{"title":"Book review: Peter Ronald deSouza, Hilal Ahmed and Mohd. Sanjeer Alam, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India","authors":"Krishnamurari Mukherjee","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082823","url":null,"abstract":"Peter Ronald deSouza, Hilal Ahmed and Mohd. Sanjeer Alam, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing House, 2019), 203 pp. ₹1,299.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48533193","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":"Religion-as-Ethnicity and the Emerging Hindu Vote in India","authors":"N. Sircar","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082824","url":null,"abstract":"Religious division formed the basis for the subcontinent’s partition and has continued to be a major social cleavage in local relations. Yet remarkably religious parties have rarely been successful in India. This may be changing with an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party mobilizing the Hindu vote. Accordingly, this article seeks to explicate the conditions under which successful religious parties may emerge. In order to do so, I conceive of electoral mobilization on religion as a form of ethnic mobilization, what I refer to as religion-as-ethnicity voting. I argue that religion-as-ethnicity voting emerges when the religious group meets certain spatial demographic criteria (density and pivotality) and when a governing party representing these interests can use state power to reify boundaries between religious groups. I use this framework to explain the emergence of the Hindu vote in the Indian state of Assam.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41993953","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: Adam Michael Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums","authors":"Manjesh Rana","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082827","url":null,"abstract":"Adam Michael Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 304 pp., ₹663.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42065702","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":"‘India @75: Religion and Citizenship in India’","authors":"Madhav Khosla, M. Vaishnav","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082800","url":null,"abstract":"As India celebrates 75 years of independence, fresh questions are being raised about who is an Indian. This essay introduces a special section of Studies in Indian Politics which puts forward answers to this question considering recent tectonic changes in India’s political climate and party system. We outline how religion is being increasingly adopted as a filter through which citizenship is decided—both in formal, legal terms as well as in informal terms. The special section delves deeper into this terrain, exploring several critical themes: de jure changes to India’s citizenship regime, the relationship between Hindu nationalism and liberal democracy, the judiciary’s role in adjudicating religious disputes, the Muslim community’s response to recent policy shifts and the changing nature of electoral coalition building. Taken together, the articles in this section represent a signal contribution to ongoing debates in India—and elsewhere—on democracy, nationalism and inclusion.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49138763","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":"Representation and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court: Adjudicating Law and Religion in India","authors":"Raeesa Vakil","doi":"10.1177/23210230221083064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221083064","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents the argument that the Supreme Court of India’s jurisprudence on procedural bars to litigation is insufficient to address challenges that arise in cases involving religious rights. Examining the Court’s views on standing (the right to litigate) in three key public interest decisions (the Sabarimala Temple case, the Ram Janmabhoomi case, and the triple talaq case), I argue that the Court has privileged a discretionary, ends-based reasoning over an approach based on principle and law, resulting in erratic and inconsistent outcomes. The result is an uncertain level of protection to minority rights in judicial processes.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43236558","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":"Teaching Indian Politics: How Independent Are We?","authors":"K. Suri","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082790","url":null,"abstract":"Several questions come to mind when we think of the state of teaching Indian politics at a time when we celebrate 75 years of independence. How much progress did we make in advancing knowledge of India’s political reality, an objective of the Indian political scientists during British rule? How independent intellectually are Indian political scientists, as a collective, from the West in theorizing India’s democratic politics? Is there domination of overseas concepts and analysis in our understanding of Indian politics? How do we bring together, integrate and synthesize the theories of Indian politics that are produced abroad and those that are developed within India? I do not claim to have satisfactory answers to these questions. But I believe that they claim our attention.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43251875","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":"Sound Subjects and Hearing Cultures: Towards an Acoustic Ethnography","authors":"Ratheesh Kumar","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082831","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082831","url":null,"abstract":"Sensory techniques enable the process of classification, which in turn facilitates the perceptive capacity to make sense of the world. The human competence to work with the senses in a complex and often unregistered manner prompts us to explore the world of the senses with reference to their functional modalities in the ways of knowing. Apparently, such an exploration cannot rest on the question of epistemology in its conventional frame. It rather involves the idea of the political in the making of a sensory hierarchy. The history of the sensory hierarchy is stridently audible through the early records of western modernity (Howes, 2003; Howes & Classen, 2014; Seremetakis, 1994; Stoller, 1989, 1997). Placing the hierarchy of the senses as a central concern, this article explores the promises of a sound ethnography that seeks to underline the ways of hearing as a methodological possibility, not as an alternate, but as an add-on to the hitherto ‘dominant’ visual sensibilities and practices. Is hearing an unexplored technique in the study of culture? Can hearing be a method in a more imaginative way in ethnographic research? How do we make sense of the relation between the listening ear and its ‘superior other’ the ‘observing eye’ in ethnographic contexts? While raising such methodological concerns is crucial to the shifting grounds of ethnography, the article engages with the recent debates in the emergent fields of sound studies, anthropology of the senses and digital ethnography.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42887852","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":"Reinventing the Republic: Faith and Citizenship in India","authors":"N. G. Jayal","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082799","url":null,"abstract":"In India, a new legal regime and political ecosystem has been enacted for India’s Muslim minority that effectively undermines the constitutional commitment to secularism. This article examines the legal, political, social, moral, and international implications of an assemblage of law and policy—namely, the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, as well as two other initiatives, the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register—that cumulatively animates an ambitious project to reinvent the nature of the Indian republic, from a pluralist, multi-ethnic and multi-religious civic community to a political community marked by ethno-religious majoritarianism.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49435335","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: The Case of Sugar as an Artificial Sweetener","authors":"A. Singh","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082798","url":null,"abstract":"The article aims to explicate the binary created between the two sweeteners, that is, gur (jaggery) and sugar. The focal point of this article is to understand with the analytical framework of politics of knowledge how a ‘traditional’ sweetener, that is, gur, is replaced from our diet by a ‘modern’ sweetener, that is, sugar. This framework replaces the term ‘traditional’ knowledge with ‘already existing knowledge system’ (AEKS, as spelt out by Banerjee [2021, Studies in Indian Politics, vol. 9, pp. 78–90]) and its transformation is examined in five different spaces: epistemology, political economy, historical context, state policy and collective action. In the first section, the epistemic hegemony of sugar is deconstructed through analytical understanding of technological processing; in the second, the changing political economy of sweeteners is explored. The third analyses post-colonial sugar policy showing the continuum from the colonial; and the fourth explores the politics of collective action to challenge and delegitimize the hegemony of sugar.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46870332","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: Jinee Lokaneeta, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogation in India","authors":"V. Mudgal","doi":"10.1177/23210230221082826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082826","url":null,"abstract":"Jinee Lokaneeta, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogation in India (Hyderabad: Oriental BlackSwan, 2020), 264 pp. ₹795.","PeriodicalId":42918,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Indian Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41532382","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}