Studies in Indian Politics最新文献

{"title":"Book Review: Jyotiprasad Chatterjee and Suprio Basu. Left Front and After: Understanding the Dynamics of Poriborton in West Bengal and Suman Nath. People-Party-Policy Interplay in India: Micro-dynamics of Everyday Politics in West Bengal, c. 2008–2016","authors":"A. Guha","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999218","url":null,"abstract":"Jyotiprasad Chatterjee and Suprio Basu. Left Front and After: Understanding the Dynamics of Poriborton in West Bengal. New Delhi, India: Sage. 2020. 255 pages. ₹1,195. Suman Nath. People-Party-Policy Interplay in India: Micro-dynamics of Everyday Politics in West Bengal, c. 2008–2016. New Delhi, India: Routledge. 2020. 221 pages. ₹995.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"139 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999218","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48311632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Madhav Khosla. India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy","authors":"Alisha Dhingra","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999216","url":null,"abstract":"Madhav Khosla. India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2020. 219 pages. ₹599.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"137 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999216","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47656520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Book Review: Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Anupama Roy. Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties","authors":"V. Tripathi","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999215","url":null,"abstract":"Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Anupama Roy. Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. 2019. 366 pages. ₹1,100.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"135 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999215","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46956614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Generations of Constitutional Studies","authors":"Anupama Krishnan, K. Kailash","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999240","url":null,"abstract":"A paper on the Indian Constitution and its working is de rigueur in both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in political science across Indian universities. When the two of us exchanged notes comparing what we read on the Indian Constitution at similar points of time in our educational journey, we realized that studying the constitution has been a lively area of interest, and there has been an impressive increase in scholarly work over the years. In the last decade, it has been approached from a variety of disciplinary paths causing a veritable explosion almost as if constitutional studies are the most fashionable field of research. This massive accumulation has created a conundrum of mixed feelings. On the one hand, these studies from scholarly discussions in different spheres have substantially enriched our knowledge and understanding of the constitution and its working. On the other hand, the cumulation of knowledge can also be overwhelming for both students and teachers alike. What was basic or essential reading two decades ago is one of the many texts in the field. While we cannot discard or ignore the scholarship that comes earlier in chronological time, we cannot, at the same time, cover the literature in the field given the time constraints. Moreover, these studies also approach the field from various disciplinary angles underlining multiple pathways to a topic. How do we then get over this dilemma caused by an embarrassment of riches? We attempt to map a framework that could serve as a teaching-learning framework to make sense of the vast corpus of work. We divide the literature in the field into four generations.2 The term ‘generation’ here denotes a collective identity in terms of ideas, approaches, methods and a sequence. A generation Studies in Indian Politics 9(1) 124–131, 2021 © 2021 Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999240 journals.sagepub.com/home/inp","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"124 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999240","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44487366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can the Popular Disembody Populism? Students and the Re-appropriation of the Nationalist Floating Signifier in Contemporary Indian Politics","authors":"Jean‐Thomas Martelli","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999140","url":null,"abstract":"This ethnographic account chronicles the journey of one of the largest anti-government protests since India’s independence. It examines the pivotal role of students—initially activists and then first-time participants—in crystallizing challenges to the ruling dispensation, not only by opposing it directly, but through subverting its way of claiming representation. More specifically, it is the strategic reuse of the pervasive anti-institutional and anti-elite discourse at the top—while replacing its majoritarianism with inclusiveness—that enabled protesters to disembody the populist modality of the current Indian Prime Minister. Protesters’ short-lived success was achieved through an enactment of the popular, embodied in a diffused fashion by faceless, peaceful and feminized protesting masses. The popular successfully appropriated the claim to be the people through invoking a ‘derivative’ nationalist repertoire in part shared by the government, emptying its anti-minorities subtext through appropriating floating signifiers of patriotic belonging such as the Indian constitution, the flag and the anthem. By engaging on how relatively small communities of politicized students used the campus ecology and its neighbouring spaces as territorial and ideational nodal points for the mobilization of less politicized cohorts, the article underlines their significance in the political articulation of dissent in contemporary Indian democracy.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"7 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999140","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47904475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"State, Floods and Politics of Knowledge: A Case of the Mahananda Basin of Bihar","authors":"P. Jha","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999177","url":null,"abstract":"This article identifies two main perspectives on flood control: the traditional and the modern hydrological. The objective here is to look at the contest between them from the point of view of the politics of knowledge. The traditional perspective views floods as a part of life and focuses on people’s wisdom or local knowledge of flood control. The hydrological approach, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with taming a river and views floods as a disaster that ought to be controlled and possibly eliminated. This perspective dominates the policy of the post-colonial state in India. There are five vantage points, such as historical context, state policy, political economy, collective action and epistemology, to understand the politics of knowledge around floods. In the first section, through history we discuss the transition from the colonial to post-colonial India on the issues of floods, dams and embankments. The second section of this article describes the flood policy and politics around it, from Patna Flood Conference (1937) to Disaster Management Act, 2005. In Political Economy section the article explores the link between land-holdings, tenancy and floods and also observes how agriculture has changed due to floods. The fourth section, Forms of Collective Action, explores the politics of collective action. Epistemology section presents the debate of lokvidyavs versus rajyavidya or living with floods versus hydrological knowledge.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"91 - 104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999177","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42131916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Politics of Knowledge in Development: Explorations in Seed Sovereignty","authors":"Pushpa Singh","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999179","url":null,"abstract":"There is an existing debate on the epistemic hegemony of the knowledge system of industrial agriculture. The two sides posit a critique and offer alternatives from already existing practices of agriculture. Most often, the critique is on hard material grounds, while the alternatives are offered in terms of the recovery of a cultural set of practices. This article posits a fresh critique to complement the existing one and expands the scope of the alternative to make critical appraisals of existing knowledge systems. For the first, it critically analyses each of the presumptions that underlie the argument of the dominant vision and for the second, this article identifies, analyses and aims to foreground those perspectives that contested major policy decisions and the reasons for their subsequent marginalization. The issue of seed sovereignty—that of women farmers specially, retaining the authority to breed and propagate seeds for farming—is the focal point of this study.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"105 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999179","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45833031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of Knowledge in Development: An Analytical Frame","authors":"Madhulika Banerjee","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999176","url":null,"abstract":"The parameters of modern knowledge systems are clearly showing fault lines—that if there is a continuation of the technological systems at the heart of development, neglecting the twin issues of ecology and equity—there is a serious threat to human existence. This article seeks to answer a specific question: in the context of the twenty-first century search of offering alternatives to the hegemonic development paradigm, what kind of knowledges of production in society could possibly be best developed at this point in history? It argues that the answer lies in ‘already existing knowledge systems ( AEKS)’, accompanied by critical thinking on production, distribution and consumption systems. Locating the production of knowledge in five spaces—historical context, policy formulation, political economic structures, forms of collective action and articulation of contested epistemologies—it argues that when AEKS are understood both in form and transformation in these spaces, that the possibilities they offer for substantial alternatives can be explored.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"78 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999176","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46403320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Technology and Collective Action Event Size: Lessons for India","authors":"William O’Brochta","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999231","url":null,"abstract":"An event is a geographically and temporally focused ‘nonroutine, collective and public’ action aimed at making broad social or political claims (Olzak, 1989, p. 124). Event attendance matters for how the event is perceived and reported on by citizens, the media and political leaders (Biggs, 2018; McPhail & McCarthy, 2004). Scholars of Indian politics have measured event size with proxies: using deaths, injuries, or the number of First Information Reports (FIRs) filed to quantify riot size and relying on newspaper-based estimates of the size of other collective action events (Bhavnani & Lacina, 2015; Varshney & Wilkinson, 1996). Is there a way to improve our event size estimates in order to more effectively study this critical indicator of event success and impact? Political scientists have recently developed methods for detecting event size using data from technology-based sources, including geolocation, social media activity and social media photos. In some contexts, these methods comport well with existing newspaper-based measures of event size, and their automated nature reduces cost and eases implementation compared to traditional newspaper searches (Botta et al., 2015). In this note, I apply technology-based event size measures to Indian events. I argue that the way that events develop in India makes using technology-based data to estimate event size particularly difficult. I take as my case the 2019 and 2020 protests surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and related causes in Delhi. These protests were highly publicized, politicized and contested, with public campaigns waged on social media. Drawing on fieldwork at key protest sites, a review of social media data and media reports, I find that strategic choices on behalf of both protesters and the government made estimating event size using technological data quite challenging. I then discuss some ways that event size measurement techniques can be adapted for the Indian context. Studies in Indian Politics 9(1) 118–123, 2021 © 2021 Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Reprints and permissions: in.sagepub.com/journals-permissions-india DOI: 10.1177/2321023021999231 journals.sagepub.com/home/inp","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"118 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999231","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44825616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Engendering Political Labour: Findings from a Kerala Village","authors":"Anamika Ajay","doi":"10.1177/2321023021999142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2321023021999142","url":null,"abstract":"Literature on Indian politics has largely under-examined the role of the family in shaping party politics with the exception of the studies on dynasticism. There is a paucity of research that looks at the complex ways in which intimate lives and party politics are intertwined. This article contributes to the existing feminist analyses of Indian party politics by conceptualizing politics and political labour in a way that does not exclude the role of the family. It presents the case study of a village in northern Kerala, which has been witnessing heightened political conflicts to show how personal experiences and family disputes get politicized. As domestic and political spheres bleed into each other, political parties become hugely dependent on feminine ideals and women’s everyday labour, affects and sociality to survive electoral competitions. Yet, the patriarchal family and masculinized local party leadership use gender ideologies to celebrate hypermasculine political participation, undervalue women’s labour and limit their political aspirations.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":"9 1","pages":"37 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/2321023021999142","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48787167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}