My fortnightly letter to you today will be a brief one, but I am attaching to it a note which is for the present incom¬plete. I may add to it later. It represents really some kind of loud thinking on my part and an attempt to clarify my own mind. I am venturing to share this with you.
One of the main challenges the institutions of Indian democracy are facing is the decline of the liberal professions. Journalists, lawyers, professors were supposed to be the front line of the army fighting for the rights of the governed. Today, they are seen more as collaborators of the governors. Why that is so is the subject matter of a separate debate.
Striking Women is a well-researched reexamination of two strikes in the United Kingdom (UK) that saw the mobilization of migrant South Asian women workers against highly exploitative and racially structured low-paying jobs, which have been overcrowded by a predominantly female labour force.
Tamil Nadu is seen as a model state that combined growth and development with inclusiveness. The State’s policy initiatives were critiqued by the Right for the populist schemes and neglect of fiscal prudence and by the Left for prioritization of populism over structural changes like land reforms. Such critiques notwithstanding, the State has done better in basic development indicators, an outcome of an efficient and inclusive delivery of social sector schemes…
In 1944 Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Polanyi was born into a well-heeled Jewish family in Austria and grew up in Hungary, where for a brief while, he was a local political leader active in the Radical Citizens’ Party. He is best known for his work as an economic historian.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee’s Twilight Falls On Liberalism, as the name suggests, diagnoses the present political conjuncture—from Trump to Brexit and Modi—as one where liberal ideas such as freedom, tolerance and fellow feeling ‘seem to be under a shadow’ ( p. ix). However, he immediately qualifies this to argue that liberalism has always been beset with contradictions in theory…