<b>T N Ninan: </b>Not always soft

With Modi govt, we may be seeing India willing to adopt hard stances more often than before, even if this new approach is selectively applied

Half a century ago, the Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal penned the three-volume Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. In this magnum opus, he called India a “soft state”, a term that encapsulated the “indiscipline” reflected in poor respect for the law by the police (broadly defined) as well as the policed, and the collusion of public officials with the big and powerful. You could say, for instance, that the soft state was unable to enforce land reform legislation. Myrdal and subsequently others have argued that low respect for the law (from the point of