20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST initiatives of the Indian state. Since welfare is not expressed in the language of rights, its abandonment could arguably be a relatively simple matter, as there are neither legal/constitutional nor moral or political criteria defining the claimants of welfare rights. A right that has never been conferred is self-evidently difficult to claim or defend. The question of rights has thus been altogether external to the debate, not only in the form of a libertarian notion of rights, strictly ruling out state interventionism, but also in the possible form of a radical notion of social rights in which claims to welfare may conceivably be grounded. The Indian state, it is suggested, may be more appropriately characterised as an interventionist rather than as a welfare state. Interventionism can subsume a welfarist orientation, but being a vastly more encompassing concept, suggests the legitimacy of state intervention for a variety of tasks, not all of which need be justified in terms of welfare objectives. The primary purpose of interventionism, and indeed its inspiring and guiding force, was developmentalist. This was not a state that self-consciously and deliberately took on the responsibility of providing for its citizens, in clearly defined areas which bore some relationship to the idea of needs, especially basic needs. The paramount project of the posi-colonial Indian state was the project of modernisation, variously expressed in different spheres: from the impulse to secularise society to the choice of development strategy. The "growth with equity" formula seemed to suggest that growth or development was an essential precondition for social justice, for a state which cannot afford to provide for the basic needs of its citizens, much less to ensure equality between them, can hardly afford to be a welfare state. Growth, however, was not a purely instrumental goal, on the success of which the telos of equity was predicated. It was also a telos unto itself. In this sense, the placing of planning outside the domain of politics, as Partha Chatterjee has argued,4 is paralleled by the placing of a rather limited notion of welfare too outside that domain, as an incontestable common good, with huge ethical appeal besides. That this ethical appeal could very easily translate into political support and legitimacy was, of course, not unimportant. It is worth noting, further, that the developmental initiatives of this interventionist state were largely directed to the so-called modern, dynamic, industrial sector. Its welfarist initiatives, on the other hand, were directed substantially towards the redressal of inequalities generated not by the market, but stemming from inequalities in the ownership and use of land. In relation to the problem of rural development, another contradiction is apparent in the strategy of development planning even in the early years after independence, when the economic component of development—defined purely in terms of economic growth—was privileged over its social and