The two sides came to a patrolling agreement in October 2024 for Depsang and Demchok areas in Ladakh. As per the Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, ‘(India and China) reached an agreement on patrolling, and with that we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020 and we can say … the disengagement process with China has been completed.’
By David Kilcullen and Greg Mills
This is one of the motifs they use to comment on the decay and failure of Western approaches to the business of war-fighting and peace making. The book also finds that 21st century wars take place in already unstable geopolitical conditions. The backdrop of global disorder, evolving multipolarity, Western decline, and diminishing reliability of alliances have several negative—and some potentially advantageous—ramifications.
By Anne Irfan
Towards the 1980s, Gaza emerged as the fulcrum of Palestinian resistance and in 1987, the first Palestinian Intifada started here. In 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA) established its first headquarters in the Strip. From the beginning of the 21st century, Gaza’s politics of resilience underwent a fathomable transformation with the advent of political Islam which later overpowered Arab and Palestinian nationalisms
By Elizabeth Lhost
After conquering South Asia in the 19th century, the British decided to retain precolonial personnel, like qazis, while designing structures to meet their requirements. In 1864, however, Act XI abolished the position of qazi, as they were considered superfluous. This led to operational difficulties in Muslim legal practices and the British were forced to re-establish this position a decade later.
By Dinkar Prakash Srivastava
This was the case in many of the newly independent countries of that time, including India, but it became a bigger issue in Pakistan. Of the six major nationalities within Pakistan during its initial phase—the Pashtun, Punjabi, Baloch, Sindhi, Bengali and Mohajir, all others except one (the Punjabi) have raised questions over the national identity (Pakistani) vis-à-vis their linguistic and ethnic identities during the last seven decades. While the Bengali identity assertion resulted in the partition of Pakistan in 1971, the Sindhis
By Shadi Hamid
Hamid, however, has a tough time explaining away continued American military, diplomatic support and arms supplies to Israel which have resulted in the current bombing of Gaza and indiscriminate killing of women and children. Israel’s bombing of Gaza has led to over 67,000 deaths of which more than 20,000 were children and close to 170,000 injuries. To his credit, he does anticipate that the American support to Israel in the Gaza war ‘will stand as the strongest objection to the arguments in this book’. When Hamid argues that America
By Neil Shearing
As the world fractures into rival blocs, many countries like India will resist becoming a part of this rivalry between the US and China, especially as they cannot determine its outcome (p. 60). However, it will be difficult for these countries to avoid picking a side and they will be forced by their economic, financial, cultural and political ties to align with one side or the other (p. 64). He argues that India is likely to align with the US, based on the fact that the US is India’s largest export market, invests much more in India than China
Edited by Paula Banerjee
Since none of the South Asian states have signed the 1951 Convention, they never legally recognize having refugees. On the contrary, they have sought to deal with such challenges through numerous national legal frameworks. The patterns of national interest decide state responses. The European Union (EU) today is deeply divided on how to cope with the influx of people from West Asia, which is testing the principle of solidarity and making the Union look heartless and ineffective, pitting member states against each other, thereby infusing populism and anti-Islamic sentiments.
By Partha Chatterjee
The book is full of perceptive insights like the discussion of the different terms used in Indian languages for the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’—desam and arasu in Tamil, jati and rashtra in Bengali, and the implications of that (p. 17); an analysis of the stability of India’s federal democracy if the ‘Hindu ethnic group’ (80% of the population) is mobilized, or alternatively, if the ‘Hindi ethnic group’ (slightly less than 40% of the population) is focused on as the largest linguistic group (p. 288). There is also a fascinating discussion on the difference between an understanding of the norm as the empirical average or as the normative.
By Avinash Hingorani
As the book progresses, what does emerge from the analysis is the way in which the larger structure of the nation-state in both the US and India impinged adversely on the Dalits in India and Blacks in the US. This resulted in greater adverse encounters with the repressive apparatus of the state, leading to more frequent police detentions and prolonged incarceration. Blacks in the US and Dalits in India are thus more likely to be found serving prison sentences
Edited by Milinda Banerjee and Julian Strube
The paratexts also become an essential means of understanding the Mahabharata’s transnational connections. Christopher D Bahl and Abdallah Soufan read Wadi-al-Bustani’s introduction of his Arabic translation of the Mahabharata, ‘Understanding Global Intellectual Exchanges through Paratexts: Wadi-al-Bustani’s introduction of his Arabic translation of the Mahabharata’. Paratexts, such as an introduction, offer crucial insights into the text in the new language.
By Manu Joseph
As a psychological curiosity, I wonder not just what makes the poor remain poor, or the forces of over-consumption in this capitalist living and what ‘deprivations’ is this really fulfilling but also would have appreciated an enquiry into what draws the rich to writings on the poor. Many books written, much research done—what is the impact of this work on the subjects? I understand better why the authors may want to write about these areas—these may come from lived experiences, as does in the case of Manu Joseph, along with the need to put out their anger, share experiences and ensure the experiences of the marginalized; not just remain on the margins.
By Vibhuti Ramachandran
Ramachandran further documents that the authorities conducting inquiries did not merely question the rescued women, but also ‘counselled’ and censured them to lead a ‘dignified life’ and tried to extract the ‘truth’ from them by emphasizing their identities as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters.
Edited by Michael Stausberg
Another major grouping of chapters focuses on public culture. The ability to access the public after figuring out where one can inhabit space emerges very well in Patrick Eisenlohr’s contribution on Twelver Shia Muslims and their engagements especially in media publics. The chapter by Raminder Kaur and Faisal Syed Mohammed looks at the Ganpati festival, a major Hindu festival which has become synonymous with the city. While it builds on earlier work, it provides a fascinating view of how festivals can often provide spaces of participation across religious boundaries
Edited by Anandita Chakrabarti and Barbara Harriss-White
G Sreekumar’s essay deals with gold as a factor in money laundering which means cleaning the proceeds of crime. He says, in a heroic assumption of causality, that the high demand for gold in India leads to crimes in other countries. One must assume China, too, is responsible here because since 2009 its gold demand has exceeded that of India.
By Asiya Islam
Women’s entry into the world of paid work is a theme tackled in chapters two and three. Islam highlights two crucial resources, using the respective tropes of ‘Madam’ and ‘Fast-Forward’, required by the women to gain access to, not without struggle of course, the new, globalized economic system; one the English language, and two, mobility. The former is contextually deployed to maintain the separate ethos and distinction between work and non-work place, while the latter is skilfully managed, lest its pace disturbs the work-leisure-home balance.
By Liz Mount
Mount’s study uncovers the bitter truth that though the emergence and visibility of the trans woman may translate as an increased acceptance of GNC people in India, it is at the cost of further discrediting, marginalizing and othering of the hijras. The rise of the trans woman has perhaps meant the decline of the traditional guru-chela dynamics of the hijra tradition, a further stigmatization of the sex work hijras are associated with,
he book asserts that anticolonial struggle also focused on the socio-economic aspects of national life, which give prominence to the idea of centralization. Gandhi’s alternative developmentalism had a fatal weakness because he hoped to create a decentralized polity on the basis of an anticolonial movement which had a strong centralizing feature. The author also presents a critique of other aspects of postcolonial economic changes:
By Rohit De and Ornit Shani
Yet, the book’s celebration of participatory constitutionalism occasionally risks romanticizing the democratic impulse. While De and Shani acknowledge that many public demands were unheeded, their treatment of exclusion remains understated. The book might have further examined the gendered hierarchies within these publics, or the tensions between caste solidarity and universal equality.
By Shashi Tharoor
The next set of chapters move seamlessly from pure constitutional discourse to institutions of civil society, judiciary and federalism in India. Chapter four reiterates the liberal individualism that led to the preference for rule of law, a centralized state, rejection of localism, rejection of separate electorates and a preference for individual representation than the group.