History for Peace Tracts, Seagull Books

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.


Reviewed by: By Sohail Hashmi
Srikrishna Ayyangar

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.


Reviewed by: Ajit Phadnis
By Manoj Kumar Jha

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


Reviewed by: Ambar Kumar Ghosh
By KV Prasad

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.


Reviewed by: Prerana Priyadarshi
By Ruhi Tewari

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.


Reviewed by: Parvin Sultana
By Anurag Minus Verma

This reading experience is akin to a guided walk through the alleys of the virtual world behind our screens. Depending on your tendencies to doomscroll and your screen time, some spots will be familiar, some a surprise, and if the content and spaces under discussion don’t intrigue you much, the commentary and observations are alone worth staying for. Despite the complete absence of an advisory tone but much like a good description, the book slowly nudges you to rethink the time spent on the internet. The author does not judge at all and in fact admits to the strange follies of human nature. That is precisely what makes the introspection easier.


Reviewed by: Shimaila Mushtaq