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.

The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India

What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar—Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India’s founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India’s struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.

This book deals with the Khilafat movement (1918-1924) in British India, which aimed at mobilizing pan-Islam for saving Ottoman Turkey from dismemberment and securing political reforms for India. It also examines the gradual transition of Muslim politics from pan-Islam to territorial nationalism.

Honorable Mention, 2018 Global Division Book Award presented by the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Historically, the Indian state has not offered welfare and social rights to all of its citizens, yet a remarkable characteristic of its polity has been the ability of citizens to dissent in a democratic way. In Undervalued Dissent, Manjusha Nair argues that this democratic space has been vanishing slowly. Based on extensive fieldwork in Chhattisgarh, a regional state in central India, this book examines two different informal workers' movements. Informal workers are not part of organized labor unions and make up eighty-five percent of the Indian workforce. The first movement started in 1977 and was a success, while the other movement began in 1989 and still continues today, without success. The workers in both movements had similar backgrounds, skills, demands, and strategies. Nair maintains that the first movement succeeded because the workers contended within a labor regime that allowed space for democratic dissent, and the second movement failed because they contested within a widely altered labor regime following neoliberal reforms, where these spaces of democratic dissent were preempted. The key difference between the two regimes, Nair suggests, is not in the withdrawal of a prolabor state from its protective and regulatory role, as has been argued by many, but rather in the rise of a new kind of state that became functionally decentralized, economically predatory, and politically communalized. These changes, Nair concludes, successfully de-democratized labor politics in India.

An analysis of the use of media by political and religious interest groups in India

In this book, Das presents a class-based perspective on the economic and political situation in contemporary India in a globalizing world. It deals with the specificities of India’s capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as poverty/inequality, geographically uneven development, technological change, and export-oriented, nature-dependent production. The book also deals with Left-led struggles in the form of the Naxalite/Maoist movement and trade-union strikes, and presents a non-sectarian Left critique of the Left. It also discusses the politics of the Right expressed as fascistic tendencies, and the question of what is to be done. The book applies abstract theoretical ideas to the concrete situation in India, which, in turn, inspires rethinking of theory. Das unabashedly shows the relevance of class theory that takes seriously the matter of oppression/domination of religious minorities and lower castes.

This look at economic development in India focuses on interactions between the central state and regional elites. India is widely regarded as a "failed" developmental state, seemingly the exception that belies the prediction of a triumphant Asian century.