Weaving together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents, In Pursuit of Proof tells stories from the ground about the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. The book moves with agility across the late colonial era and the postcolonial years marked by ration cards, refugee registration certificates, permits, licences, and affidavits. How did the ration card, introduced during the Second World War, crystallize into proof of residence? After the Partition, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste? Might there be alternative conceptualizations of the much-maligned ‘Licence Raj’? How does proof manifest itself for those living in Delhi’s slums? And how does the unique identification number, termed the Aadhaar, impinge on rural migrants dwelling in the city? Relying on intensive ethnographic and archival methods, the book answers these questions and theorizes the Indian state as one whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular knowledge practices of documenting and proving identities.

The proliferation of chemical, biologial and nuclear weapons is now the single most serious security concern for governments around the world. This text compares how organisations shape the way leaders intend to employ these armaments.

The book is on the Prime Ministers of India since Jawaharlal Nehru. A chapter is devoted to each of them with a focus on their foreign policies. The broad organisational framework, designed and deployed in this publication, begins with a brief analysis of their formative years, their perceptions of the international system, and the architecture of their foreign policies, before delving into their decisional process, and before concluding with an evaluation of their role. All the Prime Ministers were obviously not interested in international affairs. Though the dimensional size of the country had unavoidably pushed all of them to deal with foreign affairs, their role was variegated and their performance was unequal. While the Nehru-Gandhi family were the icons of Indian diplomacy, there were others like Morarji Desai, V.P.Singh, H.D.Deve Gowda, Chandra Shekar, etc. who were really marginal either because their mandate was limited by time or by interest. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that the author has dealt with all the Prime Ministers, including the ones for whom foreign policy was not crucial.

Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been undergoing transformation since independence. If caste as a system of rigid stratification has been on the decline, castes as autonomous interest-serving groups have been on ascendance. This book critically engages with the changing notions of caste and its intersection with public policy in India. It discusses key issues such as social security, internal reservation, the idea of Most Backward Classes, caste issues among non-Hindu religious communities, caste in census, caste in market, and service castes and urban planning. Drawing on in-depth case studies from states including Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, the volume explores the cyclical process of how caste drives policies, and how policies in turn shape the reality of caste in India. It looks at the impact of factors like protective discrimination, adult franchise and democratic decentralisation, horizontal and vertical mobilisation, land reforms, and religious conversion on social mobility, and traditional hierarchy in India. Empirically rich and analytically rigorous, this book will be an excellent reference for scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, sociology, exclusion studies, social work, law, history, economics, political science, development studies, social anthropology, and political sociology. It will also be of interest to public policy and development practitioners.

Records publications acquired from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, by the U.S. Library of Congress Offices in New Delhi, India, and Karachi, Pakistan.