This volume deliberates on various dimensions of the challenges confronting parliamentary democracy in India, and provides a platform for debates emanating from the depths of society, new critiques of the manner in which democracy has functioned, and the strengths and weaknesses of Indian democracy. It deals with the theory and practice of democratic governance, the role of the judiciary in strengthening the legislative and executive functions of the state, the role of the media as the fourth estate, the rise of social movements and civil society, the critical role of economic development in sustaining democracy, and the role of democracy in containing ethnic conflicts. It also includes two essays on democracy at the grassroots analysing electoral behaviour and the gender perspective, and presents alternatives that have been offered by civil society activists, academicians, and researchers, who together form an intellectual comity.
More than seventy years after its founding, with Narendra Modi's authoritarian Hindu nationalists in government, is the dream of Indian democracy still alive and well? India's pluralism has always posed a formidable challenge to its democracy, with many believing that a clash of identities based on region, language, caste, religion, ethnicity, and tribe would bring about its demise. With the meteoric rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the nation's solidity is once again called into question: is Modi's Hindu majoritarianism an anti-democratic attempt to transform India into a monolithic Hindu nation from which minorities and dissidents are forcibly excluded? With examinations of the way that class and caste power shaped the making of India's postcolonial democracy, the role of feminism, the media, and the public sphere in sustaining and challenging democracy, this book interrogates the contradictions at the heart of the Indian democratic project, examining its origins, trajectories, and contestations.
Under what conditions are some developing countries able to create stable democracies while others have slid into instability and authoritarianism? To address this classic question at the center of policy and academic debates, The Promise of Power investigates a striking puzzle: why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? Drawing on interviews, colonial correspondence, and early government records to document the genesis of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated independence movements, Maya Tudor refutes the prevailing notion that a country's democratization prospects can be directly attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality. Instead, she demonstrates that the differential strengths of India's and Pakistan's independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. She also establishes that these movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. By illuminating the source of this enduring contrast, The Promise of Power offers a broad theory of democracy's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, democratization, state-building, and South Asian political history.
"...combines a study of the rise and fall of Bose with a study of the roots of Indian democracy. The treatment of Bose focuses on his ideology, foreign policy, relations with Nazi Germany and Japan, and the myths surrounding his death.... the book will interest biographers and students of Indian history and politics."--Choice "Expertly translated into English, [Democracy Indian Style] knowledgeably explores the workings of the modern East Indian political system by focusing upon the life of one man, Subhas Chandra Bose, and his profound impact upon India's governmental system."--The Bookwatch As a nation India is very old. It had deep roots in its pre-colonial history, but it is also a product of Western-style democracy, which has shaped and even created the nation. Democracy Indian Style focuses on the Indian factors underlying its successful democracy by describing and analyzing the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, who competed with Nehru for the role of Gandhi's heir, and his impact on India before and after Independence. The book is balanced between chapters that explain Bose's life and career and those that describe and analyze the Indian political system. It explains India's stable democracy as a mixture of British and American patterns--Westminster parliamentary rule plus federalism--and a specific set of power-sharing arrangements among religions, linguistic groups, and castes. India fulfills all the criteria the traditional understanding of pluralistic democracy implies. Basic freedoms are guaranteed, despite the temptation during Indira Gandhi's "emergency" rule to follow the path of authoritarian development. Precisely because India, after Pakistan's separation, did not become "Hindustan" but stayed on track as a secular, pluralistic democracy, it became the most prominent challenge to the traditional wisdom of comparative politics. Democracy Indian Style gives one answer to the Indian enigma of how democracy succeeds by describing the working of the Indian constitution, the weaknesses of the party system, and the specifics of Indian elections. The focus on Bose provides the second explanation. The author describes Bose's rise to the leadership of the Indian National Congress in the 1930s, his attempt to combine an economic leftist outlook with an extremely pragmatic foreign policy, his failure to get serious help from Nazi Germany, his success with the Japanese war lords--and his tragic end in August 1945. Democracy Indian Style is a timely exploration of the roots of Indian democracy, and will be of interest to political scientists, historians, and students of India. Anton Pelinka is professor of political science at the University of Innsbruck and director of the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna. Among his recent publications are Austria, Out of the Shadow of the Past, Politics of the Lesser Evil: Leadership, Democracy and Jaruzelski's Poland (Transaction), and The Haider Phenomenon in Austria, edited with Ruth Wodak (Transaction).
Records and archival arrangements in Australia are globally relevant because Australia's indigenous people represent the oldest living culture in the world, and because modern Australia is an ex-colonial society now heavily multicultural in outlook. Archives and Societal Provenance explores this distinctiveness using the theoretical concept of societal provenance as propounded by Canadian archival scholars led by Dr Tom Nesmith. The book's seventeen essays blend new writing and re-workings of earlier work, comprising the fi rst text to apply a societal provenance perspective to a national setting.After a prologue by Professor Michael Moss entitled A prologue to the afterlife, this title consists of four sections. The first considers historical themes in Australian recordkeeping. The second covers some of the institutions which make the Australian archival story distinctive, such as the Australian War Memorial and prime ministerial libraries. The third discusses the formation of archives. The fourth and final part explores debates surrounding archives in Australia. The book concludes by considering the notion of an archival afterlife. - Presents material from a life's career working and thinking about archives and records and their multiple relationships with history, biography, culture and society - The first book to focus specifically on the Australian archival scene - Covers a wide variety of themes, including: the theoretical concept of the records continuum; census records destruction; Prime Ministerial Libraries; and the documentation of war
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
