Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

If the world has a ‘West’ and an ‘East’ , it is fairly well established that the center of gravity is shifting to the East. The author goes a bit deeper into this conclusion to say that the East is not a peaceful homogenous bloc.

It is generally accepted that peace is a natural condition while war is an aberration. Peace is defined as ‘not violence’. Johan Galtung has defined violence in two categories, direct violence and indirect violence.

Terrorism has traditionally presented states with a major security challenge. After 9/11, however, governments have become totally focused on this threat to national security for what they fear most is terrorist violence designed to achieve clearly defined political objectives like independence from central authority.

Kanti Bajpai and Harsh V. Pant have edited this book for the benefit of graduate students studying Indian foreign policy, those teaching the subject as well as the general reader interested in its key aspects.

Anyone who has asked an Indian Army officer why it has got bogged down in a bloody quagmire in the North East, why it made such a hash of the operation in Sri Lanka, or why the lives of so many jawans were squandered in Kargil, hears the same answer: ‘We fought with one hand tied behind our backs’. Apart from being hard to do unless you have a tail or other appendage to which the hand can be tied, that excuse absolves many sins. That is also the first of many limitations in this book.

The discipline of International Relations in India, although vibrant and growing, has suffered from the straitjacket of having as its only points of reference, IR Theories originating in the western hemisphere.

2013 has been a good year for law related publications in India, with a clutch of high quality titles from some of the leading publishing houses in the country. Among these, Nitya Ramakrishnan’s In Custody: Law, Impunity and Prisoner Abuse in South Asia would count among the more significant ones.

Coalition Politics and Democratic Consolidation in Asia highlights the experience of four Asian countries, namely India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Japan with coalition politics.

The eastern part of the Indian subcontinent hosts the confluence of two mighty river systems of the subcontinent, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, known as the Padma and Jamuna in Bangladesh respectively.

Since the path-breaking work in the 1990s on women abducted during the Partition violence in divided Punjab, at least two generations of much needed scholarship have built upon and extended the literary archive of the years of trauma and displacement that followed the Partition of 1947.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, has earlier enriched our understanding of South Asian history by his ground-breaking research on the complex relationship between caste, society and politics.

Is Indian Civilization a Myth? is a collection of articles by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, most of which have been previously published in Outlook, India Today and the London Review of Books.