Discover the ultimate guide to India's dynamic political landscape in "Assessing the Leadership Battle in India." Dive deep into the captivating world of leadership as we undertake a comprehensive comparative analysis of two iconic figures, Mr. Narendra Modi and Mr. Rahul Gandhi, along with a host of other influential political leaders. Unravel the intriguing strategies, ideologies, and charismatic personas that have shaped the nation's destiny. This thought-provoking book offers valuable insights into the leadership styles, policies, and visions that have propelled these leaders to the forefront of Indian politics. Embark on a transformative journey as you navigate the corridors of power and gain a deeper understanding of the individuals vying to shape the future of the world's largest democracy.

This book puts together the most important contemporary writings in the debate on secularism. It deals with conceptual, normative and explanatory issues in secularism and addresses urgent questions, including the relevance of secularism to non-Western societies and the question of minority rights.

The author takes issue with the complacent belief that a happy mixture of deterrence, arms control and luck will enable humanity to cope adequately with weapons of mass destruction, arguing that the risks are ever more serious.

The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

"India is changing, and Europe is missing out. A new collection of essays explores India's economic, domestic and foreign policy prospects"--Publisher's description.

In The Other One Percent, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh provide the first authoritative and systematic overview of South Asians living in the United States.

Western policymakers, political activists and academics alike see patronage as the chief enemy of open, democratic societies. Patronage, for them, is a corrupting force, a hallmark of failed and failing states, and the obverse of everything that good, modern governance ought to be. South Asia poses a frontal challenge for this consensus. Here the world's most populous, pluralist and animated democracy is also a hotbed of corruption with persistently startling levels of inequality. Patronage as Politics in South Asia confronts this paradox with calm erudition: sixteen essays by anthropologists, historians and political scientists show, from a wide range of cultural and historical angles, that in South Asia patronage is no feudal residue or retrograde political pressure, but a political form vital in its own right. This volume suggests that patronage is no foe to South Asia's burgeoning democratic cultures, but may in fact be their main driving force.

Marked by deep ideological divisions, a massive advertising blitz and an election campaign that could claim to rival the US presidential polls, the 2014 general election has been called ‘historic’ for its verdict – a political party received a majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time in three decades. In this personal, partisan and superbly perceptive narrative of how the dice rolled in the four months leading up to 16 May 2014, Harish Khare – journalist, columnist, scholar and former media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – provides an honest, impassioned record of India’s greatest democratic exercise. Through a meticulous account of what he saw, heard and read during this time, Khare elucidates how the different political stakeholders kneaded into their day-to-day campaign rhetoric the latent cultural angst, economic anxieties and political expectations of a nation that has changed irrevocably over the past decade, to persuade the Indian voter to cast a decisive vote. From the brilliant and flexible campaign pitch made by the BJP to the jaded and outdated Congress rhetoric, from openly expressed middle-class aspirations to rural India’s resurgent hopes, and from communal polarization to shifting caste equations, How Modi Won It provides brilliant insight into and an incisive assessment of one of the most memorable elections in the country’s history.