China’s unprecedented rise has forced the world to restudy and refocus on the major factors behind this development. The Deng Xiaoping era is considered to be the time when China moved out of the trap of a low-income agrarian society to becoming the factory of the world and the second largest economy. The reform and opening up announced by Deng in late 1978 gave China the direction which it needed to gain momentum.
Both the authors need no introduction to the public attentive to strategic matters. Between them, they have fifty years of engagement with strategic affairs. Both have past publications that place them in good standing as readers appraise whether they should pick up their latest wares. While Joshi’s landmark book was on Kashmir—The Lost Rebellion—in the nineties, Sawhney’s co-authored one—The War Unfinished—was on the India-Pakistan crisis of early this century.
Jayita Sarkar’s book traces the origins and development of India’s nuclear weapons programme in the context of overlapping narratives of postcolonial modernity, developmentalism and geopolitics. Sarkar achieves this explanation by way of highlighting the technopolitics binding developmentalism and national security in the vision of its technopolitical elite which conceived and ran India’s nuclear programme.
First published in 2013 from the University of Chicago Press, this book is one of the most important interventions into comprehending Bihar, an eastern Indian province. With reference to post-1947 Bihar, among the western scholars, Francine R Frankel’s essay (1989), many long essays of Harry W Blair, and Paul Brass, too, in his book, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, and also his essay, ‘Political Uses of Crisis: The Famine of 1966-67’ (Asian Survey, 1986)
Stateless were we branded and stigmatized…as outcaste vagabonds at the bottom we remain, with shattered and bleeding hearts we leave, like dumbed cattle benumbed we go (p. 247). The apathy and difficulties in the lives of refugees and stateless people are innumerable, and there will never be enough words to describe their predicament’s severity adequately.
With the establishment of a new dominant party in India since 2014 and its re-election with a thumping majority in 2019, a new political era has been identified with the BJP being called a ‘system defining party’. A lot has been written about the changing political climate of the country with the Bhartiya Janata Party as the dominant party in order to analyse the reasons for the BJP wave sweeping across the nation.