Tag Archives: Politics

There are very few political leaders in India whose initiation and evolution in the country’s political life would lead to an understanding not merely of the leader

This book details the debates on some of the key issues in the Constituent Assembly and the interventions made by the members who were women. (It repeatedly refers to them as women members, this is at odds with the current practice that eschews such ways of referring to people as lady doctors or women cricketers and so on.) Of these issues, the author attaches considerable importance to the question of separate and joint electorates.

Scott R Stroud succeeds in arguing a Deweyan Ambedkar: Did Ambedkar have one intellectual interlocutor throughout his life? Was Ambedkar’s world mediated through Dewey? It is however a well-argued book, theoretically rigorous which systematically conceptualizes Ambedkar’s pragmatism.

Identifying the core areas and patterns, the authors set out to unravel the contemporary context of mediatization of public life leading to the emergence of media-public or info-public. New keywords like Twitterati, WhatsApp-publics, Media public, Info public, though coming to limelight, mediatized public sphere continues to follow the ‘pre-existing grammar of political mobilization’

As is well known, after his return to India in 1915, Gandhi launched the noncooperation movement in the 1920s and the civil disobedience satyagraha in the 1930s.  These were the decades when the loin cloth-clad Gandhi was viewed as a bit of a rustic rockstar by the people of Tamil Nadu.  Wherever Gandhi travelled in the old Madras State, people would get wind of his whereabouts and proceed to mob him in hundreds or thousands.

The merit of the study is that it breaks the stereotype of the analysis of the State’s contemporary politics from a myopic view of religious identity. 

Despite several biographical works on Azad, a definitive biography was still awaited because the previous biographers had not explored adequately the Urdu writings of Azad and other such sources. This new biography by S Irfan Habib, a Delhi-based historian with a firm grasp on the Urdu language attempts to fill the gap by uncovering some of the enigmatic aspects of Azad’s life, thought and politics. In doing so, he has made extensive use of Azad’s works in Urdu and brought to the fore the enriching and curious facts associated with him.

The Indian Parliament completed 71 years during April-May 2023.  The study of the institution, which began soon after the publication of Parliament in India by WH Morris-Jones in 1957, a classic till today, is still a work in progress, as is Indian democracy.  There have been authored studies and edited volumes on the Indian parliament with rich material. 

The term ‘Saffron Terror’ was coined almost two decades ago in 2002 and gained popularity in 2007-2008. At times, terms like Hindu terrorism or Hindutva terror are also used instead, allegedly to describe acts of violence motivated by Hindu extremist nationalism. In all probability, the term comes from the symbolic use of the saffron colour by most of the temples in India and many Hindu nationalist organizations.

Allah Naam ki Siyasat, Hilal Ahmad’s first book in Hindi, brings together his writings over a period of about ten years. It kicks off as an autobiography. The author talks about his understanding of Islam and its Indian variant. He tries to explain how he comprehends Islam. Going into the past, he talks about Prophet Mohammad and the evolution of the concept of the state in Islam.

In Who Moved My Vote?, Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik have a simple point to make. Elections are pivotal to modern representative democracy, and the credibility and legitimacy of the political system depend on how well election results reflect the people’s will. The authors highlight some quirks of the First Past the Post (FPTP) system.

Anuradha Bhasin hit the national headlines with her challenge in the Supreme Court on the Government disconnecting Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) from India and those living there from each other by turning off the internet as part of its massive crackdown to usher in Naya Kashmir with the evacuation of Article 370 of all meaning.

Britain’s botched cartographic endeavour to partition the Indian subcontinent not only left behind a legacy of bloodshed but also people who, till now, are trying to fit into the larger picture of ‘India’. Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir’s Frontier by Radhika Gupta tries to explore what meaning belonging, identity, and freedom have for the people in Kargil along the most militarized border of the world.

The author, S Narendra, formerly of the Indian Information Service, has comprehensively explored the extraordinary rise of PV Narasimha Rao (PVNR) from the grassroots, a journey that saw him become Prime Minister in June 1991 and the only one till then, from outside the Nehru-Gandhi fold, to complete a full term in office. He was known for his sharp analyses of political situations and was prominent in many an electoral battle.

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.