State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India
State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India

Author: Santana Khanikar

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0199092028

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How do people respond to a state that is violent towards its own citizens? In State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India, this question is addressed through insights offered by ethnographic explorations of everyday policing in Delhi and the anti-insurgency measures of the Indian army in Lakhipathar village in Assam. Battling the dominant understanding of the inverse connect between state legitimacy and use of violence, Santana Khanikar argues that use of violence does not necessarily detract from the legitimacy of the modern territorial nation-state. Based on extensive research of two sites, the book develops a narrative of how two facets of state violence, one commonly understood to be for routine maintenance of law and order and the other to be of extraordinary need for maintaining unity and integrity of the nation-state, often produce comparable responses. The book delves into the debates surrounding state–citizen relationship in India, while critically engaging with dominant notions of state legitimacy and its relation with use of violence by the state.

Political Violence and the Police in India
Political Violence and the Police in India

Author: K S Subramanian

Publisher: SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited

Published: 2007-10-09

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13:

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Increasing political violence in India is challenging the government’s ability to resolve conflicts democratically. In this topical book, K S Subramanian: - identifies patterns and trends in political violence in India; - examines how the government’s political machinery has responded; - explains why State response has been inadequate; and - recommends changes in structures and attitudes. The author sketches the growing crisis of governance by assessing the Central and state governments’ police organisations, especially key central agencies such as the Intelligence Bureau, the Central Paramilitary Forces and the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. In case studies of regions and communities affected by political violence, he takes the reader behind the scenes—whether it is on police partisanship in the communal pogrom in Gujarat, the official approach to the Naxalite problem, the violence against dalits and adivasis, or the violation of human rights in northeast India. With police reform being a major public concern, police research is gaining importance as a field of study. This book will appeal to students of criminal justice, political science, sociology, public policy and public administration, as well as policy makers, police and administrative officers, and human rights activists.

Red Tape
Red Tape

Author: Akhil Gupta

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-07-17

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0822351102

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Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project.

State Terror, State Violence
State Terror, State Violence

Author: Bettina Koch

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-16

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 365811181X

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The volume critically discusses theoretical discourses and theoretically informed case studies on state violence and state terror. How do states justify their acts of violence? How are these justifications critiqued? Although legally state terrorism does not exist, some states nonetheless commit acts of violence that qualify as state terror as a social fact. In which cases and under what circumstances do (illegitimate) acts of violence qualify as state terrorism? Geographically, the volume covers cases and discourses from the Caucasus, South East and Central Asia, the Middle East, and North America.

Provisional Authority
Provisional Authority

Author: Beatrice Jauregui

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-28

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 022640384X

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Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security. Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy. Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.

Lynching and Local Justice
Lynching and Local Justice

Author: Danielle F. Jung

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 95

ISBN-13: 1108888607

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What are the social and political consequences of poor state governance and low state legitimacy? Under what conditions does lynching – lethal, extralegal group violence to punish offenses to the community – become an acceptable practice? We argue lynching emerges when neither the state nor its challengers have a monopoly over legitimate authority. When authority is contested or ambiguous, mass punishment for transgressions can emerge that is public, brutal, and requires broad participation. Using new cross-national data, we demonstrate lynching is a persistent problem in dozens of countries over the last four decades. Drawing on original survey and interview data from Haiti and South Africa, we show how lynching emerges and becomes accepted. Specifically, support for lynching most likely occurs in one of three conditions: when states fail to provide governance, when non-state actors provide social services, or when neighbors must rely on self-help.