This paper examines the relationship between state and democracy in India. It probes the paradox that representative government is not always responsive government. There is a persistant gap between the practices of popular authorisation and the production of legitimacy. It examines this gap from two different directions. On the one hand, it looks at the the myriad mechanisms by which the strucutre of the state impedes democracy. On the other hand it looks at how inherited social inequality produces forms of politics that make the production of shared legitimacy difficult.