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This book talks about the Indian political regime after 2014. It explores the changing meaning of diaspora and reflects upon the nature and features of Diaspora Policy of Prime Minister Modi and its impact on the changing perception about India in the world. The book also gives a glimpse of gender based perspective on how security of the environment promotes gender security. It also explores the adequate options existing for women to participate in order to improve human security in current political regime. A review of social welfare policies of current government is another highlight of this book; the present Government’s social welfare schemes aim to make programmes and schemes more efficient and give priority to empowerment of the vulnerable sections of the society including women, children and the marginalised. It also emphasises on the fact that Indian federalism is conducive to the social structure of India which has a plural and multicultural socio-cultural split. Furthermore it explains about how India followed a geopolitical code of regional ‘brothers’, a foreign policy belief system. The issue of Maoism and failure of the policy is also discussed in this tome. There is an emphasis on National Security which symbolizes a sense of confidence that the government of a sovereign state is able to instill into its citizenry through its proactive approach and actions. Moreover there is an enhanced focus on the increasingly localised economic development, which is a global concern, and currently gaining momentum.
Rethinking Democracy is an insightful and reflective monograph on democracy in general and Indian democracy in particular. In this work, Rajni Kothari revisits the core arguments he has laid down in his various writings in the past four decades Politics in India, State Against Democracy, Communalism in India, etc. While revisiting his writings, Kothari reflects, interrogates and even contests some of his earlier formulations on democracy, state and civil society, developing a new paradigm on the basis of his intellectual experience and activist experience. Kothari makes a powerful critique of prevailing democratic theory and practice in a changing global as well as Indian contaxt and concludes that democracy has failed to achieve its objective of human emancipation and survives merely as a dream. However, this disillusionment with democracy does not deter him from searching for an alternative model of a decentralized, participatory and emancipatory democracy.
Dynastic politics, usually presumed to be the antithesis of democracy, is a routine aspect of politics in many modern democracies. This book introduces a new theoretical perspective on dynasticism in democracies, using original data on twenty-first-century Indian parliaments. It argues that the roots of dynastic politics lie at least in part in modern democratic institutions - states and parties - which give political families a leg-up in the electoral process. It also proposes a rethinking of the view that dynastic politics is a violation of democracy, showing that it can also reinforce some aspects of democracy while violating others. Finally, this book suggests that both reinforcement and violation are the products, not of some property intrinsic to political dynasties, but of the institutional environment from which those dynasties emerge.
While a growing private sector and a vibrant civil society can help compensate for the shortcomings of India’s public sector, the state is—and will remain—indispensable in delivering basic governance. In Rethinking Public Institutions in India, distinguished political and economic thinkers critically assess a diverse array of India’s core federal institutions, from the Supreme Court and Parliament to the Election Commission and the civil services. Relying on interdisciplinary approaches and decades of practitioner experience, this volume interrogates the capacity of India’s public sector to navigate the far-reaching transformations the country is experiencing. An insightful introduction to the functioning of Indian democracy, it offers a roadmap for carrying out fundamental reforms that will be necessary for India to build a reinvigorated state for the twenty-first century.
What is the nation? What is the idea of India? Whose India is it, anyway? This inaugural volume in the series titled Rethinking India aims to kickstart a national dialogue on the key questions of our times. It brings together India's foremost intellectuals, academics, activists, technocrats, professionals and policymakers to offer an in-depth exploration of these issues, deriving from their long-standing work, experience and unflinching commitment to the collective idea of India, of who we can and ought to be. Vision for a Nation: Paths and Perspectives champions a plural, inclusive, just, equitable and prosperous India, committed to individual dignity as the foundation of the unity and vibrancy of the nation. In order to further disseminate these ideas-the vision for the nation as aspirationally reflected in the Constitution-this book provides a positive counter-narrative to reclaim the centrality of a progressive, deeply plural and forward-looking and inclusive India. It serves as a fresh reminder of our shared and shareable overlapping values and principles, and collective heritage and resources. The essays in the book are meaningful to anyone with an interest in contemporary Indian politics, South Asian studies, modern Indian history, law, sociology, media and journalism.
Jawaharlal Nehru being an architect of Indian polity, economy and foreign policy set the ball rolling. However, they have witnessed cataclysmic changes over a period of time. Indian polity has witnessed different waves of reorganisation of states, evolving democracy, spelling out of quasi-federal system and building a more inclusive political nation. Nehru set the agenda of economic development and framed the strategy of development accordingly. In this volume an attempt has made to have a fair understanding about Nehru by placing him in the context in which he worked and by taking into account the challenges that Post-Colonial India was facing during his time. However, the problems faced by the neo-liberal economy, and the challenges confronting Indian polity and foreign policy have again invoked the relevance of Nehruvian philosophy in contemporary India. The contributors to this volume have analysed the diverse aspects of Nehru's thinking and the policies that flowed from it to understand their relevance in contemporary Indian, Asian and global context. Note: T& F does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar—Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India’s founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India’s struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.
Caste is a contested terrain in India’s society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. It examines questions of untouchability, citizenship, social mobility, democratic politics, corporate hiring and Dalit activism. Using rich empirical evidence from the field across Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and other parts of north India, this volume presents the reasons for the persistence of caste in India from a new perspective. The book offers an original theoretical framework for comparative understandings of the entrenched social differences, discrimination, inequalities, stratification, and the modes and patterns of their reproduction. This second edition, with a new Introduction, delves into why caste continues to matter and how caste-based divisions often tend to overlap with the emergent disparities of the new economy. A delicate balance of lived experience and hard facts, this persuasive work will serve as essential reading for students and teachers of sociology and social anthropology, social exclusion and discrimination studies, political science, development studies and public policy.
Modern European intellectual history is thriving as never before. It has recovered from an era in which other trends like social and cultural history threatened to marginalize it. But in spite of enjoying a contemporary renaissance, the field has lost touch with the tradition of debating why and how to study ideas and thus lacks both a well-articulated set of purposes and a range of arguments for exactly what it means to pursue those purposes. This volume revives that tradition. Recalling past attempts to showcase the diversity and differentiation of modern European intellectual history, this volume also documents how much has changed in recent decades. Some authors are much readier to defend a history of ideas practiced over the long term - once the defining sin of the field. Others go so far as to insist on how ideas are always open to reappropriation and reevaluation beyond their original contexts - suggesting that it is an error to reduce the ideas to those contexts. Others still argue that, under threat from trends like social history, intellectual historians have forsaken any attempt to resolve for themselves how ideas are socially embodied. The volume also registers old and new trends in history that have affected the study of ideas, including the history of science, the history of academic disciplines, the history of psychology and "self," international and global history, and women's and gender history.
Caste is a contested terrain in India's society and polity. This book explores contemporary realities of caste in rural and urban India. Presenting rich empirical findings across north India, it presents an original perspective on the reasons for the persistence of caste in India today.