Finally, no other state in the world has as much experience handling protests running into the thousands as the Indian state. Yet no other state refuses to learn from its experience. The two important lessons are: if you let resentments simmer, they will come home to roost. There is a kind of political laziness where we refuse to defuse agitations when it is still possible to do so. It is foolish to expect that the deployment of police power is a substitute for political dexterity. The second is that the organisation of our law and order machinery is still such that its deployment inevitably leads to deaths, whether in Nandigram or Dausa. Such incidents always cast doubt on the state’s capacity to handle large-scale social protest.

Unfortunately there is no sign that any political party will opt for a new paradigm of social justice. Both the Congress and the BJP in Rajasthan have played the same game. But conflicts of this kind — like that between MBCs and OBCs, or Malas and Maddigas in Andhra — have the potential to escalate all over the country. ‘Shining India’ needs a politics of inclusion. Unfortunately what passes as the politics of inclusion is a series of involuted collective narcissisms that has lost touch with a concept of shared citizenship.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi