126 SOCIAL SCIENTIST protagonists involved preclude collusive action to maximize gains from collective control of the state. Indeed what we are faced with is a rather disparate coalition where conflicts of interest (over access to educational privileges, licensing grants, financial subsidies) increasingly come out into the open—witness Sharad Joshi's rich farmer movement supporting 'Bharaf versus 'India'. Thus the dominant class, far from being a homogeneous entity (as in some advanced capitalist countries) is here seen as riven by intra-class conflicts. What this leads to ultimately is a struggle amongst these various factions to gain control of key social resources whereby one faction can advance its interests over the others. This jockeying involves the manipulation of the whole paraphernalia of the state power, from changing the tax structure, to cornering industrial permits and directing the flow of public financial transactions. It is at this stage that the argument is closed, for Bardhan notes that despite an impressive record of resource mobilization (through indirect taxation and the transfer of savings from the household sector) the bulk of these resources has been frittered away in current expenditures, leaving insufficient surplus to finance the ambitious plan targets in infrastructural investment programmes, such as transport, coal power and irrigation. Why ? Largely because "when diverse elements of the loose and uneasy coalition of the dominant proprietary classes pull in different direction, and when none of them is individually strong enough to dominate the process of resource allocation, one predictable outcome is the proliferation of subsidies and grants to placate all of them, with the consequent reduction in available surplus for public capital formation" (p. 61) In sum the Indian economy has become an elaborate network of patronage and subsidies in which the hetrogeneous proprietary classes described above fight and bargain for their share in the spoils of the system. Under these circumstances, the needed level of public investment simply cannot be sustained, since so many resources have to be wasted on the spoils economy. It is precisely this "pervading atmosphere of the politics of patronage" that also gets reflected in the high capital-output ratio and low capacity utilization of the public sector, noted above as a characteristic feature of Indian industrial performance since the mid-sixties. Such "compulsions of clientelist pork barrel politics arising from the nature of the polity and its interrelationships with the structures of civil society" (p. 71) contribute to explaining then not only the nature of the economic slowdown that we have witnessed over the last twenty years but also have, as Bardhan notes in a concluing chapter, implications for the future of the Indian polity : whereas the nature of class balance and hetrogeneity may accommodate a more democratic style of politics than in other developing societies, economic stagnation has a tendency to generate in time a political legitimation crisis. As the hitherto subordinate classes become more assertive in their demands for slices of the cake, a§