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The book revolves round the role played by Tripura in Indian foreign policy on East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. The ‘Agartala Doctrine’, that emerges from the policy of successive Tripura governments, stresses on ‘appropiate response’ – friendly approach towards regimes which are friendly and tough response to those which are not. Tripura is also marked out for playing an active role within the parameters of national foreign policy and furthering national interests – unlike some states which oppose national foreign policy initiatives for short-term domestic considerations. Having developed the ‘Agartala doctrine, the book then seeks to lay bare the emerging realities – both challenges and opportunities -- for Indian states in the eastern neighbourhood, even as the Union government pushes its Look East initiative. Twelve contributors, representing a varied mix from India and neighbouring countries with proven expertise on the region, examine both problems within India’s Northeast and focus on Bangladesh, Myanmar and China to explore the dynamics involved in pushing ahead with the Look East initiative. An effort is also made by three contributors to examine the growing role of states and provinces in the national foreign policy of US, China and Russia . The implications of regional groups like BCIM and BIMSTEC are also examined by some contributors. The underlying argument is to advocate the policy of ‘appropriate response’ to the present foreign policy challenges and hold up the Tripura role as a model for other Indian states when they seek to influence national foreign policy.

Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups (religious, caste, regional, and linguistic among others) have come to routinely damage artwork, disrupt their exhibition, and threaten and assault artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are said to be a protest against the allegedly ‘hurtful’ or ‘offensive’ artworks. They are even claimed to be a prescient call to save the identity of the community, in a manner that makes the communal identities hinge entirely on that artistic (mis)representation. Yet, at the time of these attacks, many who indulge in this kind of violence have seldom heard of the artist before or even seen, read, watched, let alone engaged with the artwork. Such is the wrench on the right to freedom of speech and expression in general, and on the physical safety and security of artists in particular, that has inspired fear, anger, and discomfort within the art world, marked by ominous declarations of a ‘cultural emergency’ owing to the loss of lives and property, and without the due processes of law—a consequence that was hardly synonymous with art practice in India, at least until a few decades ago. This book tells the story of violence against artists in India, marked by the intensifying sense of insecurity, fear, frustration, and anger within the art world. But to bring out its complexities—to build an analytical account for understanding what such destructive and even competitive attacks on artists convey about India’s liberal democracy, given that violence in its many avatars has not so much been an aberration to the form of India’s liberal democracy as much as its very condition—the book attempts to map the concrete political transformations that have informed its dynamic unfolding. In other words, as opposed to simply adding to the prevalent commentaries on violent regulation of free speech in India, this work focusses on the dynamics of violence in that regulation. Based on extensive interactions with assailants and artists, I argue that these attacks are not simply ‘anti-democratic’. But are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy’s functioning, as much they are contained by it, along with the wider material conditions that have prevented both free speech in India, and India at large, from being immutably locked in a downward spiral.

This collection of documents on Article 370 of the Constitution of India contains ‘temporary provisions’ with respect to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. This book presents documents on the five-month long negotiations which preceded its enactment on 17 October 1949. It explains the significance of the article, describes how it was eroded, and traces the Constitutional evolution of the State and its relationship with the Union of India thereafter. It covers the period from 1946 to 2010. From Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947 to the various negotiations thereafter, including Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest to the framing of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, and the replacement of Sadar–i–Riyasat, this book examines in detail the little-known constitutional history of the state.

This book presents a scholarly edition of one of the greatest works on Buddhist writings, Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma. It was published posthumously without citations, bibliographies and other scholarly apparatus. This present edition is scrupulously annotated, with inclusions of references to the Buddhist scripture and other texts which have served as references for Ambedkar. It also includes explanations of those scriptures, comments on Ambedkar's interpretations, and modifications of his sources. The volume deals with Ambedkar's interpretation of the concepts of Buddhism and the possibilities the religion offered for the liberation and upliftment of the Dalits. It offers Ambedkar's reflections and interpretations on the life of Siddharth Gautama, the Buddha, his teachings, and the proliferation of Buddhism in India through series of anecdotes and narratives that details the life of Buddha and the spread of his Dhamma. The book also provides detailed analysis of the basic tenets, canons, and tradition of the Dhamma. It also addressed the unresolved dispute over Ambedkar's interpretation of the Buddha's dhamma by examining the accuracy and correctness of his citations and by providing sources not included in his citations and references. It also considers the modifications made by Ambedkar on his sources of materials.

In January 2011, Felani Khatun was shot dead while attempting to cross the border from India to Bangladesh. Her body remained hung on the fence as a warning to those who illegally crossed an international border. Migration to India from the current geographical and political entity called Bangladesh is more than a century old and had begun long before the nation states were created in South Asia. Often termed as ‘foreigners’ and ‘infiltrators’, Bangladeshi migrants such as Felani find their way into India for the promise of a better future. Post 1971, there has been a steady movement of people from Bangladesh into India, both as refugees and for economic need, making this migration a complex area of inquiry. This book focuses on the contemporary issue of undocumented Bangladeshi migration to the three Indian states of Assam, West Bengal, and Delhi, and how the migrants are perceived in light of the ongoing discourses on the various nationalisms in India. Each state has a unique history and has taken different measures to respond to Bangladeshi migrants present in the state. Based on extensive fieldwork and insightful interviews with influential members from key political parties, civil society organizations, and Hindu and ethnic nationalist bodies in these states, the book explores the place and role of Bangladeshi migrants in relation to the inherent tension of Indian nationalism.

How can the government and citizens become more responsive to each other in alleviating poverty and reducing corruption? The book tests several intuitions including whether vulnerable groups demand more from the state if they acquire information about government programs by attending public meetings and participating in social and economic networks such as self- help groups, or by occupying elected positions reserved for them. The book assesses the effectiveness of formal and informal mechanisms—political representation, community social audits, access to information, membership in networks, political competition—that have enabled the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (MGNREGS) to reach its intended beneficiaries in Andhra Pradesh (AP), Tamil Nadu (TN), Madhya Pradesh (MP), and Rajasthan. Analytically, it asks why a mechanism worked or failed in doing two things: a) changing the dominant structure of institutional and social interactions; and b) transforming the ability of poor individuals to take advantage of these changes.

India’s current bureaucracy dates back to the nineteenth century, set up by the British in 1854. It is outdated and moribund. Clearly, India needs a better civil service, one that delivers policies and services to make its people more healthy, more secure, and better equipped to meet the challenges head on. While several countries in the world already have flexible, decentralized, and user-friendly civil services in place, India’s civil service has been stuck with a civil service that is rigid, hierarchical, centralized, and process-driven. This book presents a range of initiatives aimed at helping India build a world-class civil service suitable for the twenty-first century. These initiatives are mainly based on the reform experiences of nations such as Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, but remain appropriate for India. Some of these initiatives are structural, while others are thematic and deal with subjects ranging from performance and accountability to accounting, risk management, results orientation, values, and civil service law. The book is divided into four parts. Part I provides an overview of India’s current civil service. Part II deals with the institutional framework for reforms. Part III examines the organizational framework for the proposed reforms. Part IV describes the legal and ethical framework, and concludes by arguing for a modern, world-class civil service to improve India’s governance.

This book deals with the instability and violence in Northeast India, and discusses the attempts made by states and societies in the region to respond to them. It also investigates why attaining political order and peace in Northeast India has been a difficult task. Section I of this book examines the historical process of state-making in Manipur and Mizoram. Section II evaluates mobilization of identity in Manipur, followed by a similar exploration in the case of Mizoram. Section III discusses state capability by systematically comparing how agencies of the state in Manipur and Mizoram perform their basic functions. Lastly, it presents some lessons from the author's research in terms of the overall argument, as well as the manner in which the research findings open out to larger issues around state-making, state capability, and collective identity construction and mobilization, and how they can help to better inform policy responses to the crisis in the Northeast.

Institutions are norms that undergird organizations and are reflected in laws and practices. Scholars point towards the ‘stickiness’ of institutions as stubbornly persisting on the historical landscape. As institutions tend to persist, the related political, administrative, and social processes persist as well. Therefore, it is puzzling when perpetuating institutions change paths. This book unravels one such puzzle by examining the process of institutional change through the lenses of transformation in the ‘information regime’ in India by tracing the passage of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005. Historically, in India, the norm of secrecy was entrenched within the state, perpetuating since colonial times. Yet, in 2005, the RTI Act was enacted heralding an institutional shift from the norm of ‘secrecy’ to the new norm of ‘openness’. What explains this institutional change? Based on new historical evidence overlooked in the mainstream literature, this book shows that the RTI Act was path-dependent on ideas of openness that emerged within the state since Independence. It argues that an endogenous policy discourse on enacting legislation on access to information had begun since Independence; it incrementally evolved and reached a ‘tipping point’ and, after surviving many political challenges, resulted in institutional change. Initially these ideas emerged gradually and incrementally as part of opposition politics, but eventually became part of mainstream politics. The book presents an alternate perspective to the mainstream narrative explaining the evolution of the RTI Act and makes theoretical contribution to the literature on institutional change.

This book explores how movements that are explicitly anti-pluralist in nature still manage to succeed electorally within a democratic framework which they themselves reject. The book studies the ideologies and practices of the successful but minor affiliate of the Hindu nationalist movement: the Shiv Sena, a party which has dominated the political scene in Maharashtra—especially in its capital city Mumbai—for several years, and has been characterized by its culture of direct—often violent—action, its militant images, and its autocratic leader, Bal Thackeray. The author explores the internal dynamics of the party, its local mode of operation, and its strategies of mobilization within a democratic set up. It also examines the movement’s dilemma between norm-breaking and norm-setting as well as its role within the Hindu nationalist agenda of which it has become the most vociferous propagator. While studying the movement’s need for creating opportunities for action, the role of militant enemy images, and the integration of diverse interests and motivations in the politics of struggle, the author also analyzes the deliberate and repeated creation of space for such anti-pluralist violent movements within democratic environments.

India has the largest number of child labourers in the world, and has been the subject of intense media and political campaigns in the North aimed at addressing the abuse of children’s rights. This book explores children’s rights as a site of power and reveals how the rights discourse has been used by international actors, national elites, and local NGOs in the child labour debate in India. While discussing the children’s rights in the contemporary world, the author analyses human rights and power along with insights from postcolonial theorists. He provides empirical accounts of how three Indian NGOs—Bonded Labour Liberation Front, Butterflies, and South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude—are using the discourse of children’s rights to challenge child labour practices. Combining global and local perspectives to arrive at a comprehensive picture, the book locates the struggle for child rights on two fronts: critiquing neo-liberal globalization and challenging rights violations in India.

The political history of modern India is intimately intertwined with the history of the Indian National Congress. The Congress is unique not only for its longevity but also for its role in the building of the Indian nation. This book seeks to analyse important aspects of political change at a time when India is at once a rising power with an expanding middle class and a poor, unequal, and misgoverned country through the story of the shifts in the politics and strategy of the Congress Party. It investigates the structure and direction of change within the party and its governance agenda, essentially in its policy and strategy and in its organization and leadership after Indira Gandhi. It is a thematic account of political processes and the discursive and policy practices that shaped the thinking and approach of the Congress, and provides an interpretation of the politics of change in India and how this shaped the development of the Congress, especially under the United Progressive Alliance. It considers economic liberalization, the Ayodhya issue and the re-emergence of the Congress as a ruling party in 2004. This volume also analyzes how the dualist structure in the Congress leadership influenced the perception of the people about the party.

This book analyses the role of politics in the process in education policy reforms in the context of developing countries, specifically India. Considered significant in the real world, politics is missed out by the dominant approaches used to design or analyse the policy process. In the small body of analytical literature available, politics is viewed in a negative way, merely as an obstruction, which leads to failure of technically well designed policies However, if we focus also on cases of success, and view changes ‘downstream’ as poor people experience them, the reform–politics relationship unravels as a far more nuanced and deeply contested process. Comparing the case of educational policy reform in two Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, this book finds that teachers and their unions need not necessarily work as collective actors to block reforms; neither does decentralization prove to be the panacea that a more technical understanding of reforms promotes. Unintended policy consequences, building allies amongst teachers, and a preference for collaboration with unions over more conflictual approaches, are possible reasons for better outcomes in Andhra. In comparison, the stagnation in Bihar has been on account of weaker policies of teacher management, and elite capture of local institutions. Seeing the change process, in terms of the day-to-day conditions of policy-implementation, helps in understanding the locally embedded nature of power relations within which schools for the poor work, and policy change unfolds. Often, policy gains may be contingent outcomes of leaders pursuing their own goals, while they seemingly work in the name of the poor. This book engages with the big world or power without necessarily romanticizing the local, and understands that the empirical reasons why the pursuit of the basic right to education remains a struggle for the poor.

Elections are the procedural foundations of democracy. We cannot conceive of democracy without elections, but it is equally impossible to imagine elections without money. This book is the first in-depth investigation of the role money plays in Indian politics. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on political campaigns, unique surveys, and creative and innovative data analysis, this book opens readers’ eyes to the opaque and enigmatic ways in which money flows through the political heart of the world’s largest democracy. The contributions in this volume are structured around five central questions: What is the institutional and regulatory context governing the flow of money in politics? What are the sources of political finance? What do campaigns spend on and why do they spend such vast sums? How does money operate at, and interact with, different levels of government? And what are the substantive implications for democracy itself?

The US–India nuclear deal, popularly known as the 123 Agreement, announced by George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh on 18 July 2005, was a defining moment in the relationship of the two countries, as also India’s relationship with the non-proliferation regime. The Bush administration’s implied recognition of India’s nuclear weapons, and its abrupt reversal of three decades of sanctions to restore Indian access to nuclear fuel, reactors, and dual-use technologies despite being a non-proliferation treaty non-signatory, led to contentious debates in both India and the USA. A Debate to Remember emphasizes the multifaceted debate in India over the nuclear deal using concepts from science and technology studies. It focuses on the intense contestation over the civil-military mix of India’s separation plan, the competition between the Iran–Pakistan–India pipeline and the nuclear deal, the role of retired nuclear scientists, and the issue of liability that has stalled the full implementation of the nuclear deal. The impact of domestic factors on issues ranging from the civil-military status of breeder reactors to the Indian insistence on no restriction on future nuclear testing in the 123 Agreement is also revealed in this book.

This book is about group rights and liberal democracy in India. It presents the first systematic account of the structure of public reasoning over group rights in India. It critiques both liberal and post-colonial narratives and constructs a framework that combines their insights for an empirical study of the norms of group rights in the country. It suggests that public reason is to be found not just in the thought of extraordinary individuals, but also in more routine practices of debate. The debates considered in this book involve policies of group-differentiated rights in India, mainly since independence in 1947. In India, special treatment of Muslims and lower castes, in the Shah Bano and Mandal cases, posed urgent dilemmas and was the topic of intense debate. Could special treatment for particular groups be reconciled with liberal democratic commitments to equal individual rights? Would the greater recognition of religion and caste in public policy mean the end of the Nehruvian nationalist project of ultimately transcending ethnicity, of building political community across social difference? For tackling the difficult dilemmas of group rights, was politics a problem or a part of the solution? The book’s interest in these questions coincided fortuitously with the emergence of liberal theories on group rights in the 1990s, which provided the initial intellectual shape to this inquiry. It elaborates the conceptual frame and its application to understanding key policy and power shifts in post-colonial India.

This book investigates the rise and fall of the broader parliamentary left, and the dynamics of national coalition governments, in modern Indian democracy. Since the 1970s, socialist, communist and regional parties in India have sought to forge a progressive “third force.” Most scholars typically dismiss its principal manifestations—the Janata Party, National Front and United Front—as inherently opportunistic coalitions of power-seeking politicians. Employing a variety of methods and resources, including the rare confidential testimonies of key political actors, this book provides a fine-grained analytic narrative to challenge prevailing wisdom. The politics of each governing coalition, despite their self-evident flaws and short-lived tenures, revealed the outlines of a distinctive national vision. Analyzing the politics of coalition in India afresh, moreover, yields wider theoretical insights. Competing partisan interests and formal institutional arrangements, as existing scholarship and coalition theory rightly emphasize, shape important outcomes. Yet most studies fail to analyze how multiparty governments actually function. Hence they overstate the stability of and polarity between multiple political motivations, and discount internal party debates over whether to share power, with whom and to what extent, and how. In such circumstances, the strategies, tactics and choices of actors become especially significant. The pursuit of power in a highly regionalized federal parliamentary democracy creates incentives to forge national coalition governments, yet paradoxically decreases their chances of surviving. Ultimately, the failure of socialists and communists to exercise better political judgment regarding their real historical possibilities at key junctures led to the decline of the broader Indian left.

As a key state in the international system, India’s positions and contributions on issues like climate change, global health, humanitarian crises, and nuclear disarmament significantly affect how these issues are addressed. Scholarly work mapping India’s multilateral behaviour has extended from covering the United Nations to a wide range of fora where India is seeking to shape issues that affect its security and development. Yet, the literature on Indian multilateralism lags, focusing disproportionately on India’s ostensibly obstructionist tendencies without adequately contextualizing why India behaves this way. There has been no serious exploration of how India concretely negotiates multilateral issues. In this book, Karthik Nachiappan investigates how India negotiates international rules covering issues like climate change, nuclear disarmament, tobacco control and international trade. By unpacking these negotiations, he shows that India’s multilateral persona is more nuanced than is generally understood. When interests converge, Indian negotiators are willing to shape and ratify international agreements, conceding when necessary to cut deals and make compromises.

This book surveys key features of contemporary Indian foreign policy. The text identifies relevant aspects of Indian history, examines the role of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and international economic factors. It analyzes the specifics of India’s policy within its South Asian neighbourhood, and with respect to China, the USA, West Asia, East Asia, Europe, and Russia as well as multilateral diplomacy. The book also touches on Indian ties to Africa and Latin America, and the Caribbean. India’s ‘soft power’, the role of migration in its policy, and other cross-cutting issues are analyzed, as is the role and approach of several categories of foreign policy actors in India. Substantive conclusions touch on policies India may want or need to adjust in its quest for international stature.

This book offers fresh insights into ethnic conflict and democracy with reference to Northeast India, where insurgency and counter-insurgency operations have caused human and material losses, eroded the region’s democratic fabric, and institutionalised authoritarianism. The result is a growing dissonance between the concept of ethnic homelands and the political economy that actually exists in the region. The book also traces the origins of the Naga insurgency—Northeast India’s oldest armed conflict—and looks at the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) during different phases of its power and influence. The author argues that if peace and development are to be brought to the region, India’s policy would have to be reoriented and linked to a new foreign policy towards Southeast Asia through the pursuit of a dynamic ‘Look East’ policy. In the Preface, the author discusses the issues of insider/outsider and the politics of location which have been interpreted by reviewers and critics as the main themes of the book.