Subnational trajectories of development and sources of divergences increasingly constitute an important dimension of understanding the political economy of global development (Crouch and Streeck 1997; Storper 1997). The literature on subnational variations in the Global South, and institutional sources of their dynamism is, however, recent but expanding (World Bank 2009; Moncada and Snyder 2012; Giraudy, Moncada and Snyder 2019). Given that the fastest growing economies are primarily in the Global South, particularly Asia, an understanding of such processes in the Asian context becomes important at the current conjuncture. In fact, the Asian experience with ‘catching up’ and economic transformation has contributed substantially to the idea of the ‘developmental state’ (Evans and Heller 2018). While the Japanese experience highlighted a strong role for state action, recent successes of the East Asian newly industrialising economies (NIEs) reinforced the importance of the ‘developmental state’ as a conceptual category to understand what makes some countries improve their citizens’ capabilities better than others.

Importantly, the relationship between capital accumulation, state and civil society in the Global South is seen to be distinct from the experience of Western capitalist economies. Chatterjee (2004) and Sanyal (2007) for example, have dealt at length with how governamental imperatives in postcolonial countries do not follow that of advanced capitalist economies even as they significantly shape the global capital accumulation dynamic. Chatterjee in his more recent work (2019) also points to the distinctiveness of politics in these regions, arguing that mobilisation in postcolonial democracies like India often draws upon reworked social identities forged through modern print cultures and governmental imperatives. Further, as Harriss-White (2003) has established, capital accumulation tends to rely on social stratification and actually reinforces social hierarchies based on caste and gender identities. Piketty (2020), in fact, argues that status-based inequalities in such countries, for instance based on caste, not only persist but constitute important sources of inequality as they modernise. Mapping the links between accumulation, state acts, political mobilisation around identities and development trajectories in these regions therefore becomes important.

India and China have been two of the fastest growing economies in the world since the early 2000s, contributing substantially to global wealth creation, given the size of their economies (Bardhan 2008). Talking about China's achievements on the growth front, Evans and Heller (2018) reason that it is impossible to understand the Chinese state as a unitary one despite having a centralised apparatus.