Emerging Regimes of Market Citizenship: The Politics of Social Policy in Contemporary India

Abstract

This chapter analyses contestations over citizenship in contemporary India with a focus on how these struggles manifest in debates over social policy. It argues that in recent years, civil society campaigns have sought to appropriate and reconfigure neoliberal concepts of accountability, localisation and participation to further a regime of social citizenship in India. Successive governments, headed by two different political parties, however, have reappropriated these ideas to push varied regimes of ‘market citizenship’ which seek to reconcile social policy with market reform. The chapter makes these arguments by drawing on a relational conception of the state as the outcome of the balance of power between different social forces which act through the state’s institutional ensemble and by analysing policy documents and debates on social policy. The chapter contributes to literature on citizenship in India, civil society and the regulatory state, and welfare policy in a time of market reform.