Business and Politics in India

Over the last few decades, politics in India has moved steadily in a pro-business direction. This shift has important implications for both government and citizens. In Business and Politics in India, leading scholars of Indian politics have gathered to offer an analytical synthesis of this vast topic. Collectively, they cover the many strategies that businesses have used to exert their newfound power in recent times and organize the book around a few central concerns. They first analyze the nature of business power and how it shapes political change in India. Second, they look at the consequences of business' growing power on some important issue areas-labor, land, urban governance, and the media. Finally, they take account of regional variation and analyze state-business relations. This definitive account offers significant insights into how and why corporations have increased their power in contemporary Indian politics.

Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI) at Sciences Po/ CNRS in Paris. His core research focuses on theories of nationalism and democracy, mobilization of the lower castes and Dalits (ex-untouchables) in India, the Hindu nationalist movement, and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan. Jaffrelot is the author of nine books and has edited twenty-three volumes. Atul Kohli is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His principal research interests are in the areas of comparative political economy with a focus on the developing countries. He is the author of Poverty amid Plenty in the New India (a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2012 on Asia and the Pacific) and State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (winner of the 2005 Charles Levine Award). He has also edited eight volumes and published some sixty articles. Kanta Murali is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include comparative political economy of development, Indian politics, politics of growth and economic policy, state-business relations, state capacity, ethnicity, and economics development, inequality, and labor policy. Her first book, Caste, Class, and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.