THE GENTLE LEVIATHAN: WELFARE AND THE INDIAN STATE 19 political community. The challenge to the welfare state issued by libertarian economists and political philosophers in the last two decades has sought to displace this conception of the human person and to restore to the core of liberalism that which is most central to it, viz., individual freedom and rights, both of which are seen to be-endangered by welfare philosophies and the welfare state. The critique of the welfare state in the west has thus both an economic and a moral dimension, with strong links between the two. The economic component, as is well known, centred on the argument of inefficiency, in turn fuelling arguments of overloaded government. The moral component was premised on the claim of inviolable individual rights and the illegitimacy of state intervention. In this perspective, redistributive initiatives by the state are morally unacceptable constraints on individual freedom. For Nozick, to be forced—through redistributive measures like taxation—to contribute to the welfare of others, is on par with forced labour. It is violative of the right of individuals to the product of their labour, and is tantamount to giving some people property rights in others. The first and singular virtue of social institutions being to protect the inviolable, inalienable and impresciptible rights of individuals,, this function is best performed by the minimal, night-watchman state of classical Lockean liberalism.1 Built on identical moral foundations, and combined with a critique of inefficiency, is Murray Rothbard's anarcho-libertarian attack on welfare rights and claims—in an argument that bears a strong resemblance to that encountered in the Famine Relief Codes of British India—as encouraging idleness and dependence on the largesse of the state and as undermining freedom and voluntary action for all members of society.2 In the Indian context, the arguments for the rolling back of the state have generally echoed a variant of the efficiency argument. The critique of the public sector, for instance, has primarily targeted its inefficiency and wastefulness. Not only, it is argued, do the benefits of welfare schemes not reach their intended beneficiaries, but the concern for social justice has itself led to faulty economic and planning policies, to which may be attributed the dismal failure of the project of economic development. Politically, this argument fuels the charge that states entrusted with welfare functions tend to become devouring monsters in their obsessive drive to accumulate power, a desire that increases in direct proportion to the state's failure to deliver its impossible promise of providing for the material well-being of its citizens.3 The second, moral aspect of the neo-liberal critique of the welfare state in the west has been altogether absent in the Indian context. This paper argues that rights-claims have not been a component of the neo-liberal agenda in India, not least because rights have never been central to the philosophy of welfare that underpins the welfarist