Tag Archives: Politics

Who belongs to the nation? And, how do we become members of a state? The responses to such questions are often contested. These contestations have led to violent conflicts, and therefore, citizenship laws were created to determine the membership to a political community. In Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC, Anupama Roy examines the form and content of recent changes to citizenship regimes and laws in India by locating the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the Land Border Agreement (LBA 2015) in their historical, ideological, and political contexts.

This timely study of the Indian National Congress of  yore, now widely referred to as the Congress Party, in the context of political processes in the post-sixteenth general elections in India in 2014, comes at a time when Rahul Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, disparaged as ‘Pappu’ (immature and naïve) by the BJP, has recently completed the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ that began on  7 September 2022 to traverse 3,570 kilometres to reach Srinagar after a 150-day journey.

I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS by Bhanwar Meghwanshi, an autobiographical note of his political genesis, where he shares his experiences with the RSS and the reasons he quit, is the narrative of an agonized author. Unlike other autobiographies which focus on different aspects of life, this book premises Meghwanshi’s metamorphosis of political career and varied  discourses of political engagement.

First published in 2013 from the University of Chicago Press, this book is one of the most important interventions into comprehending Bihar, an eastern Indian province. With reference to post-1947 Bihar, among the western scholars, Francine R Frankel’s essay (1989), many long essays of Harry W Blair, and Paul Brass, too, in his book, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, and also his essay, ‘Political Uses of Crisis: The Famine of 1966-67’ (Asian Survey, 1986)

Stateless were we branded and stigmatized…as outcaste vagabonds at the bottom we remain, with shattered and bleeding hearts we leave, like dumbed cattle benumbed we go (p. 247). The apathy and difficulties in the lives of refugees and stateless people are innumerable, and there will never be enough words to describe their predicament’s severity adequately.

With the establishment of a new dominant party in India since 2014 and its re-election with a thumping majority in 2019, a new political era has been identified with the BJP being called a ‘system defining party’. A lot has been written about the changing political climate of the country with the Bhartiya Janata Party as the dominant party in order to analyse the reasons for the BJP wave sweeping across the nation.

Reading the synoptic narrative of the hundred years of the chequered political career of the Shiromani Akali Dal in the volume under review makes us aware about the uniqueness of the oldest State-level Party which emanated from a religious reformist movement and went on to qualify both as a ‘regionalist’ and an ‘ethnic’ party. As ethnic Party, Akali Dal has sought and received considerable political support from the Sikhs in India and even among the Sikh diaspora, while taking up the community’s religious, social and political causes as central to the Party agenda.

The Punjab Borderland, drawing together an array of archival sources, traces the first ‘comprehensive social history’ of the Punjab border, straddling the states of India and Pakistan (p. 2). Through an extensive study of the border mobility and materiality from 1947 to 1986, it argues that the Punjab border was far more porous and accessible than generally assumed.

What happens when a state wages a war on people? How do the people navigate a system rigged against them? Flaming Forest, Wounded Valley is a result of Freny Manecksha’s decade-long experience of travelling and documenting in the two most volatile regions in India—Bastar and Kashmir. The book documents state’s action as well as inaction in these volatile regions and examines the meaning that words like ‘home’, ‘safe-space’, ‘development’ and ‘justice’ take on in a conflict zone.

Ajay Gudavarthy has through this edited volume of essays foregrounded the argument that there are internal contradictions giving rise to new power formations which are a result of conflict within and between marginalized groups. He states, ‘today, we cannot understand social dynamics exclusively as conflicts between the dominant and dominated.

The significance of this book is that it adds to our understanding of Western India and more specifically the milieu of the small Parsi community in Bombay that provided the commercial, political and intellectual matrix out of which the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji emerged. Visana suggests that in the development of Naoroji’s ideas, ‘Bombay had an especially important role to play since it was the “centre of the best political thought in India”.

Knowledge, at least in its a priori form, promises to be liberating. The basic thought of being able to learn, to question, to unlearn and then to relearn is deeply empowering. However, knowledge production and knowledge dissemination seldom remain under the control of one single individual. Knowledge can become liberating and empowering only if its systemic functioning is informed by the logic of equity, empathy and respect.

This volume, divided into four sections, has thirteen carefully selected essays. It attempts at investigating the rise of ‘New Hindutva’ in India. This phenomenon has been defined by the editors as a ‘governmental formulation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (p. 1).

Who is a citizen of India and on what terms? This is the momentous question that this anthology poses before us with a compelling force, in the increasingly unsettling climate of vulnerability and fear that the recently sculpted trinity of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019)-NRIC-NPR has produced in our Republic. With much care, analytical sophistication, and citizenly conscience, a number of researchers, legal scholars, social activists, journalists, and creative writers examine through the pages of this edited volume the conceptual, constitutional, socio-political and affective dimensions of citizenship, and more pertinently, its denial, and the entangled issues of rightlessness and statelessness that such disenfranchisement engenders.

Sikkim, a tiny Indian State with a population of less than a million, merged with India and became the 22nd State of the Indian Union in 1975. Ambassador Preet Mohan Singh Malik’s book, Sikkim: A History of Intrigue and Alliance, comes at a time when India’s strategic affairs are much debated notably after the Doklam, and Galwan Valley skirmishes.

In the title story of the short story collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance*, noted Santhal writer Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar sketched the character of Mangal Murmu who had accepted the opportunity to dance at a programme where the President of India would inaugurate a thermal power plant. However, upon learning that the whole project was constructed at the expense of the eleven villages whose inhabitants were evicted by an official diktat

The persistent under-representation of the Indian Muslim in the legislative arena has been a longstanding feature of Indian politics. The community comprises 14 percent of the population, and their average representation in the Lok Sabha, for instance, stands at 5 percent. This is same as their representation in the Lok Sabha after the last parliamentary elections in 2019. Therefore, it would not be wrong to argue that the Muslim under-representation in the legislative arena, and the fact that the community also lags behind on almost all socio-economic indicators, is not a recent trend but a longstanding feature in Indian politics

Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy by Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal unravels the complex and contested layers of the theory and practice of citizenship in independent India. The underlying query of the book is whether the constitutional ethic of Indian citizenship as an inclusive and egalitarian civic-national norm has been imperilled and ‘irretrievably undermined’ in more recent times. In response to this question, the book argues that the expansion or erosion of Indian democracy is contingent upon its citizenry.

Books on Jawaharlal Nehru are seldom rare—Nehru, indisputably, is a perennial favourite of publishers and authors, as can be seen in the countless books on him that relentlessly keep pouring out, year after year. In the recent past, Nehru’s views, his persona and his policies, have become a matter of intense debate, and shall I say controversy, especially with the present ruling dispensation propping him up as an ideological counterfoil to polish its grand Hindutva narrative.

The phrase ‘undeclared emergency’ is not new to Indian political discourse. The features of the Emergency period (1975-77), imposed by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government, have since then provided political actors and analysts alike with a framework of comparison to evaluate the state of Indian democracy.