Constitutional Law (Books and Journals)
- Studies in Indian Politics From No. 1-1, June 2013 to No. 10-2, December 2022 Sage Publications, Inc., 2021
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Book review: Subrata K. Mitra, Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State
Subrata K. Mitra, Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2021. 481 pages. ₹476.
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Parties, Civil Society and Democratic Deepening: Comparing India, Brazil and South Africa
Despite being among the most successful democracies in the Global South, India, Brazil and South Africa have all recently experienced democratic crises. I argue that these democratic crises result from the formation of social coalitions that have been willing to subvert democratic institutions and practices in order to preserve or restore their social and economic privileges. In structural terms,
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Book review: Anupama Roy, Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC
Anupama Roy, Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC. India: Oxford University Press. 2022. 288 pages. ₹1,495.
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Book review: Jelle J. P. Wouters, ed. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity & Indigeneity
Jelle J. P. Wouters, ed. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity & Indigeneity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022, 426 pages, ₹1,638.
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The National Bias of India’s First-Past-The-Post System
The relationship between the local and the national in Indian politics has taken a variety of forms, from secessionist tendencies to agitational politics around specific issues. The course of this relationship is typically explored through electoral performance, primarily whether a party wins sufficient seats to form the government. There is much less attention paid to the relationship between...
- ‘Documents of Power’: Historical Method and the Study of Politics
- Note on Special Section: Comparative Assessments of Indian Democracy
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Gujarat 2022 Elections: Explaining BJP’s Hegemony
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) victory in the 2022 Gujarat state elections not only broke a record but also reversed the trend that was resulting in Congress’ growing effectiveness election after election. This time, the Congress registered its worse performance ever, largely because of the entry of a new player, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), but also because of the progress of the BJP. The...
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Taxation and Accountability in Local Government: A Democratic Deficit in Andhra Pradesh
This study looks at the vibrancy of local democracy through linkages between local tax collection and accountability: When villagers pay taxes to the village panchayat are they more likely to hold the panchayat accountable? Fifty villages in Andhra Pradesh were surveyed through 500 structured interviews. The study found that in the low-tax environment where panchayats generally follow government-e
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Institutional ‘Presence’ and the Indian State: The Long Narrative
The long durée narrative of the state in independent India is one of accumulation of incremental and aggregate power relations arrayed in and through political institutions inhabiting a field of power. These relationships are protean, exhibiting conflicts and contestations among institutions that compete for power within the domain of the state. The ‘ebbs’ and ‘flows’ in power are visible in the...
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What Lies Beneath the Successes of Hindutva: Reading the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections 2022
What explains the success of the Bhartiya Janta Party in the 18th Uttar Pradesh Vidhan Sabha election? Hindutva gets the due credit but the socio-political dynamics beneath Hindutva is often sidelined in political discussions. What makes Hindutva appealing? Is Hindutva a fixed ideology or an ever-evolving one? How does Hindutva correspond with the lived realities of people? How does Hindutva plug
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Saving Indian Villages: British Empire, the Great Depression and Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement
This article traces an intricate relationship between Mahatma Gandhi’s call for Civil Disobedience (1930–1933) and the global economic slump of the 1920s experienced by Britain and colonial India. I argue that the economic hardships faced by Indians (particularly the peasant classes) forced Gandhi to revisit his sociopolitical approach to India’s nationalist movement. Despite the chronological...
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Book review: Shekhar Pathak, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History
Shekhar Pathak, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History. India: Permanent Black. 2021. 371 pages. ₹895. ISBN: 9788178245553.
- Teaching International Relations in Indian Universities: Issues and Challenges
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State and Nation: Shall the Twain Ever Meet?
This article traces the separate trajectories of the Indian state and the Indian nation since independence. The state machinery, largely inherited from colonial times, retained its imperial character, which facilitated the integration of the princely states. The negotiated transfer of power also created the myth that the state was prior to the nation whose sovereign people gave itself a new...
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Taxation and Accountability in Local Government: A Democratic Deficit in Andhra Pradesh
This study looks at the vibrancy of local democracy through linkages between local tax collection and accountability: When villagers pay taxes to the village panchayat are they more likely to hold the panchayat accountable? Fifty villages in Andhra Pradesh were surveyed through 500 structured interviews. The study found that in the low-tax environment where panchayats generally follow government-e
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Book review: Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy
Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy. India: Permanent Black. 2021. 260 pages. ₹795. ISBN: 9788178246451.
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Book review: Shekhar Pathak, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History
Shekhar Pathak, The Chipko Movement: A People’s History. India: Permanent Black. 2021. 371 pages. ₹895. ISBN: 9788178245553.
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Saving Indian Villages: British Empire, the Great Depression and Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement
This article traces an intricate relationship between Mahatma Gandhi’s call for Civil Disobedience (1930–1933) and the global economic slump of the 1920s experienced by Britain and colonial India. I argue that the economic hardships faced by Indians (particularly the peasant classes) forced Gandhi to revisit his sociopolitical approach to India’s nationalist movement. Despite the chronological...
- Sampling and Categorization of Households for Research in Urban India
- Teaching International Relations in Indian Universities: Issues and Challenges
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Nehru’s Elephant Envoys: Animal Modernity, Orientalist Gaze and India’s Soft Power
The colonial masters classified Indian subjects according to animalistic iconographies of rebel tiger or docile elephant. Even prior to the colonial imaginings, orientalist gaze associated elephant with the Indian geographical imagery. After decolonization, due to circumstantial necessities India, one of the biggest elephant suppliers to Europe, started to gift elephants to war-stricken zoos not...
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The Politics of Knowledge of Medicinal Plants in India: Corporations, Collectors and Cultivators as Constituents
This article seeks to understand one of the most important problems in the contemporary discourse of modern development, that of management, control, collection and trade of medicinal plants in India. The tremendous growth in the market for herbal medicines since the 1990s has prompted large-scale industrial production of these medicines by big pharmaceutical corporations. This relies on...
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New India, Hindutva Constitutionalism, and Muslim Political Attitudes
This article explores Muslim political attitudes in contemporary India. It contextualizes the political responses of Muslim communities in the backdrop of two crucial legal-constitutional changes introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government: the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019. These changes, I suggest, stem from the official...
- Sound Subjects and Hearing Cultures: Towards an Acoustic Ethnography
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Book review: Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajendra Kumar Pandey, Reconceptualizing Indian Democracy: The Changing Electorate
Bidyut Chakrabarty and Rajendra Kumar Pandey, Reconceptualizing Indian Democracy: The Changing Electorate (New Delhi: SAGE, 2020), 258 pp., ₹1,050.
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Book review: Adam Michael Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums
Adam Michael Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 304 pp., ₹663.
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Book review: Jinee Lokaneeta, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogation in India
Jinee Lokaneeta, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogation in India (Hyderabad: Oriental BlackSwan, 2020), 264 pp. ₹795.
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Religion-as-Ethnicity and the Emerging Hindu Vote in India
Religious division formed the basis for the subcontinent’s partition and has continued to be a major social cleavage in local relations. Yet remarkably religious parties have rarely been successful in India. This may be changing with an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party mobilizing the Hindu vote. Accordingly, this article seeks to explicate the conditions under which successful religious parties...
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Reinventing the Republic: Faith and Citizenship in India
In India, a new legal regime and political ecosystem has been enacted for India’s Muslim minority that effectively undermines the constitutional commitment to secularism. This article examines the legal, political, social, moral, and international implications of an assemblage of law and policy—namely, the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, as well as two other initiatives, the National Register of...