Development as Political Strategy: Why Davos Matters for Indian Politics More Than We Think

At first glance, the announced participation of record ten Indian state governments at the upcoming World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos (19-23 January) would look like a familiar investment-attracting exercise—chief ministers, ministers, and senior bureaucrats; and panels, meetings, and memorandums.

Yet this moment deserves closer scrutiny.

What makes it analytically significant is not that Indian states are seeking investment abroad, but that even laggard and structurally constrained states like Jharkhand, Kerala, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh now feel compelled to compete openly for capital, jobs, and enterprise.

States do not collectively change behaviour unless political incentives change. The Davos rush is therefore not merely an economic phenomenon. It, I argue, is a signal of a deeper transformation underway in India’s political sociology.

Beyond Identity Arithmetic in Political Sociology

For decades, state-level politics in India has been interpreted primarily through the lens of identity arithmetic:

Caste consolidation

Ethnic mobilisation

Patronage-based vote banks

Grievance-driven coalitions

These logics have not disappeared. Nor would they, in a society as complex as India’s.

What appears to be changing, however, is their relative centrality.

Identity is increasingly insufficient on its own as a basis for durable political legitimacy. Governments are being judged—unevenly but increasingly—on their ability to expand industry, enterprise, and employment.

This is where the politics of development emerges — not as a slogan, but as a structural competitor to narrow identity-first politics.

Layer One: Infrastructure, Mass Mobility and the Expansion of Political Horizons

The first layer of this shift is mass mobility, and it must be understood in three dimensions:

Inter-state mobility

Intra-state rural–urban mobility

Intra-state inter-regional mobility

Over the past decade under the current Central government:

Road and rail infrastructure have vastly expanded

Transport services have improved in quality, frequency, and reliability

Vehicle ownership has surged to record levels

Paid mobility (especially taxis and cabs) has proliferated

In parallel with inter-state migration, intra-state mobility—particularly rural–urban movement and inter-regional travel within states—has expanded sharply, reshaping political behaviour in quieter but equally consequential ways. 

Rural populations now move more frequently to district headquarters, urban centres, industrial clusters, and education or healthcare hubs, often within the same state. This everyday movement exposes citizens to visible differences in governance quality, economic opportunity, service delivery, and administrative competence across regions. 

Such comparison is politically corrosive to enclosure: when voters can observe that life is organised differently in the next district or city, it becomes harder for local leaders to normalise stagnation or shield failure behind narrow identity mobilisation. 

Intra-state mobility, therefore, expands political horizons by converting governance from an abstract promise into a lived, comparable experience—weakening the capacity of petty political elites to keep electorates boxed into static identity narratives.

Mobility and the Davos Signal

The Davos investment-seeking rush intersects directly with this mobility layer. State governments increasingly understand that:

A more mobile population is a more comparative population

Citizens judge states relative to each other

Youth evaluate futures spatially, not sentimentally

Investment-seeking, therefore, becomes a political response to mobile electorates. Davos is not only about attracting capital—it is about signalling to voters that the state intends to compete, catch up, and move forward.

Maharashtra’s Civic Elections: Delivery as Political Proof

This changing political sociology was visible earlier—and more starkly—in the Maharashtra municipal corporation elections. Civic elections strip politics of:

National ideology

Security narratives

Charismatic leadership

What remains is pure governance performance:

Roads and drainage

Water and waste management

Transport and public amenities

Visibility of delivery

The Maharashtra results suggested a clear trend: urban voters increasingly evaluate politics through delivery and institutional competence rather than lineage and surname alone. Identity did not disappear—but it was downgraded.

Municipal elections, thus, acted as a low-noise laboratory, revealing how voters behave when politics is reduced to systems and services. This urban logic increasingly diffuses outward as intra-state mobility expands.

Layer Two: Investment, Employment, and Entrepreneurship as Political Currency

The second layer reshaping political sociology is the growing electoral salience of employment and economic participation.

Investment Competition as Electoral Signalling

That so many states—industrially strong and weak alike—are competing for investments at Davos reflects a shared recognition:

Youth unemployment is politically dangerous

Out-migration is electorally costly

Being perceived as “non-aspirational” is no longer viable

When investment announcements translate into permanent jobs, they:

Signal seriousness and direction

Shift voter expectations

Create pressure for administrative delivery

Davos, in this sense, is as much about domestic political credibility as it is about foreign capital.

Return Migration and the Promise of “Bringing Our Youth Back”

A particularly important element of this investment-and-jobs narrative is the explicit promise of bringing back “our youth” from other states. This is not merely emotive rhetoric; it reflects a genuine alignment between state intent and individual aspiration.

On the demand side, state governments now recognise that the sustained out-migration of educated and semi-skilled youth represents both an economic drain and a political liability. Investment promotion, industrial clusters, IT parks, and startup ecosystems are framed not only as job creators, but as mechanisms to bring back talent and stabilise the state’s social fabric.

On the supply side, the promise holds real credibility. A significant number of blue-collar and white-collar workers (I personally know a few) currently working in cities such as Bengaluru, Noida, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune, etc display a clear preference for returning to their home states if comparable opportunities emerge. Proximity to family, lower living costs, cultural familiarity, and quality-of-life considerations matter, once basic professional aspirations are met. Migration, increasingly, is viewed as a phase rather than a permanent exit.

Politically, this matters because return migration reframes development as dignity restoration. Employment generation ceases to be merely about numbers and becomes about enabling citizens to imagine a future without leaving home. This further weakens narrow identity mobilisation by replacing grievance with possibility and by tying individual life trajectories directly to state performance.

Entrepreneurship, Women, and the Reconfiguration of Political Agency

Alongside large-scale investment, governments—particularly BJP-led administrations—are aggressively promoting micro-entrepreneurship, especially among women. Schemes such as SHG promotion programs (or Lakhpati Didi Yojanas) and individual seed-grant and concessional-credit programs are often analysed narrowly as welfare. In political sociology terms, they do something more consequential. They:

Create a producer identity

Introduce a vocabulary of capital, turnover, and growth

Reposition women as economic actors rather than dependents

Build constituencies invested in stability and continuity

Mass-scale productive employment and entrepreneurship dilute the intensity of caste and ethnic voting considerations, not by erasing identity, but by overlaying it with economic agency.

Bihar: The Stress Test for Development Politics

If Maharashtra represents the urban frontier of this shift, Bihar represents its most demanding test case.

Bihar is:

Economically under-developed

Historically caste-ridden in political mobilisation

Deeply shaped by out-migration

Yet its electorate delivered a decisive mandate to the NDA, outperforming most exit polls. This does not imply caste ceased to matter. It implies that caste has ceased to be decisive on its own.

Infrastructure expansion, welfare delivery credibility, employment signalling, and aspirational narratives appear to have cut across identity blocs. Bihar demonstrates that development-oriented politics can operate even in the most identity-dense environments when material conditions and expectations shift.

Development Does Not Eliminate Identity—It Reconstructs It

A crucial clarification is necessary: No political system functions without identity. But the nature of identity is changing. What is emerging—visible in Davos rush, Maharashtra’s civic voting, and Bihar’s mandate—is the rise of state-based civic identities, like:

Maharashtrian rather than Marathi vs Konkani

Uttarakhandi rather than Garhwali vs Kumaoni

Broader state-based Assamese identity rather than narrow language-based Assamese identity 

Broader Bihari identity rather than narrow caste identities 

These are aggregation identities—broader, performance-linked, and economically compatible.

Development politics does not abolish identity. It pushes identity toward civic, state-level belonging that can build and sustain economic growth.

Caveats and Limits

This transformation, however, must not be overstated, for it has limitations:-

The shift is uneven: Youth, women, and mobile populations lead it; older, land-anchored groups lag.

Shocks can reverse gains: Prolonged jobless growth, inflation, or welfare withdrawal can reactivate identity-first mobilisation.

Investment signalling without delivery has consequences: Davos optics must eventually translate into jobs, or political credibility will erode.

Civic identity can slide into exclusion: If poorly managed, state pride can harden into new forms of political exclusion.

This transformation, therefore, is not a destiny, but a directional change.

A Moment of Political Choice

Over the next couple of months, four to five state elections are scheduled.

Political parties should read the signals carefully.

The lesson is not that identity politics is obsolete. The lesson is that identity-first politics is losing its monopoly.

Parties that wish to capture or retain power must increasingly compete on the politics of development:

On mobility and infrastructure

On employment and entrepreneurship

On institutional credibility and delivery

Those that retreat exclusively into narrow identity mobilisation may still win pockets—but risk losing the broader trajectory.

Conclusion: A Transformational Political Sociology

India is not becoming 'post-identity'. India is becoming "post-identity-first".

The Davos rush by Indian states is not merely an economic spectacle. It is a political admission: legitimacy increasingly flows from investment, industry, enterprise, and employment.

The politics of development is not wiping out identity politics. It is elbowing it aside, constraining it, and reshaping it—while simultaneously giving rise to broader, state-based civic identities.

This is the quiet but consequential transformation now underway in India’s political sociology.