Providing a comprehensive analysis of the broad spectrum of India’s politics, this undergraduate textbook explains the key features of politics in India in a comparative and accessible narrative, illustrated with relevant maps, life stories, statistics and opinion data. Familiar concepts of comparative politics are used to highlight the policy process, with a focus on anti-poverty measures, liberalisation of the economy, nuclearisation and relations with the United States and Asian neighbours such as Pakistan and China. The author raises several key questions relevant to Indian politics, including: • Why has India succeeded in making a relatively peaceful transition from colonial rule to a resilient, multi-party democracy in contrast to her neighbours? • How has the interaction of modern politics and traditional society contributed to the resilience of post-colonial democracy? • How did India’s economy – moribund for several decades following independence – make a breakthrough into rapid growth, and, can India sustain it? • And finally, why have collective identity and nationhood emerge as the core issue of India in the 21st century? Introducing the novice to India, this accessible, genuinely comparative account of India’s political evolution also engages the expert in a deep contemplation of the nature of strategic manoeuvring within India’s domestic and international context. In addition to pedagogical features such as text boxes, a set of further readings is provided as a to guide readers who wish to go beyond the remit of this text.

Product Description: Five years ago, India was an emerging world power being courted by the world's most powerful political and business leaders, an upbeat story of unparalleled economic growth. Since then, it has failed to account for the human capital at the heart of its effort to modernize: more than one billion people clamoring for what has become known as the "Indian Dream"--an education, a career, and an opportunity to pull one's family out of poverty and into prosperity...read more

As a nation India is very old. It had deep roots in its pre-colonial history, but it is also a product of Western-style democracy, which has shaped and even created the nation. Democracy Indian Style focuses on the Indian factors underlying its successful democracy by describing and analyzing the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, who competed with Nehru for the role of Gandhi's heir, and his impact on India before and after Independence. The book is balanced between chapters that explain Bose's life and career and those that describe and analyze the Indian political system. It explains India's stable democracy as a mixture of British and American patterns--Westminster parliamentary rule plus federalism--and a specific set of power-sharing arrangements among religions, linguistic groups, and castes. India fulfills all the criteria the traditional understanding of pluralistic democracy implies. Basic freedoms are guaranteed, despite the temptation during Indira Gandhi's "emergency" rule to follow the path of authoritarian development. Precisely because India, after Pakistan's separation, did not become "Hindustan" but stayed on track as a secular, pluralistic democracy, it became the most prominent challenge to the traditional wisdom of comparative politics. Democracy Indian Style gives one answer to the Indian enigma of how democracy succeeds by describing the working of the Indian constitution, the weaknesses of the party system, and the specifics of Indian elections. The focus on Bose provides the second explanation. The author describes Bose's rise to the leadership of the Indian National Congress in the 1930s, his attempt to combine an economic leftist outlook with an extremely pragmatic foreign policy, his failure to get serious help from Nazi Germany, his success with the Japanese war lords--and his tragic end in August 1945. Democracy Indian Style is a timely exploration of the roots of Indian democracy, and will be of interest to political scientists, historians, and students of India.

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Product Description: This book assesses the evolution of the Indian Parliament as an institution. By focusing on the changing dynamics of the Lok Sabha, the book demonstrates the changes in the idea of the nation as it reached out to encompass pluralism and diversity...read more

Product Description: ‘Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India: Interrogating Political Society’ critically unpacks the concept of ‘political society’, which was formulated as a response to the idea of civil society in the postcolonial context...read more

Product Description: Maoism, democracy and globalization are three distinct but inseparable currents marking Indian politics today. They are distinct in terms of their goals, direction, and modalities of forging social, political, economic and even cultural change, while mutually influencing each other in the emergent political process...read more

Product Description: Since the structural change in Indian society that began in the 1990s - the result of the liberalisation of the economy, devolution of power, and decentralisation of the government–an unprecedented, democratic transformation has been taking place...read more

Product Description: In this lively collection of essays, Ashutosh Varshney analyses the deepening of Indian democracy since 1947 and the challenges this has created. The overview traces the forging and consolidation of India s improbable democracy. Other essays examine themes ranging from Hindu nationalism, caste politics and ethnic conflict to the north south economic divergence and politics of economic reforms...read more

Product Description: The last four decades have seen momentous changes in the Indian society, in terms of its structure, processes, and the dynamics of social institutions. Sociological study of stratification, identity, ethnicity, democratic processes, and urbanism and modernity, have been at the centre stage of academic engagement with this transition, and Indian sociologists have contributed significantly to this corpus of knowledge...read more

"Gorgeously wrought...pitch-perfect prose...In language of terrible beauty, she takes India's everyday tragedies and reminds us to be outraged all over again."—Time MagazineCombining fierce conviction, deft political analysis, and beautiful writing, this is the essential new book from Arundhati Roy.This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism, and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy.Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu Nationalism and India's neo-liberal economic reforms, which began their journey together in the early 1990s, are now turning India into a police state.She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities, the rise of terrorism, and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. She also offers a brilliant account of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.Field Notes on Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.Praise for Field Notes on Democracy:"In her searing account of the actual practice of the world's largest democracy, Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach. Roy shows in painful detail how the beneficiaries of the highly admired 10 percent growth rate are enjoying a 'new secessionism,' leaving the great majority languishing in poverty and despair, with malnutrition reaching the same levels as sub-Saharan Africa. As surveillance and state terror extend, all under the guise of flourishing democracy, India is becoming 'a nation waiting to be accused,' a nation where a confession extracted under torture can lead to the brink of nuclear war, and where 'fascism's firm footprint has appeared' in ways reminiscent of the early years of Nazism. Most chilling of all is that much of the grim portrait is all too familiar in the West. Roy asks whether our shriveled forms of democracy will be 'the endgame of the human race'—and shows vividly why this is a prospect not to be lightly dismissed." —Noam Chomsky"After so much celebratory salesmanship about India the 'emerging market,' Roy draws us into India the actual country, peeling away the gloss until we are confronted with perhaps the most challenging question of our time: who and what are we willing to sacrifice in the name of development? Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."—Naomi Klein"The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today." —John BergerArundhati Roy is a world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. From her celebrated Booker Prize–winning novel The God of Small Things to her prolific output of writing on topics ranging from climate change to war, the perils of free-market development in India, and the defense of the poor, Roy's voice has become indispensable to millions seeking a better world.

Product Description: Since the early 1990s, the achievement of ‘good governance’ has been a dominant discourse in the pursuit of social and economic development. This book presents a critical challenge to the contemporary development paradigm of good governance...read more

Product Description: This volume reflects Beteille's engagement with the conception of formal, legal, political institutions (Parliament, Judiciary, and political parties), and practices in specific domains of public and political life- rule of law, constitutional morality, the opposition-without which democracies cannot function or survive...read more

Product Description: Historically treated as an amorphous borderland and marginal to the understanding of democratic politics and governance in South Asia, Southeast Asia and northern Asia, the Himalayan region, in the last 50 years, has become an ‘active political laboratory’ for experiments in democratic structures and institutions...read more

Product Description: Globalisation implies widening and deepening integration with the globe, i.e. with people and processes abroad. Globalisation is widely seen as the most important factor that could influence economies of nations the world over in the new millennium...read more

Product Description: One of the world's leading historians examines the great Indian liberal tradition, stretching from Rammohan Roy in the 1820s, through Dadabhai Naoroji in the 1880s to G. K. Gokhale in the 1900s. This powerful new study shows how the ideas of constitutional, and later 'communitarian' liberals influenced, but were also rejected by their opponents and successors, including Nehru, Gandhi, Indian socialists, radical democrats and proponents of Hindu nationalism...read more

Product Description: These essays are written over the last two decades by Rajeev Bhargava, one of the most insightful commentators on philosophical and historical questions around secularism. The topics covered are the democratic vision of the new republic of India, the evolution and distinctiveness of India's linguistic federalism, the distinctiveness of Indian secularism, India's secular constitution, and Muslim personal law and the majority-minority syndrome...read more