Today, India is increasingly witnessing a state-sponsored effort towards vilifying and criminalising its largest minority population, the Indian Muslims – and this has an ‘economic’ cost. But first, let me offer some background context.
The intricate, often complex relationship between an economy’s macro and micro-foundations and society and the underlying forces that drive human interactions were first discussed in a series of research studies put forth by renowned social scientist Karl Polanyi.
Polanyi’s work gave the disciplinary roots to what was later termed the modern field of “economic sociology”. In the basic tenets of his work in The Great Transformation (1944), he argues that the discipline of economics emerged from the observations of human beings and their practices in society. Because of the social nature of humans, ‘embeddedness’, ie, the process of interaction between social relations and economic foundations, becomes a necessary condition for the economy.