This volume examines the distinct structural characteristics of Indian politics and unearths significant sociopolitical and economic processes which are critical to the political articulation of governance in the country. It reflects on the foundational values of Indian polity, the emergence of the nation post-colonialism, the structural fluidity of federalism in India, and the changing nature of the planning process in the country. The book also studies the electoral processes, social movements, party system, local and state governance. Apart from analyzing corruption and public grievance systems, the volume also probes into significant issues in Indian politics. This book will be useful to the students, researchers and faculty working in the field of political science, public administration, political sociology, political economy and post-colonial contemporary Indian politics in particular. It will also be an invaluable and interesting reading for those interested in South Asian studies.

The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.

""Deals with the issues at the intersecting domains of economics and politics"--Provided by publisher"--

From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how - far from being a system based on traditional values - Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.

""This book is a lively and accessible account of the remarkably complex legal and political situation of American Indian tribes and tribal citizens (who are also U.S. citizens) David E. Wilkins and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark have provided the g̀o-to' source for a clear yet detailed and sophisticated introduction to tribal soverignty and federal Indian policy. It is a valuable resource both for readers unfamiliar with the subject matter and for readers in Native American studies and related fields, who will appreciate the insightful and original scholarly analysis of the authors."--Thomas Biolsi, University of California at Berkeley" ""American Indian Politics and the American Political System is simply an indispensable compendium of fact and reason on the historical and modern landscape of American Indian law and policy. No teacher or student of American Indian studies, no policymaker in American Indian policy, and no observer of American Indian history and law should do without this book. There is nothing in the field remotely as comprehensive, usable, and balanced as Wilkins and Stark's work."--Matthew L.M. Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law" ""Wilkins has written the first general study of contemporary Indians in the United States from the disciplinary standpoint of political science. His inclusion of legal matters results in sophisticated treatment of many contemporary issues involving Native American governments and the government of the United States and gives readers a good background for understanding other questions. The writing is clear-not a minor matter in such a complex subject--and short case histories are presented, plus links (including websites) to many sources of information."--Choice

Why do some ethnic parties succeed in attracting the support of their target ethnic group while others fail? In a world in which ethnic parties flourish in both established and emerging democracies alike, understanding the conditions under which such parties rise and fall is of critical importance to both political scientists and policy makers. Drawing on a study of variation in the performance of ethnic parties in India, this book builds a theory of ethnic party performance in 'patronage democracies'. Chandra shows why individual voters and political entrepreneurs in such democracies condition their strategies not on party ideologies or policy platforms, but on a headcount of co-ethnics and others across party personnel and among the electorate.

The book begins with the momentous task of demolishing the prejudices attached with the phrase 'founding fathers' that has held an immense sway over constitutional interpretation. It shows that women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly had painstakingly co-authored a Constitution that embodied a moral imagination developed by years of feminist politics. It traces the genealogies of several constitutional provisions to argue that, without the interventions of these women framers, the Constitution would hardly have a much poorer document of rights and statecraft that it is. Situating these interventions in the larger trajectory of Indian feminism in which they are rooted, in the nationalist discourse with which they perpetually negotiated, and in the larger human rights discourse of the 1940s, the book shows that the women members of the Indian Constituent Assembly were much more than the 'founding mothers' of a republic.

On Rajiv Gandhi, 1944-1991, former prime minister of India.

This book analyses the quality of statistics such as geographic area, census population and sample survey statistics in a developing country. Using field interviews, archival sources, and secondary data covering the last seven decades, it explores the shifting relations between various kinds of statistics over their lifecycles and charts their cradle-to-grave political career. It uncovers a mutually constitutive relationship between data, development, and democracy and offers an exciting account of how government statistics are social artefacts dynamically shaped by political and economic factors. The book also quantifies the impact of data quality on the statistics of interest to policy makers such as household consumption expenditure and federal transfers. Numbers in India's Periphery makes a major contribution to the growing literature on the political economy of statistics in developing countries through a novel analysis of the shifting determinants of the nature of data in North East India.