Mita Bordoloi.

This is a story about a little girl Bumoni in an Assam village who sees wild elephants on a fairly regular basis because they come to eat the bananas growing in her backyard that she herself loves and needs to eat. From an adult’s point of view, this is a situation of human-animal conflict. But Bumoni thinks of an innovative, compassionate way to keep the herds away from her family’s banana crop. Then she goes a step further and comes up with a way to keep the elephants away from the village fields.


Reviewed by: Madhu B Joshi
Shabnam Minwalla

The book introduces children to the voting process in a democracy. Mini is a class VI student with a buzzing mind that runs in three directions at the same time. Now school elections are approaching and of the four candidates, Mini must vote for the one she thinks will be a good school captain. Everyone is encouraging Mini to decide on her own.


Reviewed by: Nidhi Gaur

The persistent under-representation of the Indian Muslim in the legislative arena has been a longstanding feature of Indian politics. The community comprises 14 percent of the population, and their average representation in the Lok Sabha, for instance, stands at 5 percent. This is same as their representation in the Lok Sabha after the last parliamentary elections in 2019. Therefore, it would not be wrong to argue that the Muslim under-representation in the legislative arena, and the fact that the community also lags behind on almost all socio-economic indicators, is not a recent trend but a longstanding feature in Indian politics


Editorial
Niraja Gopal Jayal

Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy by Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal unravels the complex and contested layers of the theory and practice of citizenship in independent India. The underlying query of the book is whether the constitutional ethic of Indian citizenship as an inclusive and egalitarian civic-national norm has been imperilled and ‘irretrievably undermined’ in more recent times. In response to this question, the book argues that the expansion or erosion of Indian democracy is contingent upon its citizenry.


Reviewed by: Swaha Swetambara Das
Tripurdaman Singh

Books on Jawaharlal Nehru are seldom rare—Nehru, indisputably, is a perennial favourite of publishers and authors, as can be seen in the countless books on him that relentlessly keep pouring out, year after year. In the recent past, Nehru’s views, his persona and his policies, have become a matter of intense debate, and shall I say controversy, especially with the present ruling dispensation propping him up as an ideological counterfoil to polish its grand Hindutva narrative.


Reviewed by: Syed Areesh Ahmad
Arvind Narrain

The phrase ‘undeclared emergency’ is not new to Indian political discourse. The features of the Emergency period (1975-77), imposed by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government, have since then provided political actors and analysts alike with a framework of comparison to evaluate the state of Indian democracy.


Reviewed by: Janaki Srinivasan