Tag Archives: Politics

The book by Debal K SinghaRoy provides an exquisite illustration of the situational reconstruction of new, fluid and layered identities in collective mobilizations, along the axis of caste, class, tribe, nationality, ethnicity, citizenship and social movements, resulting from the unprecedented social transformation caused by the spread…

In the existing scenario whereby the literature on urban life in India has almost reduced urban neighbourhoods to abstract monolithic entities embodying human settlements, and the ecology thereof, to the utter neglect of the embeddedness of these settlements in different communitarian identities and categorical values…

There is a common critical consensus that the 1947 Partition of South Asia correspondingly affected two regions in particular—Punjab and Bengal. However, the recent scholarship on the 1947 Partition[1] explicates that the waves of refugee migration and the ensuing rehabilitation of individuals and families have had an enduring impact on other regions in India…

Maharashtra is the second largest State in India in terms of the number of Lok Sabha seats. Amongst the top five States sending the largest contingent of parliament members, Maharashtra was the only State wherein the Congress was able to retain power for significant years in the post-1989 phase of Indian politics…

More verbiage has been expended, on a global scale, on MK Gandhi’s 1930 Salt Satyagraha  than on any other event of national importance in the 20th century.  To this day, analysts continue to pore over the why and wherefore of the Gandhian satyagraha (literally, ‘soul-force’) movement…

The book foregrounds the ‘multitudinous dialectics’ (p. 215) at the core of the political, defying borders and hierarchies of disciplines and minds, and most fabulously, replete with the volumes of counterintuitive ideas. The book delivers in text as well as subtext…

Vinay Sitapati’s Jugalbandi is an absorbing account of the growth and development of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) before 2004. The story is about the Party when it was on the fringes, nowhere near capturing a plurality of the votes, and had no realistic chance of becoming the ruling party on its own…

Undercover: My Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva gives a chronological account of the events, testimonies, and use of state machinery in the execution of what culminated into a cold-blooded extermination of the Muslims in Gujarat. Ashish Khetan, a journalist by profession, presents…

Electoral politics in India, particularly in the Indian States, has acquired its own dynamism and complexity.  While it gets impacted by socio-economic factors—local, State level and national—it also impacts the society and polity through social and political alliances as well as voting patterns…

Modernity and democracy are responsible for changing the conventional nature of state power and social relationships. In India, the colonial state was responsible for introducing new institutional practices that regulated and reformed the state and societal practices…

Writing on the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, in its post-1947 avatar(s), is a challenge that few of us have met without being called out for missing out on not one but many strings which weave together the chaotic mess that has come to be euphemistically called the Kashmir problem…

The on-going farmers’ protest in India has once again highlighted the continuous significance of land on the one hand and its continuous process of making and re-making on the other. These protests point towards the fact that the land issues and agrarian politics are not settled…

British ethnographers and administrators commenced the documentation of Tribes and Caste in India. HA Rose, HH Risley, E Thurston, RE Enthoven, RV Russel and others made  painstaking efforts to identify different communities present in British India. After Independence…

In the book under review Nazima Parveen looks at the transformation of Shahjahanabad, which later became Old Delhi, between 1850 and the 1970s to understand the deep segregation that has emerged between the city’s Hindu and Muslim populations in terms of residential living…

Ever since I had started listening to rock music in my early teens, one of the most unusual figures I have come across is Henry Rollins. Rollins began as a front man for Black Flag, a band that is part of the canon of punk rock in its later period, and later made a name as the founder of Rollins Band…

India is a land of diverse opinions, interpretations and debates. It is a land of pluralistic but protean ethos. Herein history and hagiography, anecdotal and ideological, secular and sacred continuously coalesce and collide to configure and reconfigure its constitutive icons. In the process the icons often lose their existential/embodied moorings…

Chandrika Kaul’s brief introductory remarks to the edited volume of essays, titled M.K. Gandhi, Media, Politics and Society, begins with a rhetorical flourish. Gandhi, she remarks, ‘both made the news and was the news.’ His preoccupation with media…

unrecognizable and the future uncertain. Fear and restrictions are its primary currencies, and far from the garbled promise of stability, it is inducing greater instability in the lives of the people. Mamdani answers his question by tracing the history of nationalism as a principle to organize the political association that is the state…

In the last few years, many academic books have been published on the Emergency in India. One of the first comprehensive academic interventions was Bipan Chandra (2003), In the Name of Democracy. The British sociologist, David Lockwood (1929-2014)…

Samuel P Huntington in his seminal text, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century suggests three waves of democratization, indicating the third wave as neoteric as in 1989-1991. But the rise of contemporary Right-Wing populism puts a big question…