The danger �here, as Akhil Gupta has pointed out in his analysis of Indian
anti-�poverty programs, is that programs of limited redistribution,
if disconnected from more far-�reaching pro�cesses of po�liti�cal mobilization
and economic transformation, may only “shore up the legitimacy
of ruling regimes” without posing any fundamental challenge to the
entrenched inequalities to which the programs are supposed to be a response.
Indeed, he asks whether it might even be the case that programs
that prevent the very worst outcomes for the poor may have as their main
effect to “inoculate us to the poÂ�litiÂ�cal possibility of their death becoming
a scandal” (2012, 278).