Malignant Growth

This book argues that the ideology of high growth which has been adopted as the dogma by successive governments at the centre and states are excluding the poor, disenfranchising them from the growth process and destroying their livelihood without creating alternative jobs. This process has distorted parliamentary democracy and reduced it to a level of no choice. The polity's inbuilt insensitivity to poverty and rising inequality has in recent years turned into arrogant defiance of the poor and is now turning into an assault on them, dispossessing them of their land and livelihood, community and culture. Of late, this process is increasingly assuming the form of narrow jingoistic majoritarianism. But it is not all that new as a streak of this narrowness could be seen present in the mainstream nationalism that took shape around the anti-colonial struggle and continued through the course of the post-Independence development process. The book also outlines a proposition to rethink development, democracy and also nationalism.