Constitutional Law (Books and Journals)

Jelle J. P. Wouters, ed. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity & Indigeneity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2022, 426 pages, ₹1,638.

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...

Mukulika Banerjee, Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2022. 256pp., ₹995.

This article analyses the environmental politics of Hindu nationalism in India after 2014, which is deeply enmeshed with aggressive nationalism. Taking as its case study articles, newspaper reports and visuals published in the Organiser, a leading magazine of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), it focuses on four ubiquitous environmental themes—imagination of a great Hindu motherland; icons of

Democracy has become an accepted lexicon among ruling elites and the general public through the twentieth century. However, there are also doubts about its strength in the current century. Looking at survey data, this article attempts a first-cut analysis of citizens’ commitment to democracy. Taking an elected government as the primary principle of democracy, do citizens make concessions to non-el

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,

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy. India: Permanent Black. 2021. 260 pages. ₹795. ISBN: 9788178246451.

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

Koushiki Dasgupta, Sadhus in Indian Politics: Dynamics of Hindutva. New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 2021. 284 pages. ₹847. ISBN: 9789391370961.

• Studies in Indian Politics

Conventional sampling methodologies for citizens/households in urban research in India are constrained due to the lack of readily available, reliable sampling frames. Voter lists, for example, are riddled with errors and, as such may not be able to provide a robust sampling frame from which a representative sample can be drawn. The Jana–Brown Citizenship Index project consortium (Janaagraha,...

• Studies in Indian Politics

Akhil Ranjan Dutta, Hindutva Regime in Assam: Saffron in the Rainbow. SAGE Publications. 2021. 329 pages. ₹1295. ISBN: 9789391370411. Nani Gopal Mahanta, Citizenship Debate over NRC & CAA: Assam and the Politics of History. SAGE Publications. 2021. 326 pages. ₹1395. ISBN: 9789391370299.

• Studies in Indian Politics

Capitalism is usually associated with inequality. The Indian variant of capitalism creates its specific structure of inequality. The recent trends of capital concentration in India, facilitated by the political decision-making, shape particular patterns of the rise in inequalities. The nature of capitalism in India is linked to the nature of capital concentration and the low bargaining power of...

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

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...

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

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...

• Studies in Indian Politics

Capitalism is usually associated with inequality. The Indian variant of capitalism creates its specific structure of inequality. The recent trends of capital concentration in India, facilitated by the political decision-making, shape particular patterns of the rise in inequalities. The nature of capitalism in India is linked to the nature of capital concentration and the low bargaining power of...

• Studies in Indian Politics

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...

• Studies in Indian Politics

Conventional sampling methodologies for citizens/households in urban research in India are constrained due to the lack of readily available, reliable sampling frames. Voter lists, for example, are riddled with errors and, as such may not be able to provide a robust sampling frame from which a representative sample can be drawn. The Jana–Brown Citizenship Index project consortium (Janaagraha,...

• Studies in Indian Politics

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...

• Studies in Indian Politics

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...

• Studies in Indian Politics

The article aims to explicate the binary created between the two sweeteners, that is, gur (jaggery) and sugar. The focal point of this article is to understand with the analytical framework of politics of knowledge how a ‘traditional’ sweetener, that is, gur, is replaced from our diet by a ‘modern’ sweetener, that is, sugar. This framework replaces the term ‘traditional’ knowledge with ‘already...

• Studies in Indian Politics

Media is an integral part of any society. In modern societies where it has grown so much, it becomes very important to pay attention to the role of media in constructing the social. This article discusses how the role of press in establishing the hegemony of the modern-industrial west works through the politics of news, establishing the hierarchies in the politics of knowledge in general and...

• Studies in Indian Politics

Peter Ronald deSouza, Hilal Ahmed and Mohd. Sanjeer Alam, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing House, 2019), 203 pp. ₹1,299.

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

• Studies in Indian Politics

This article reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy and how the former emerges from within democracy only to subvert it. The essay outlines important conceptual issues in the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy, discusses the relationship between the idea of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and ‘Hindu Rajya’, and delves into the complex interplay between Hindu...