The paper locates state-market relationship in India in a historical framework to contextualise the contemporary trend in the state-market dynamics in a globalising India, as both foreign economic and domestic policy is increasingly being influenced by the dynamics of market forces. It argues that while Indian state’s control over land, resources and contracts gives it an overwhelming privilege over the market, it concurrently provides strategic avenues for ‘state capture’ by certain business houses, which at various historical junctures have gained immensely through extension of such privileges, a trend that continues unabated, perhaps even more blatantly in a liberalising India. Yet, such ‘state capture’ remains partial and tenuous as the quest for social-economic justice continues to weigh heavily on the market forces. Simultaneously the democratic and federal polity lends Indian state a fair degree of authority over the market forces. More pertinently, in the imagination of the nation, the state was given and continues to enjoy a privileged and exalted status in general and more particularly vis-à-vis the market forces even when it cedes to and is compromised by the latter in numerous ways. The Indian case thus offers a vital lens to revisit some of the extant theoretical pivots of state-market relationship.
