This book explores the emergence of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as an alternative political force in Uttar Pradesh. It focuses on the historical continuity of Dalit social justice movements and organizational politics from pre- to post-colonial India and its subsequent institutionalization as a political force with the rise of the BSP in the state since the 1980s. The volume discusses the new age Dalit–Bahujan politics and its ethnicization of caste groups to create a bahujan samaj. The book analyzes the focused political leadership of Kanshiram and Mayawati, the strong party organization, and how they evolved an empowered Dalit ideology and identity by grassroots mobilization and championing Dalit icons and history. The author also explores the party’s strategies, slogans and alliances with other political parties and communities and its political manoeuvrings to retain its influence over the electorate. The book also effectively identifies the reasons for the political marginalization of the BSP in present times in the context of the phenomenal rise of the BJP in the state. The book will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of political science, sociology, Dalit and subaltern studies, exclusion studies and those working on the intersectionality of caste and class. It will also be useful for policy makers, think tanks and NGOs working in the domain of caste, marginality, social exclusion and identity politics.

This book is an unconventional articulation of the political thinking in India in a refreshingly creative manner in more than one way. Empirically, the book becomes innovative by providing an analytically more grasping contextual interpretation of Indian political thought that evolved during the nationalist struggle against colonialism. Insightfully, it attempts to unearth the hitherto unexplored yet vital subaltern strands of political thinking in India as manifested through the mode of numerous significant socio-economic movements operating side by side and sometimes as part of the mainstream nationalist movement. This book articulates the main currents of Indian political thought by locating the text and themes of the thinkers within the socio-economic and politico-cultural contexts in which such ideas were conceptualised and articulated. The book also tries to analytically grasp the influences of the various British constitutional devices that appeared as the responses of the colonial government to redress the genuine socio-economic grievances of the various sections of Indian society. The book breaks new ground in not only articulating the main currents of Indian political thought in an analytically more sound approach of context-driven discussion but also provokes new research in the field by charting a new course in grasping and articulating the political thought in India. This volume will be useful to the students, researchers and faculty working in the fields of political science, 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.

This book is a collection of essays written over the last five decades to document events related to the communal politics that have flourished in Gujarat. It features chapters on the historical aspects of communalism and the growth of the BJP in Gujarat, particularly focusing on its electoral politics.

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

Hidden behind the much-touted success story of India’s emergence as an economic superpower is another, far more complex narrative of the nation’s recent history, one in which economic development is frequently countered by profoundly unsettling, and often violent, political movements. In Democracy against Development, Jeffrey Witsoe investigates this counter-narrative, uncovering an antagonistic relationship between recent democratic mobilization and development-oriented governance in India. Witsoe looks at the history of colonialism in India and its role in both shaping modern caste identities and linking locally powerful caste groups to state institutions, which has effectively created a postcolonial patronage state. He then looks at the rise of lower-caste politics in one of India’s poorest and most populous states, Bihar, showing how this increase in democratic participation has radically threatened the patronage state by systematically weakening its institutions and disrupting its development projects. By depicting democracy and development as they truly are in India—in tension—Witsoe reveals crucial new empirical and theoretical insights about the long-term trajectory of democratization in the larger postcolonial world.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years. Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings. By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

Citizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. This book investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in rural India, Kruks-Wisner demonstrates that claim-making is possible in settings (poor and remote) and among people (the lower classes and castes) where much democratic theory would be unlikely to predict it. Examining the conditions that foster and inhibit citizen action, she finds that greater social and spatial exposure - made possible when individuals traverse boundaries of caste, neighborhood, or village - builds citizens' political knowledge, expectations, and linkages to the state, and is associated with higher levels and broader repertoires of claim-making.

Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This puzzle has been famously studied within wealthy Western democracies, yet the fact that the poor voter paradox also routinely manifests within poor countries has remained unexplored. This book studies how this paradox emerged in India, the world's largest democracy. Tariq Thachil shows how arguments from studies of wealthy democracies (such as moral values voting) and the global south (such as patronage or ethnic appeals) cannot explain why poor voters in poor countries support parties that represent elite policy interests. He instead draws on extensive survey data and fieldwork to document a novel strategy through which elite parties can recruit the poor, while retaining the rich. He shows how these parties can win over disadvantaged voters by privately providing them with basic social services via grassroots affiliates. Such outsourcing permits the party itself to continue to represent the policy interests of their privileged base.

Handbook of Tribal Politics in India is undoubtedly the most authoritative source for a systematic and comprehensive study of this vibrant field of scholarship. Divided into three sections, the chapters cover a broad range of themes ranging from a general introduction to tribal politics to exploring contemporary issues and concerns within the discipline. The book presents a trajectory and authentic overview of tribal politics while keeping in mind the changing relationship between tribal communities and democracy. Using qualitative and quantitative data, it studies the role of tribal political representatives in public policy-making, issues related to communities, and the nature and dynamics of tribal politics at the state and national levels. It explores the patterns, conditions and challenges of tribes' participation in electoral politics and presents the issues and agendas that will continue to affect the tribal politics in future. This book is an essential resource for teaching and research in political science and other social science disciplines studying comparative political dimensions.

Police Matters moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined nature of police and caste in the Tamil countryside. Radha Kumar argues that the colonial police deployed rigid notions of caste in their everyday tasks, refashioning rural identities in a process that has cast long postcolonial shadows. Kumar draws on previously unexplored police archives to enter the dusty streets and market squares where local constables walked, following their gaze and observing their actions towards potential subversives. Station records present a textured view of ordinary interactions between police and society, showing that state coercion was not only exceptional and spectacular; it was also subtle and continuous, woven into everyday life. The colonial police categorized Indian subjects based on caste to ensure the security of agriculture and trade, and thus the smooth running of the economy. Among policemen and among the objects of their coercive gaze, caste became a particularly salient form of identity in the politics of public spaces. Police Matters demonstrates that, without doubt, modern caste politics have both been shaped by, and shaped, state policing. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.