ROOTS OF CONFLICT

The book under review is authored by the winner of the prestigious V.K.R.V. Rao award for social sciences this year. It is a collection of papers grouped into four parts but displaying continuity and unity of discourse because the issues under discussion relate to various dimensions linking politics and social structure.‘Part I: Social Structure And Political Process’ consists of four chapters, the first two of which are theoretical exposi¬tions on the concerned subject. To conceptualize the linkages between social pluralism and political integration, Prof Oommen identifies the con¬texts, levels and mechanism of participation that burgeon into sources of social tension and political change. He believes that primordial identities such as regionalism, casteism, communalism, and linguism are in themselves not dis-functional to political integration (a la the nationalist school of thinking), so long as distributive justice can offset imbalances stemming from such identities. However, one cannot be too sure whether economic engineering can ever take care of political integra¬tion in the long run.