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‘Dynastic politics is a termite that eats away the foundation of democracy,’ asserted the Prime Minister of India,Narendra Modi, addressing an election rally in Sangai Mandli area of Billawar constituency, in December 2014, in the run-up to the State assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.1 This was not the first time that the issue of dynastic politics found mention during the electoral battle in India. In fact, the BJP leadership had made it one of the core issues during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to target its principal opponent, the Congress. While the Congress led by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is one of the most prominent political dynasties in India, there are several others at the national and regional level, spread across parties with an increasing number in the Indian legislature.

Professor Manor’s scholarship on India extends to nearly half a century now and his distinctive commentaries on various as-pects of development of politics and society have benefitted generations of students of Indian politics so far. The set of writings under review revisits some of the key themes in Indian politics that Professor Manor has addressed from time to time and helps reconstruct an important part of contemporary political history in India. This work, therefore, becomes one of the most important additions to the literature on contemporary Indian politics as politics enters a new phase after the elections in 2014.

This is an important book that tackles a question where more heat than light tends to be generated; namely why has the Left faced such catastrophic failure in Bengal, a State where it once ruled unchallenged? Of course some may consider this a moot question. After all the Left across the world, except in Latin America, has been in steady decline, unable to withstand the collapse of the Soviet model and the consequent rise of neoliberalism. But the story of decline is not the same everywhere, and conventional wisdom may be no more than lazy, unexamined consensus. Bhattacharyya takes as his starting point the concept of ‘government as practice’, which he defines as a process by which governments attempt to work through the messy terrain of social contradictions, grasping ideological polarities and transforming them into meaningful practice.

Why are some parts of India more prone to Hindu-Muslim violence than others?  That is the question that Amrita Basu takes up in her engaging, insightful yet not fully convincing book Violent Conjunctures in Democratic India. Why have States like Gujarat or UP seen so much violence, while Kerala or Andhra Pradesh experienced much less Hindu-Muslim strife—despite having almost similarly sized Muslim populations? This puzzle is quickly becoming a ‘classic’ in the study of Indian politics, as scholars such as Ashutosh Varshney, Steven Wilkinson and Paul Brass have also sunk their teeth in it. Their answers have been varied: Varshney attributes relative peacefulness to the existence of a strong civil society connecting religious communities, Wilkinson focuses on electoral incentives and argues that violence is unlikely where the ruling party depends on Muslim votes, while Brass attributes violence to the existence of local networks—he calls them ‘institutionalised riot systems’—that derive benefit from the violence.

The trauma of India’s Partition in 1947 played out differently in diverse regions of the subcontinent. The division of Punjab in the West happened at one go and was sudden, cataclysmic, and violent. On the other hand, the Partition of Bengal was a slower process as the displacement took place in waves though the trauma was no less violent than in Punjab. Similarly in Sindh, Benaras, Kashmir and in Hyderabad the impact of 1947 was keenly felt but had different registers of remembrance and enunciations.

All modern, alien, imperial governments have faced a serious dilemma during their life: how to hold on to their rule and at the same time expand the rule to involve the local people into administration and governance. The British imperialism in addition faced another dilemma: how to maintain imperial rule and the liberal democratic reputation at the same time? The book under review argues that the Government of India Act of 1919 (popularly known as the Mantagu-Chelmsford Reforms) was one attempt to handle this dilemma. It starts with the premise that the Act of 1919 was extremely crucial for the formulation of the British policy for the subsequent period. The Act altered the profile of the imperial support system and cast its spell on the policy initiatives taken subsequently. In particular the Act did two things. One, it released and diffused some power to various segments of the Indian population (rural interests, landlords, constitutionalists). In so doing, it created a legislative body consisting largely of Indians, that would be pitched against the Executive, largely British.