plural representations of and by the subaltern. In so doing, PARI partially resurrects this crumbling fourth pillar of democracy and creates an alternative imagination.

Several scholars have discussed the perverse effects of neoliberal tendencies on the structure and logic of media and journalism in India (Guha Thakurta, 2014; Guha Thakurta and Chaturvedi, 2012; Mudgal, 2011, 2015). While there is consensus among the experts and researchers working on rural India that the majority of the population is going through prolonged and severe distress (Chandra, 2010; Patnaik, 2013; Sainath, 2011), the crises, issues, and challenges of rural India are almost absent in India's leading newspapers (Mudgal, 2011). Moreover, media houses have removed or reduced the number of rural correspondents. In its present neoliberal logic, the media is more interested in covering breaking news to increase its viewership than covering underlying structural processes of inequality and poverty. Consider how Tamil Nadu's farmers travelled to New Delhi and adopted extreme measures, such as carrying skulls of farmers who had committed suicide, in order to draw some attention to their plight from the ruling classes. Similarly, the 165-kilometre ‘Long March’ by Maharashtra's farmers remained unreported until it reached Mumbai. These instances provide a glimpse of the extraordinary crises in large swathes of India (see also Khare and Varman, 2016, 2017; Varman and Vikas, 2007). The vast majority of those residing in rural India are silenced and excluded in the already shrinking democratic sphere.

In this chapter, we discuss the role of media in a democracy and the repercussions when the media, an important institution of democracy, is driven by the neoliberal agenda.

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is one of the most important public universities in India and is a site for nurturing critical thought and scholarship. On 9 February 2016, some students had organized a meeting in JNU to protest against the hanging of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist (The Hindu, 2016). Afzal Guru was a Kashmiri who was awarded the death sentence after being convicted of conspiracy to attack the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001 (Tripathi, 2013). The Indian Supreme Court upheld his death sentence, and he was subsequently hanged on 9 February 2013. Several human rights organizations, activists, and lawyers alleged that Afzal Guru was denied a fair trial, and the police extracted his confessions under duress and torture (Roy, 2013). On the third death anniversary of Afzal Guru, a group of students in JNU had organized a cultural program to voice their dissent against his judicial killing and express their solidarity with the struggle of Kashmiri people (The Hindu, 2016). Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the ruling Hindu nationalist political formation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), protested against the programme organized by the JNU students (Sen, 2016).

Some news channels with leanings towards the BJP's Hindu nationalist politics whipped up a frenzy by repeatedly telecasting the ABVP's allegation that JNU students had shouted anti-national slogans during the protests on 9 February 2016 (Varadarajan, 2016). Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister of India, tweeted that the students who organized the protest on 9 February 2016 had connections with terror organizations in Pakistan (Sen, 2016). Later, forensic evidence raised serious questions about the veracity of the video footage showing JNU students shouting anti-national slogans and the basis of the Home Minister's tweet. The Home Minister had relied on a parody Twitter account, which resembled the name of a Pakistani terrorist, Hafiz Saeed (Varadarajan, 2016). Despite lack of concrete evidence, the Delhi Police, which functions under the administrative control of the Union Home Ministry, arrested Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the JNU Student's Union and charged him with sedition (The Hindu, 2016).

JNU students, academics from all over the world, civil society organizations, and opposition political parties protested against Kanhaiya Kumar's arrest, even as Kumar himself denied raising any anti-national slogans (Varadarajan, 2016).