The Kisan Andolan or the Indian farmers’ protest of 2020–2021 is one of the longest and biggest (and victorious) social movements in the history of independent India. This book adopts a multidisciplinary approach to contextualise the movement in the long run. It engages with the historical, social and religious roots of the Andolan, examining what makes it so unique and transformative for Indian polity. It explores the (dis)continuities with previous resistance and contestation movements in India and globally, and debates the role so far of regional, religious and class-caste-gender identities. Through interviews, the volume also gives a specific voice and platform to grassroots activists and farmers from the movement. Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, the book will appeal to scholars, activists and a wider audience interested in social movements and dissent politics in India and the Global South. It will also be of interest to students of economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, government, agrarian studies, Sikh and Punjab studies, politics, international relations and diaspora studies.

Popular struggles in the global south suggest the need for the development of new and politically enabling categories of analysis, and new ways of understanding contemporary social movements. This book shows how social movements in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East politicize development in an age of neoliberal hegemony.

The book argues that an increasing corporatisation of agriculture in India that is enabled by its neoliberal State, in the name of ‘development’, is contributing towards deepening of inequality in the rural India. It says that Contract Farming (CF) acts as a conduit that enables the coming together of myriad production relations (mercantile, finance, productive) to sell agri-commodities to the capitalist peasant. It is an accumulation strategy that brings together various factions of domestic and foreign capital together. It shows that CF as an accumulation strategy is enabled by an active interventionist state and this neoliberal Indian state mediates the relation between the agri-capital and Indian peasantry. The book further analyzes contract farming as a part of the totality of the capitalist mode of production in context of developing countries with a large agrarian base--- asking three fundamental questions – what is CF, how and why is it done and what are the implications of it.

This book details the movement against India's Emergency based on newly uncovered archival evidence and oral histories.

In the annals of India’s history, a monumental uprising unfolded in 2020, echoing the resilience and coming together of large sections of its agrarian base. Instigated by the contentious farm laws of 2020, the Farmers’ Movement burgeoned into a year-long saga of protest and perseverance, ending only in December 2021 after the passing of the Farm Laws Repeal Bill, 2021 by the Indian Parliament. From the initial demand for law repeal to the multifaceted growth of the movement, the book traces the journey of the Farmers’ Movement, as each essay dissects the socio-political dynamics, cultural nuances, and mass solidarity that underpinned the protests, including focused analyses from Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom. This anthology chronicles the ebb and flow of a nation’s spirit, encapsulating the symbiotic relationship between theory and praxis, between change and continuity. It serves as a testament to the power of collective resistance and a roadmap for future struggles, ensuring that the legacy of the Farmers’ Movement endures beyond the pages of history. This volume is an interdisciplinary project and will be of interest to scholars from diverse fields such as economics, sociology, public policy, political science, history, political geography, gender studies, cultural studies, international studies, architecture, media studies, psychology, and ethnomusicology.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.

The author, a former Special Secretary of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), examines a series of interconnected events that led to the rise of the Khalistan movement, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the anti-Sikh violence unleashed thereafter. With a timeline that moves from seven years before to a decade after 1984, the book strives to answer critical questions that continue to linger till today. The narrative moves from Punjab to Canada, the US, Europe and Delhi, looking to sift the truth from the political obfuscation and opportunism, examining the role that the ruling party allegedly played, and the heart-rending violence that devoured thousands of innocent lives in its aftermath.

This definitive study explores what the postcolonial condition has meant to rural people in the Third World. Based on fieldwork done in the village of Alipur in rural north India from the early 1980s through the 1990s, POSTCOLONIAL DEVELOPMENTS challenges the dichotomy of "developed" and "underdevelopoed", and offers a new model for future ethnographic scholarship. 15 photos.

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.

A trenchant assessment of Narendra Modi's BJP government and its impact on India.