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Maharajakrishna Rasgotra was a career diplomat who served India with great distinction for almost forty years (1949–1990), often working closely with Pandit Nehru, and later, Indira Gandhi. He was born in a humble (though aspirational) family and was, therefore, largely a self-made man. Any book written by him would be of interest. A Life in Diplomacy is specially so because it is the story of India and the world which the author saw— and tried to shape—in his long years in the world of diplomacy. (The book contains a few finely drawn vignettes from the author’s personal life—his early years, his poetry, his marriage, the tragic loss of a child, his spiritual awakening later in life . . . but, as is made clear by the author, the book is not an autobiography.)

Pakistan lies dead and buried under a mountain of corpses. Tajuddin Ahmed in the Proclamation of Independence after his swearing-in as PM of the Interim Government of Bangladesh at Kushtia, 17 April 1971.The idea of a pre-planned Indian conspiracy to break-up Pakistan appeared to us, from our direct exposure to the responses of those in authority in India, to be a figment of the Pakistani imagination. Sobhan, p. 362.

‘The postcolonial North East India represents a land of claimed multiple sovereignties. With fractured histories, multiplicity of ethnicities and peculiar geographical location, the region has been grappling with multiple political crises—from ethno-nationalism to the demand for territorial sovereign homeland.’ The editor’s introduction is an apt description of the contemporary political situation in North East India. With so many sovereignty movements around it is obvious that the region throw up new discourses and debates on the prime concern: sovereignty. Throughout the nineteenth century, Indian political thinkers discussed and debated the form of polity, nature of sovereignty, modes of people’s participation in the polity. On the eve of Indian Independence these debates took a serious turn with multiple sovereignty demands from separatist groups like the Pakistan movements, Azad Punjab movement, Akhand Hindusthan movement, Isolationist Princely States as well as smaller communities who wanted a sovereign existence outside Independent India.

This classic nursery rhyme in many ways sums up the story of the ‘thirdfront’, the protagonist of Sanjay Ruparelia’s engaging narrative, Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India. The pioneers in the art of coalition politics at the federal level, the components of the third-front have today gone in different directions and often come together only to separate immediately after that. In this study, Ruparelia explores in elaborate detail the coming together, performance in government and also the unravelling of three third-front federal coalitions, namely the Janata experiment (1977–78), National Front (1989– 1990) and the United Front (1996–98). In each of these coalition formations, the ‘broader Indian Left’ as he prefers to call them played a dominant role in reducing the two polity-wide parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to side actors.

Civil society and governance form key issues of concern among academia, leadership and international organizations considering the importance of cementing democracy and strengthening individual rights. The issue is significant in the case of China as scholars have written about the mutual interplay between both in order to explore the nature of political freedom and exercise of party control in China. Noted works like Civil Society and Governance in China (2012) by Jianxing Yu and Sujian Go have analysed this question based on a theoretical understanding and empirical case study of China. While in Karla W. Simon’s work Civil Society in China: The Legal Framework from Ancient Times to the ‘New Reform Era’ (2013) the question that China lacks a history of civic participation is challenged with a detailed analysis of the re-emergence of a vibrant civil society in China under government constraints.

There is a kind of negativity which is inherent to ‘toleration’, and so has it been all through with ‘liberal toleration’. Unfortunately, there have been far too few studies on the conceptual moorings of ‘toleration’ which only makes one wonder when commentators and scholars will start respecting the differences rather than merely tolerating them.Although Roover recognizes the negativity of liberal toleration, he doesn’t tell us anything about the negativity that ‘toleration’ as a concept is impregnated with, but he does introduce us to the negativity that ‘liberal toleration’ as a model of containing conflict and managing diversity is imbued with. Roover suggests that the contemporary liberal model of toleration is not only deficient in obviating the resurgence of religion in the public sphere, but it inherently carries in itself certain forms of intolerance towards the entities which fail to conform to the public/private distinction. Researching the contemporary with what I may call conceptual etymology, Roover tries to explain how and why secularism in the contemporary form remains incapable of obviating the current conflict and managing the presence of religion in the public sphere and how it carries certain forms of intolerance. This question remains the focus of this book.