By Arvind Panagariya

At the very least, the remarkable decentralization of economic authority in China—where over 50% of government spending is controlled by local bodies with sweeping powers over land, labour, and investment—and its focused development of over 600 internationally benchmarked cities deserved mention. Further, while the book does discuss China’s success under Deng Xiaoping, it stops short of unpacking the underlying drivers. While he had started empowering local governments soon after he took over in 1978, the early results were uneven.


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan
By Aria Fani

It was not just top-down reform or policy. Rather, the transformation took place in the lively debates and unpredictable collaborations among writers and intellectuals, the energy of voluntary reading circles, and periodicals that crisscrossed borders. These were spaces of possibility where new literary collections took shape and where different visions of the nation’s future could be imagined,


Reviewed by: Muneer Ahmed
By Ashutosh Singh

Notwithstanding the Agreement, clarity on status of the territories of Hunza, Chilas, Koh Ghizar, Iskoman and Yasin to be part of Gilgit Agency continued to elude the British. They wanted to retain the frontier for maintaining direct control over all the areas. Finally, in 1941 the Government of Jammu & Kashmir referred the matter to a Court of Arbitration, to reinforce their claim over these territories. The author herein has given a very detailed account of the report prepared by Ram Chander Kak, Chief Secretary of Jammu & Kashmir, and the opinion of the Resident of Kashmir, Lt. Col S M Fraser.


Reviewed by: Major General Nalin Bhatia
Edited by Purna Bahadur Karki

Nepal witnessed long spates of Maoist insurgency, and later, there were insurmountable challenges in assimilating the insurgent constituencies in the mainstream politics. In this context, the first chapter discusses the inception of the Communist movement in Nepal—founded early in 1949 upholding socialist slogans and agendas concerning universal civil liberty. The promulgation of the Constitution was significant in reinforcing the status of Communist politics in Nepal as combatants were mainstreamed and inducted in security forces, thereby legitimizing their agenda of equality and inclusion


Reviewed by: Priyanka Singh
By Gautam Hazarika

The Second World War generated one of the largest and most diverse populations of prisoners of war (POWs) in modern history, with an estimated 35 million individuals experiencing some form of military captivity between 1939 and 1945 (Cohen 2012). Governed nominally by the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War—ratified by most,…


Reviewed by: Reshmi Kazi
By Shweta Singh

The intention, and the effort was to highlight how India was still not ready for self-rule, given the deplorable condition of its women. This of course, offered the needed moral umbrage, where the white man was on a ‘civilizing mission’—out there to save the brown woman, from the brown man (Spivak 1983). Interestingly, the nationalist discourse too deployed the narrative of ‘Mother India’,


Editorial