Ideas and practices associated with India’s living document, the Constitution of India have remained central to the political imagination and assessment of democracy in contemporary India. Recent writings on ideas, institutions and processes in Indian politics have attempted to foreground the language of democracy in deliberations involved in the making of India’s Constitution.
The argument for an electronic silk road, promoting free trade and by extension, harmonious global values and laws, is an inherently appealing idea to all digital natives used to an ‘open web’ experience.
Public memory is short. A regime of public accountability requires safe-guards against the brevity of memory. For a nation such as India, where the governmental presence is looming and large, disclosure norms are of recent vintage and their functioning leaves much to be desired.
For several decades now, historians have hotly debated the socio-economic and political developments in the eighteenth century in South Asia, with some viewing it as a period of chaos and decline, and others describing it as marked by economic growth and socio-cultural efflorescence.
For many observers the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 stands as a pivotal event in turning India from a pluralistic and secular society to one founded on a monolithic concept of ‘Hindu’ identity.
Before North East India got identified with political unrest, Assam was known for its tea. In fact Assam teas a global brand name. It took years of frantic search, botanical experiments, massive entrepreneurships, colonial machinations and above all the blood and toil of millions of labourers to create that brand name.