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‘Watershed’, ‘historic’ ‘epochal’ were used to describe India’s 2014 General Elections. The Bharatiya Janata Party secured the first single party majority in three decades, forming the Government, as the National Democratic Alliance. We argue that the sixteenth Lok Sabha elections and its aftermath constitute a re-alignment, not a clean break with the past, and that this is confirmed by the 2019 General Elections.

This book has been compiled to celebrate the work of Professor Subrata K. Mitra whose scholarship includes a wide spectrum of research topics, writings, and teaching on South Asian politics. Following his early years at Ravenshaw College in Cuttack, Orissa (now Odisha) where he read for a B.A. (honours) in Political Science (1969), he subsequently did his MA in Political Science from Delhi University (1971). Mitra was amongst the first candidates to acquire an M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (1972). Growing up in the extraordinarily dynamic environment of post-independence India where processes of state and nation building were palpable had a deep impact on his academic outlook and interests. This was a period when the foundations of modern Indian politics were being both strengthened and contested, laying the basis for a functional political and administrative system, and a deepening, multiparty democracy.

The politics of microfinance is essential to an understanding both of the success and, the crises of microfinance. It has been argued that the boom of microfinance — while building on the economics of group approaches, which address problems like adverse selection and moral hazard through peer pressure and peer monitoring — cannot be explained without the ideational success of the microfinance movement, nor without the underlying state policies. In the Indian case this is both the “priority sector lending” that fuelled the fast growth of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and the government-supported self-help groups bank linkage program (SHG-BLP). Furthermore, three out of four Indian microfinance crises — including the major 2010 Andhra Pradesh crisis — were political not economic. Certainly, the crises also stemmed from internal management problems within the MFIs that led to problematic incentives and not enough attention given to staff and group capacity building, which in turn led to easy loans, multiple and chain loans and heavy-handed loan recovery methods. However, it is argued in the thesis that ultimately it was a state-market conflict that led to the devastating Andhra crisis, shrinking the state-wide MFI loan portfolio to a tenth and existentially threatening some of the major MFIs. As a result, it is argued that MFIs have to work more actively with the involved political stakeholders at the local, regional, state and federal levels. At the same time, they have to invest more into group building, clients´ agency and establish adequate mechanisms enabling the expression and constructive handling, of complaints and problems. Perception — like trust and reputation — is core to the sustainable success of any bank, and even more so for Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), which operate in the inherently political arena of development. Additionally microfinance is a sector that is often poorly regulated and supervised. MFI operations do not only disrupt local vested interests (like that of moneylenders of all sorts, e.g. the agricultural input selling middlemen, businessman and ground landlords) but also local and regional political interests. Politicians perceived the fast growth of MFIs as “eating” into “their” self-help groups bank linkage program (SHG-BLP). This was seen as threatening either to the genuine success of the SHG-BLP or to the usage of the program for political purposes like vote bank fostering. There are enough influential interest groups who would be happy to cut down to size, the self-declared poverty-fighting heroes, who on top made a profit from their activities. Therefore, public perception and principally, the perception of clients are central. While this study found that allegations regarding strong-armed recollection methods are not unsubstantiated, the perception of specific MFIs differs substantially. In fact, the overall perception is unexpectedly positive — given that a major crisis occurred just three years before the survey of more than 550 individuals, designed for the purpose of this thesis, was conducted. Empowerment is political and multidimensional and a key stated goal of microfinance initiatives. Political, in the sense that it encompasses the struggle of marginalised groups for their political, civil and social rights. Given the argumentation, that microfinance is intrinsically political and that perception determines the long-term success of any bank, MFIs will only be sustainable if their clients see themselves as stakeholders with a strong interest in the political survival of their microfinance loan provider(s). Therefore the thesis argues that MFIs should “invest” in their clients´ agency, in their capabilities to organise themselves and rectify grievances before they can be politically exploited, endangering the MFIs. The implemented multidimensional empowerment index found expectedly that male clients are more empowered than female clients. Furthermore, female clients were found to be more empowered with regard to decision-making than female non-clients. This was the hypothesized expectation, due either to the self-selection of already more empowered women or the positive impact of group-based microfinance on the role of women in the household.

Ownership is the essence of economic citizenship. Beyond actual possession, a sense of personal welfare and proprietorship, or at least the hope of achieving them, constitute a necessary and important complement to being stakeholders in a society. Together with efficacy and legitimacy, these are necessary attributes of political agency. In this chapter we examine the interplay between democra- cy, social opportunity and economic security, drawing upon survey data to ex- plore popular perceptions of India’s new economic policy. The article first situ- ates itself within the context of new theoretical literature on the multi- dimensional nature of poverty and how to measure it, then identifies aggregate indicators of the performance of Indian states and the overall achievements and failings of India in terms of poverty alleviation. In the second half, the article identifies what seems to be the lack of a ‘politics of poverty’ in India and the various cultural, historical, political explanations that have been proffered for this apparent anomaly. Finally, the impact of democracy on poverty reduction is examined through the programmes that have been launched and which aim at creating a level-playing field, but which nevertheless have the potential to de- generate into highly populist measures.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt die Vorgehensweise und die wichtigsten Ergebnisse einer internationalen Finanzplatzstudie vor, die im Jahre 1998 im Auftrag des Center for Financial Studies (Frankfurt am Main) durchgeführt wurde. Ziel dieser Studie war es, aus der Analyse wichtiger Finanzplatzressourcen und den Wechselwirkungen zwischen den unterschiedlichen Ressourcen Rückschlüsse auf Frankfurts Position im internationalen Finanzplatzwettbewerb zu ziehen. Aus ressourcenorientierter Sicht (Resource-Based-View) konnte gezeigt werden, daß der Finanzplatz Frankfurt einerseits größere Wettbewerbsnachteile gegenüber den Finanzzentren New York und London aufweist, die kurz- und mittelfristig kaum aufholbar sind. Andererseits besitzt der Finanzplatz Frankfurt Wettbewerbsvorteile gegenüber den Finanzzentren Paris und Tokyo. Diese sind aus der Sicht Frankfurts kurz- bis mittelfristig verteidigbar. Im Gegensatz zu den Wettbewerbsnachteilen Frankfurts im Vergleich zu den angelsächsischen Finanzplätzen fallen die Wettbewerbsvorteile Frankfurts gegenüber Paris und Tokyo aber deutlich geringer aus.