Given India’s well-established democracy, one might expect that, sooner rather than later, the poor majority will express its electoral will, successfully tilting the Indian state in a pro-poor direction. This is not all that likely or, if it comes to pass, it will do so only after considerable struggle by the poor. Power of numbers has never readily equalled the power of wealth, even in well-established democracies. This is because the rich and the powerful devise a variety of institutional mechanisms to insulate substantive decision-making from popular pressures. Notice that our major national parties increasingly converge on economic programmes, prioritising private sector-led growth at the expense of redistribution. Once in power, the ruling elite want all those who voted for them to leave them alone, to quietly pursue pro-business policies. Some pro-poor policies are adopted, those that might create electoral support, but very little effort goes into implementation. Much political drama then revolves around fairly superficial debates about who is more or less corrupt, while in fact much of the political class is guilty. Of course, none of this implies that those at the bottom will simply accept these efforts by the powerful to exclude them from effective power and economic gain. The downtrodden not only participate actively in the electoral sphere, but repeated exclusion also leads them to participate in various forms of protest politics: anywhere from the violent Naxalites to desperate farmer suicides.