Rethinking State Politics in India

Rethinking State Politics in India

Author: Ashutosh Kumar

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1315391449

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In recent decades, India has been witness to the assertion of geographically, culturally and historically constituted distinct and well-defined regions that display ethnic, communal, caste and other social–political cleavages. This book examines the changing configurations of state politics in India. Focussing on identity politics and development, it explores the specificities of the regions within states — not merely as politico-administrative constructs but also as conceived in historical, geographic, economic, sociological or cultural terms. Adopting a comparative approach, the book looks at alternative theoretical approaches — the quest for homeland, identity, caste politics and public policy. This second edition includes a new Introduction that updates the research in the area, while further developing the theoretical framework. One of the first major volumes on federalism in India, including studies from across the nation, this book will be indispensable for students and scholars of political science, sociology, history and South Asian studies.


Rethinking Public Institutions in India

Rethinking Public Institutions in India

Author: Devesh Kapur

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-02-16

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0199091285

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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.


Rethinking Democracy

Rethinking Democracy

Author: Rajni Kothari

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9788125028949

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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.


Rethinking Indian Political Institutions

Rethinking Indian Political Institutions

Author: Crispin Bates

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2005-09

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1843317524

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This book explores various aspects and processes of the twentieth-century Indian state, from the central, Union government down to grassroot-level in the provinces and villages.


Rethinking Markets in Modern India

Rethinking Markets in Modern India

Author: Ajay Gandhi

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1108486789

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Using historical and ethnographic analyses, this book shows how Indian markets are embedded in society and politically contested.


Religious Politics and Secular States

Religious Politics and Secular States

Author: Scott W. Hibbard

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-10-15

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0801899206

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2011 Winner of the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize of the International Political Science Association This comparative analysis probes why conservative renderings of religious tradition in the United States, India, and Egypt remain so influential in the politics of these three ostensibly secular societies. The United States, Egypt, and India were quintessential models of secular modernity in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Islamists challenged the Egyptian government, India witnessed a surge in Hindu nationalism, and the Christian right in the United States rose to dominate the Republican Party and large swaths of the public discourse. Using a nuanced theoretical framework that emphasizes the interaction of religion and politics, Scott W. Hibbard argues that three interrelated issues led to this state of affairs. First, as an essential part of the construction of collective identities, religion serves as a basis for social solidarity and political mobilization. Second, in providing a moral framework, religion's traditional elements make it relevant to modern political life. Third, and most significant, in manipulating religion for political gain, political elites undermined the secular consensus of the modern state that had been in place since the end of World War II. Together, these factors sparked a new era of right-wing religious populism in the three nations. Although much has been written about the resurgence of religious politics, scholars have paid less attention to the role of state actors in promoting new visions of religion and society. Religious Politics and Secular States fills this gap by situating this trend within long-standing debates over the proper role of religion in public life.


Democratic Dynasties

Democratic Dynasties

Author: Kanchan Chandra

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 131659212X

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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.


When Crime Pays

When Crime Pays

Author: Milan Vaishnav

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0300216203

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The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.


Social Movements and the State in India

Social Movements and the State in India

Author: Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-23

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1137591331

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Questions of the extent to which social movements are capable of deepening democracy in India lie at the heart of this book. In particular, the authors ask how such movements can enhance the political capacities of subaltern groups and thereby enable them to contest and challenge marginality, stigma, and exploitation. The work addresses these questions through detailed empirical analyses of contemporary fields of protest in Indian society – ranging from gender and caste to class and rights-based legislation. Drawing on the original research of a variety of emerging and established international scholars, the volume contributes to an engaged dialogue on the prospects for democratizing Indian democracy in a context where neoliberal reforms fuel a contradictory process of uneven development.


Rethinking the Developmental State

Rethinking the Developmental State

Author: Vibha Pingle

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9780312219956

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Existing arguments about the developmental state primarily examine how a developmental state acts, not why it acts the way it does. Vibha Pingle presents an argument about the kind of business-government relations that make a state willing and able to act in a manner beneficial to development, and what effect the differences in relations between bureaucrats and entrepreneurs have on emerging industries."--BOOK JACKET.