The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India's 2014 Election
Irfan Ahmad and Pralay Kanungo
Abstract
Electoral democracy combines the ideas and practices of warfare and welfare, where both work in tandem as near synonyms. India’s robust electoral democracy exemplifies this combination in diverse forms. Critically analysing the 2014 Parliamentary elections beyond the seduction of immediacy and bare cold statistics, this book puts human subjectivity at the centre of election studies and, through an anthropological–sociological approach, makes lives—human and non-human, lived and unlived or unlivable—central to any understanding of elections and democracy. Crafting a new, comprehensive approach, ... More
Electoral democracy combines the ideas and practices of warfare and welfare, where both work in tandem as near synonyms. India’s robust electoral democracy exemplifies this combination in diverse forms. Critically analysing the 2014 Parliamentary elections beyond the seduction of immediacy and bare cold statistics, this book puts human subjectivity at the centre of election studies and, through an anthropological–sociological approach, makes lives—human and non-human, lived and unlived or unlivable—central to any understanding of elections and democracy. Crafting a new, comprehensive approach, this volume looks at the 2014 elections in relation to the changing nature and forms of elections and democracy globally. Coming from multidisciplinary backgrounds, the contributors to this volume use ethnographic observations to open up a space for new theoretical and methodological reflections on the role of media in Indian elections, the shift to the right in 2014 and its consequences, the significance of traditional Hindu spaces such as the river Ganga in BJP’s victory, the role of gurus like Baba Ramdev, and the electoral choices available to and exercised by the minorities, among others.
Keywords:
charisma,
2014 elections,
democracy,
Hindus,
Muslims,
media,
Narendra Modi,
polarization,
anthropology–sociology,
political science,
development,
terrorism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199489626 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199489626.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Irfan Ahmad, editor
Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany
Pralay Kanungo, editor
ICCR Chair in Contemporary India Studies & Fellow, IIAS, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
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