Tag Archives: Politics

One of the arguments put forward for the abrogation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) under Article 370 in August 2019 by the Central Government was that it hampered development in the erstwhile State. This ‘underdevelopment’ narrative was stressed vehemently by the ruling party at the centre at that time.

In The Violence in Our Bones: Mapping the Deadly Fault Lines Within Indian Society, Professor Neera Chandhoke compels us to deliberate on violence in its many manifestations in India and suggests how we may extricate ourselves from this abyss by inventively imagining participatory democracy. The treatment of violence in the social sciences often diminishes the starkness of human tragedy, when reduced to mere statistics. While recognizing that violent urges might lie dormant in our psyche, Chandhoke is concerned with stalling the eruption of these violent urges onto the socio-political arena.

Contemporary buzz on Indian democracy (Roy Chowdhury and Keane, 2021; Yadav, 2020;  Nielsen and Nielsen, 2019; Rudolph and Rudolph, 2014) analyses its evolving features. The book under review, written in memory of Professor Kalyan Bhattacharya (a faculty of Political Science in Vivekananda Mahavidyalay under the University of Burdwan, 1966-1994), probes into the making of the democracy discourse in India.

15 December 2019 was the darkest day of my life. On this day, the Delhi police entered our campus and beat us like animals.’ These lines from the introduction of Nehal Ahmed’s new book Nothing will be Forgotten transport our minds to the day when the University campus was turned into a warzone. Students were labelled terrorists. Gory visuals still refuse to leave our minds. A peaceful protest culminating in students running for their lives. Police rampaging through reading rooms and libraries, hunting for students like a pack of wolves.

In the last couple of years, a fairly large number of accounts ranging from popular pieces to research-based scholarship, of the Indian Emergency have appeared in the public domain. The book under review is the latest addition to the fast-expanding repertoire of Emergency writings. The Emergency, which Plys aptly calls the ‘particular totalitarian moment’, reconfigured forever, among others, the postcolonial political (and socio-economic) landscape of India. Imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi-led Congress in 1975, the Emergency was effective–thanks to the PM’s lackeys and her wayward, roguish son Sanjay Gandhi–until 1977.

The 2014 elections witnessed an unprecedented performance by the BJP in Assam. This was further followed in the Assembly elections of 2016 which saw the Party come to power in the State for the first time. Similar electoral victories were registered in the Parliamentary elections of 2019 and the Assembly elections of 2021. Akhil Ranjan Dutta in Hindutva Regime in Assam puts forth an elaborate account of this rise of the BJP in the State.

Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy is a meticulously documented book. It tries to unpack India’s journey from populism to ethnic democracy and authoritarianism. It is divided into three parts.In the first part, Jaffrelot starts by explaining the rise of Hindu nationalism. He studies the rise of Modi in Gujarat and how he went from the RSS to the BJP in the 1990s, where he rose above the organization, subjugated it, and to some extent liberated himself from it. He gradually became a national-populist hero, cleverly turning the stigma of the Gujarat riots to his advantage by using his charisma and a well-orchestrated public relations campaign run by pro- fessionals to build his superhuman image. 

It is well known to students of political science and modern history that the Kashmir dispute has two dimensions—external and internal. The external dimension involves India, Pakistan and the UN. The involvement of the latter was sought by India under Jawaharlal Nehru to resolve the mutually opposite claims of India and Pakistan over J&K’s political future. Besides internationalizing the Kashmir dispute, the external context led to wars between India and Pakistan, as well as constant instability in J&K. 

This book is an important academic intervention. It unpacks the political complexities associated with the much debatable refugee status of Rohingya community in South Asia. The vast empirical data/information is systematically organized to evolve an innovating theoretical framework. As a result, one finds an interesting sequence that links different individual essays to produce a highly engaging intellectual commentary on complex ideas such as nationalism and citizenship.

The problems that confront us now—the pandemic, a warming planet—require concerted action, yet what we hear constantly is loud voices pitting ‘us’ against ‘them’. In this context, should we rescue nationalism through our usual binaries of civic versus ethnic nationalisms, or liberal versus illiberal nationalisms? This is Partha Chatterjee’s concern as well, as he attempts to separate the truths of nationalism from its lies, through this manuscript which he says was left at his doorstep during the pandemic, with the inscription that the narrator was Charvak: ‘the first page began with a heading in two words—Carvaka uvaca’ (p. vii). As the manuscript seemed to be about the ‘principles of a new concept of Indian nationalism’ (p. viii), Chatterjee felt that it must reach a wider audience and decided to translate it into English.

Ramin Jahanbegloo’s new book titled Pedagogy of Dissent has a cover design depicting the iconic event of ‘The Death of Socrates’. This image contextualizes the urgency behind writing this book as it acts as an apt metaphor for capturing the continuing onslaught against dissent in our times.

This book is the fourth and last volume in a quartet by Professor Jyotirmaya Sharma, examining the restatement of Hinduism by some of its most influential exponents and thinkers. The first book Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism discusses the thought of Dayanand Saraswati, Sri Aurobindo, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda, all of whom sought to marshal Hindu identity in the service of nationalism. The subsequent volumes focus on the thought and writings of Golwalkar and Vivekananda. The series is an attempt to look at the question of Hindu identity and the restatement of Hinduism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Fresh scholarly interests evoking curiosity and concern have come up after the rise and consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India. The capture of power by the BJP in 2019 has made the causes and consequences of its victory a timely and tantalizing prospect for analysis, spanning volumes of work in academia and journalism. Accounting for the rise of the Hindu Right, studies have explored complex polarization strategies, majoritarian logic, suave use of caste-class algorithms, alliance making, attracting funds of corporate houses, deft social media marketing…

In recent times there have been several challenges to the use of theories that have been developed to investigate Euro-American societies, for understanding South Asian realities. Many of these challenges have emerged within the social science disciplines of sociology, social anthropology and political science…

The book under review serves as a ready description of ‘Brand New India’ in both economic and cultural terms. The earlier binaries of core/periphery, developed/developing, poor/rich are discarded to define the new India, which is more prosperous, mobile and enterprising. To redefine global capitalism, the author brings in the politics…

Over the last decade or so, there has been a remarkable expansion of scholarly interest in the rise of public and private forms of violence in democracies across the world, including India. One major reason for this attention is the concern that ‘toleration or encouragement’ of violence is often considered to be a ‘precursor of democratic breakdown…

Niall Ferguson has a penchant for writing sweeping histories. Over the years, Ferguson has managed to cast his spell over a wide audience through what can broadly be called as ‘popular history’. From empires and money to global leadership, Ferguson has enchanted his audience by introducing them to newer albeit obscure topics…

The author of this edited volume, Sanjaya Baru correctly highlights uncertainty as the key problem caused by COVID-19. But the eminent economists who have contributed to this volume have largely ignored it. Most of them have analysed the situation as it existed sometime in the later part of 2020…

Despite the post-positivist and postmodern epistemic shifts that have blurred the boundary between traditional notions of objectivity and subjectivity, it wouldn’t be erroneous to proclaim that the most plausible historical evaluations have emerged in retrospect. The temporality of our subjectivity plays…

Adetailed and well laid/mapped trajectory of the passage of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, in India, this book can be read in three parts through clustering the five detailed chapters apart from the introduction and the conclusion: the role of ideas and multi-layered process of institutional change…