This book is an attempt to understand the nature of India's political democracy and its implicatons for persistence of poverty and the failure in securing human well-being for all, in spite of five decades of freedom. Policies of positive discrimination have surely contributed to making India's democratic experiment dynamic, throwing up political leaders from all social groups, and expanding and broadening the circle of 'elites' or the powerful in society. However, the political mobilisation of the poor has as yet not translated into a rejection of hierarchial hegemonies that disregards and overlooks poor peoples's enlightenments to basic human well-being as acess to education, health, livelihood, food and social security, by seeing human development and social oppurtunities as an inalienable, fundamental, human right of each and every individual.
