The book is embedded in and anchored on the copious exchange of letters among political actors from different parts of the country bringing to the fore the flux of events and imperfections with which they were tackled and reconfigured by political actors, particularly Nehru. It was Nehru, the man of great fortitude and partial failures, whose hands shaped the destiny of India.
Hashmi’s logical submission is that even if buildings were designed by Turkish or Iranian architects, they were all built by local masons. The masons embellished these sacred sites according to their own acquired understanding of aesthetic piety.
These can be understood by how the masons, for example, thought that the hemisphere of the dome, even if it represented the idea of the heavens in the Central Asian imagination, looked aesthetically incomplete, which in turn they adorned with a lotus on top of the dome.
What does the book find? First, the book shows that employing the existing populism model—which posits that populists are defined by ‘the people’ and subsequently identify ‘the other’—is akin to putting the cart before the horse. Ayyangar argues that in India, boundary setting occurs first: the ‘enemy’ is identified upfront, and the idea of the people is ‘capaciously’ constructed from those who do not constitute the enemy.
He further notes that in the history of Indian politics, the ability of the political actors and stakeholders ‘to mediate between diverse interests exemplified the essence of coalition politics. Coalitions go beyond managing electoral arithmetic to focusing on governance in diverse polity based on negotiation.’ He emphasizes on the ‘spirit of coalition-building’ that is essential to accommodate the divergent
The first case study presents an overview of Parliamentary Debates on the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka to show ‘how foreign policy was crafted in a federal structure’ (p. 52). Debates in Parliament over the deployment compelled the Government to reconsider its course, creating a precedent for India’s regional strategy rooted in respect for sovereignty and mutual sensitivities.
The period from 2004 to 2014 witnessed the consolidation of several women-centric policies. Schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) played a particularly significant role by guaranteeing equal wages for men and women and ensuring a substantial female workforce.