Economic liberalisation is usually taken to mean a general "retreat of the state." This is erroneous. The state in a "liberalised regime" acts almost exclusively in the interests of globalised capital and the domestic corporate-financial oligarchy that gets integrated with it, which means inter alia a withdrawal of state support from traditional petty production, including peasant agriculture. This is what underlies the phenomenon of absolute impoverishment of the working people, notably in the form of growing nutritional deprivation, which "liberalisation" has unleashed in India over the last 25 years, and which, notwithstanding assiduous denials by its votaries, is quite indubitable.