ABSTRACT
Introduction The theory of Intermediate Classes and Regimes was originally developed by Kalecki (1967) in a general way as being relevant to many developing countries, recognised as being relevant to India by Raj (1973), fiercely contested by Namboodiripad (1973) and Byres (1997), but also refined as applied to conditions of stagnation by Jha (1980). This chapter seeks to explore the relevance of Intermediate Classes and Regimes for a very different political and economic context, that of liberalisation after 1991. As a piece of class-based political economy, this chapter marks an unusual break with recent scholarship. Class analysis has declined significantly both in India and in other major centres of academia over the past two decades (Chibber 2006). This chapter also continues a process of interrogation between more recent work, the story of India’s Intermediate Classes theorised at the macro level, (McCartney and Harriss-White 2000) and local field research (Basile and Harriss-White 1999). This chapter can be seen as a macro response to HarrissWhite (2003) and as a follow-up to a number of suggestions in McCartney and Harriss-White (2000) that the Intermediate Classes were engaged in a fighting retreat during the 1990s grouped around the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its Swadeshi guise. In this last view, globalisation and marketisation had been unleashed by economic liberalisation beginning in the mid-1980s and were undermining the allocation of resources as politically driven by the Intermediate Classes. Returning to the micro in Harriss-White (2003), this hypothesis was found to be premature. The Intermediate Classes in a ‘liberalised’ era were found to ‘still constitute a powerful social structure of accumulation’. Despite the disappearance of the preconditions for an Intermediate Regime as theorised by Kalecki, the Intermediate Classes are still a potent force in the local economy. This chapter is organised as follows. The first section outlines the theory of the Intermediate Regime and Intermediate Classes. The second section examines what the theory has attempted to explain. The third section looks at the relation between big and small or intermediate business capital from a theoretical perspective, and the fourth section discusses the reasons for the continued success of the latter. The fifth section looks at the changing nature of the rural Intermedi-
ate Classes. The sixth section explores the changing role of alternative alliances, particularly the middle classes and caste groups. The final section concludes by arguing that although the political economy of India became more fragmented during the 1990s, the Intermediate Classes still represent a powerful social structure of accumulation.
