ABSTRACT President Trump and Prime Minister Modi often invoked their two nation’s claims as “oldest and largest” democracies to trumpet the naturalness of the US-India alliance. Shared democratic values was the glue that supposedly bound the two countries together. This contribution argues that the cynical and opportunistic invocation of democratic values by both governments damaged the cause of democracy

ABSTRACT While India and the United States’ relations on the strategic and political fronts improved during 2017–2020, trade relations between the two countries noticeably worsened. Ever since their relations began to improve in the 1990s, deep divisions have existed between the two on trade issues such as market access in goods and services, intellectual property rights, and industrial policy. Given

Abstract Since the start of multilateral climate negotiations, India and the US have been on opposite sides of the aisle on the issue of responsibility for climate action. Following years of intense scrutiny, India found points of convergence with the US and worked closely with the Obama administration to help secure a global deal at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. The Trump era, however, marked

ABSTRACT Out of more than thirty strategic partnerships signed by India, its ties with the US and Russia are crucial for achieving economic and strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific and the Eurasian region respectively. There was a growing convergence on bilateral, regional, and global issues with the US during Trump years, but there was divergence between the two countries on Russia. While Washington

ABSTRACT The gradual elevation of India-US relations over the past few decades highlights a significant convergence of interests, a similarity in dominant political discourse and a converging geopolitical environment that has aided this elevation. This article explores engagements between India and the US within the Af-Pak arena, reflected in policy discourse and public pronouncements in both countries

ABSTRACT The present article examines the efforts of the Hindu conservatives at securing support for a law to ban cow-slaughter during the intervening years of India’s Independence. It also critically examines the debate on this question in the Constituent Assembly of India. Through this examination the article notes how the Hindu conservatives prepared the ground for a law against cow-slaughter even

ABSTRACT India’s pursuit of a position within the structure of Southeast Asian States has seen its most extensive ‘soft power’ campaign in all probability. One of the most effective forms of these soft power campaigns is its cultural diplomacy invoked through a shared cultural heritage with the Southeast Asian States. This cultural diplomacy takes the form of a multitude of instruments. However, the

ABSTRACT The article focuses on the Indian state’s relationship with art, and art institutions to gain insights into approaches to nation/state formation and administration. It asks two questions: How was art administered in India between 1947 and 1953, the period after India’s independence but before formal institutions for it came up? And what were the implications of decisions taken during this

ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt to analyze the trajectories of welfare policy in India since independence. Four overlapping phases are outlined, keeping in mind the transformations in the political and economic contexts. The corresponding welfare discourses are: Paternalistic, Clientelistic, Basic Needs and Responsive. These concepts indicate broad strategies of policy and are not analytical categories

ABSTRACT Political dynasties, a salient feature of the electoral politics in many electoral democracies, have critical governance implications. However, careful empirical estimates of the dynasty premium in Indian elections and explanation of their constituency-level demand side (voters) and supply side (political parties) determinants are absent. To fill this gap, we analyze the candidate-level (N = 8251)

ABSTRACT Academic scholarship on boundary making in India is disproportionately concentrated on state boundaries. Isolated attention given to other areas fails to adopt a holistic framework. The present paper traces the evolving rationales of delimiting district boundary, scheduled area boundary, and parliamentary constituency boundary. It further attempts to find a common thread to organize the boundary

ABSTRACT This paper reads V.D. Savarkar’s last work, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, and advances two arguments concerning Hindutva international thought. Firstly, it foregrounds and theorizes an organicist conception of the international that is embedded in the text. Savarkar’s narrative contains a social evolutionary account of India’s historical international relations. Drawing upon a history

ABSTRACT No other issue has influenced the India–Pakistan relationship more adversely than the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. To understand the discourse surrounding the dispute, and how it has evolved within the foreign policies of both countries, this research undertakes a critical discourse analysis of both countries’ official statements at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 1948 and

ABSTRACT One of the longest-surviving insurgent groups fighting the Indian state in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir is Hizb ul Mujahedeen. It has been linked with the Kashmiri offshoot of the Islamist organization Jama’at e Islami and has been called its armed wing. By looking at the degree of involvement of Jama’at e Islami in the Kashmir insurgency and its relationship with Hizb, the article

ABSTRACT This article shows how the international nuclear disaster in Fukushima affected the antinuclear movement in Koodankulam by using the cross-national diffusion model proposed by Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak and Giugni (1995) . It examines the impact of the international disaster on the antinuclear movement and its subsequent expansion in terms of protest events and organizational trajectories

Published in India Review (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2022)

ABSTRACT This paper traces the history of a widening distance and constructed difference between Hindi and Urdu, and their communal identification in colonial and post-colonial India. It examines how majoritarian politics has shaped the language related issues in independent India. Finally, based on limited fieldwork in the Indian city of Mumbai, this paper tries to find out what language does common

ABSTRACT Ideology and cinematic representation are crucially linked even though a film’s positioning of itself with respect to dominant state ideology may differ thus contesting the idea that films always serve as ideological state apparatus. In this context, the paper reflects on the complex ways in which the ideological positioning – advertently or inadvertently – of cinematic representations of

Published in India Review (Vol. 21, No. 3, 2022)

ABSTRACT Lollywood, or Lahore-based film industry, rarely explores the uneasy topic of the Partition. Hardly a dozen films could be produced in the last seven decades on the Partition. However, a few Lollywood productions – notably Punjabi-language Kartar Singh (1959) – either exploring the Partition or set in the context of the Partition, have surprisingly departed from business-as-usual and state-sponsored

ABSTRACT This study attempts at analyzing the process of reimagining and reproducing the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and Pakistan in 1971 in the textbooks at school level during the dictatorial regimes of Zia and Musharraf. What has appealed me to draw temporal, spatial, and thematic limitations for this research? To begin with, the dictatorial regimes, are believed to, have deeply

Abstract Bangladesh got liberated from Pakistan through a bloody war in 1971. But the country was also a victim of 1947 Partition of India. The Partition not only split India also divided Bengal and Punjab. The East Bengal with Muslim majority got a new name East Pakistan. However, the country Pakistan with two wings with 1200 miles of Indian territory in between, could not stick together for long

ABSTRACT After 24 years of the partition, the new neighboring country, Bangladesh, was born in 1971 in the Eastern region of India. The division of India and the birth of Bangladesh are, apparently, two unconnected events standing at two different times. However, researchers have found the incidents deeply interlinked. Kabir described partition not as an “event” but as an “ongoing process” while Zamindar

ABSTRACT The subcontinental divide in 1947 left deep scars on South Asians, especially the generation that went through the bloody transition during the immigration process. Its impacts can still be seen in literary and political discourses on both sides of the border. This study examines the text of Khadija Mastoor’s Urdu novel, Zameen with the uncertainties, and mendacities the process of migrancy

ABSTRACT The idea of “dominant caste” has been important in the discourse of caste that saw the movement from social intercourse (hierarchy, purity-pollution) to political mediation (representation, demand for positive discrimination) in various literature. This paper offers a longitudinal study of caste relations in and around Varanasi in North India, focusing on the Brahmin caste vis-à-vis another

ABSTRACT Why do communal provocations generate violence in some moments but not in others? Drawing on 52 interviews and archival and ethnographic evidence from Bhagalpur, Bihar, we develop a theoretical framework to explain how communal conflict might be controlled. In Bhagalpur, we find that a state-society partnership has helped the city to avoid active violence since 1989. Civil society elites gain

ABSTRACT While scholars (mainly from the Global North) in International Relations have been turning to a (critical) constructivist agenda in norms research, the field has increasingly become devoid of applying this area of research in understanding the nuclear behavior of deviant states from the Global South. The paper therefore attempts to bridge this research gap by using the case of the India-US

ABSTRACT Around the world, the practice of politics has taken a turn toward “professionalisation.” A key political actor that is facilitating this change is the political consultant. However, despite the influential role that consultants play in contemporary politics, they have been subject to little scholarly attention. We introduce a study on political consultants for the context of India, a large

ABSTRACT The communalization of the police, which resulted from the embittered political situation among the rival communities, was a prominent feature of the Partition violence in 1947. Instead of safeguarding minority communities under attack, the police largely condoned and contributed to the violence, not because of sympathies with their coreligionists, but because they could act with impunity

ABSTRACT Politicians winning elections with large margins of victory, beyond what is necessary to win electoral contests,what we term “winning big”, is a common, yet under-studied phenomenon across the world. Political economy models suggest that winning big is not an optimal allocation of scarce campaign resources in a SMP/FPTP electoral system. Inductive inquiry shows that incumbent politicians likely

ABSTRACT This article looks into international cooperation based on shared religious solidarity; its causative factors, and how it influences relations between states. To demonstrate its effects in actual practice, this article examines the case study of the decision of the Indian government to revoke the special status of Kashmir in 2019, which prompted criticism by a few states, specifically Turkey

ABSTRACT Schools and textbooks are significant mediums for the transmission of political ideas. Textbooks therefore reflect the ideology of the day whilst imparting values, goals, and myths to younger generations. This article provides an insight into the nexus between politics, the state, the social contract, and school textbooks in India. It critically highlights the ways in which the discourses

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze the beneficiaries of productivity gains in the Indian banking sector during the period from 1992 to 2019. We document the relative efficiency of different groups of banks by ownership. We find that the Indian banking sector, particularly the public sector banks, experienced steady productivity growth from the mid 1990s till about 2010. We conduct a detailed descriptive

(2021). Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Chronicling the Histories of India: The Politics of Remembrance and Commemoration’. India Review: Vol. 20, Chronicling the histories of India: The politics of remembrance and commemoration, pp. 483-496.

ABSTRACT The article looks at British India’s Burma campaign of 1941–45 and asks why the decisive battles of Imphal and Kohima appear to be virtually invisible from India’s national imagination today. It further critiques dominant readings of the twin battles for their failure to accommodate the heterogeneity of experiences and contributions of the hill tribes of the India-Burma borderlands who fought

ABSTRACT The “cultural turn” in memory studies acknowledges that collective memory has a distinctive social aspect reflected in the manner in which it is communicated orally from one individual or generation to another. However, the point of departure is the emphasis on the need to account for the fact that memory is, in equal measure, shaped and mediated by tangible channels such as texts, images

ABSTRACT Postage stamps are a significant visual text of an issuing state. In 1947, British India was divided into independent states of India and Pakistan. The successive new regimes in both countries got the freedom to design, print, and circulate the official visual iconography through postage stamps as a symbol of sovereignty for its citizens and the world community. This article explores how India

ABSTRACT Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imaginations of India’s identity has been refashioned

ABSTRACT In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways

ABSTRACT Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 promising robust economic management and more employment. The campaign promise of “maximum governance, minimum government,” created hope that Modi would transform India’s economy by removing obstacles to growth and job creation. We assess the Modi government’s economic policies from 2014–2019 focusing on salient initiatives like demonetization, bankruptcy

ABSTRACT The paper reflects on how feudal, caste-ridden and corruption-infested rural India had its first brush with the newly introduced democratic and governmental administrative institutions, culture and practices, much of the latter inherited from the late colonial times. It does it by visiting Shivpalganj, a fictious village in the “Hindi heartland” region, as depicted in the celebrated novel

ABSTRACT This paper exploits the property of random selection of questions for answering in Parliament to analyze the party-wise share of questions submitted, normalized by seat share, at two major economic policy events during the term of the Sixteenth Lok Sabha (LS16) – demonetization on 8 November 2016, and the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on 1 July 2017. Parties are grouped

(2021). States, firms, and economic development. India Review: Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 468-482.

ABSTRACT A majority of the existing narratives on studying civil society in India are flooded with empirical findings, without much emphasis on theoretical understanding of the subject. Thus, the article tries to provide a historical overview of the development of notion of civil society and its research in “uncivil” Indian tradition from different dominant theoretical angles in the field. After finding

ABSTRACT The idea of American exceptionalism in guiding US national security concerns has often come under scrutiny in the past from security analysts and policy makers alike. The US is not alone in projecting its exceptional values in its foreign policy articulations. Indian foreign policy assertions also stress India’s unique civilizational qualities that make it capable of pursuing a “peaceful”

ABSTRACT Earlier studies have advanced a number of arguments to explain why legislators disrupt legislative business. This study carries out a confirmatory analysis of the arguments by analyzing 93 speeches delivered by Indian legislators on the subject of disruption. Using Applied Thematic Analysis we identified themes that are salient in the legislator speeches. We find highest salience given to

ABSTRACT The spread of the novel coronavirus that took over the world by a storm has caused a serious rupture in the social and economic order. As the Indian state is confronted by several challenges, the exodus of migrant labor appears as a gruesome spectacle. The already precarious lives of migrant labor owing to their employment in the informal economy has been amplified manifold with the outbreak

ABSTRACT Disasters and crisis are becoming more complex with deadly cascading effects. The current coronavirus pandemic is viewed as the newest form of health and socio-economic crisis that has disrupted the flow of normal life for millions. Viewing the pandemic as a unique or unpredictable occurrence shifts responsibility and accountability from a host of institutional actors to those who were unable

ABSTRACT The challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed to the extant socio-economic and political system had created a degree of disjunct that may be more difficult to reconcile without significant paradigmatic and concomitant policy change. While this question applies to the entire world, the present special issue is focused on rethinking some select facets of these questions in the Indian context

ABSTRACT The advancement of technology, the expansion of global networks, and the shift from print media to digital and social media have brought in a drastic change to human lifestyle. With the shrinking of the world because of the advancement of technology, identities get mutated and transformed according to the need. The development of modern societies denotes how the “self” has become a “reflexive

ABSTRACT The push for digital technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic has put a question mark on the relationship between the state and society in India. In particular, it has highlighted the gap between the lofty promises of digital welfare by political leaders and businesses, and the widespread discontent with digitalization as evident on the ground. In this paper, I take this gap as a starting

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent migrant crisis has exposed and magnified the cracks in the politico-economic arrangements of our cities. Going beyond the pandemic, however, the article argues that the crisis is rooted in the manner in which our cities have been imagined, planned, and developed under the modernist paradigm and further guided by the neoliberal framework. The problems

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21 has acted as an inflection point, exposing the fragility of liberal democracy in India, already beleaguered by the rise of majoritarian populism since 2014, buttressed by a process of expansion of bureaucratic power and autocratic legalism while marginalizing the processes of political accountability – étatisation, and normalization of state violence. The combined

ABSTRACT The current situation across the globe has made us reflect on state and Government during emergency times. Series of questions have raised about the governance aspect of organizations associated with the management of COVID-19. Based on this context, this article argues that the idea of governance lacks human-centric values and this has impacted the functionality aspect of governance, especially

ABSTRACT The liberal democratic state exercises power through an element of governmental rationality, and police and the reason of the state constitute this rationality. The reason of the state and the regulation of individual conduct in a pandemic gives primary importance to the idea of public safety. Here, public order takes precedence over law enforcement, where law enforcement is geared to meet

ABSTRACT Financial liberalization has been a gradual, calibrated and uneven process in India. Since the early 90s, Indian financial system has been transformed in accordance with a market-led economic strategy aiming to attract foreign investments and prepare its integration into the international financial circuits, through institutional changes, regulatory easing, public monopolies ending, etc. A

ABSTRACT This article explores the origins and consequences of India’s regional parties and subnationalism, focusing and expanding on the key arguments made by Prerna Singh and Adam Ziegfeld in their books. According to Singh, when political leaders promote an inclusive form of subnationalism, it creates a feeling of cohesive solidarity across the region, which helps to achieve superior social welfare

ABSTRACT At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negoti- ations, India has repeatedly pushed for urgent international action on climate change, while simultaneously refusing to limit its own emissions, frustrating other participating countries. The extant economic and strategic interest-based expla- nations do not sufficiently explain some key anomalies in India’s international

ABSTRACT Political relationships and not the economic benefits of cooperation, guides India and Pakistan to take their respective stands on the hydroelectricity projects on the Indus River System. Therefore, almost all hydroelectricity projects on their shared river system have been strongly contested by one or the other riparian states. In recent years, the two countries have engaged in disputes on

ABSTRACT We argue that two key party system characteristics – the effective number of parties and electoral volatility – have a curvilinear, inverted-U shaped, influence on public goods provision. Rejecting the linear pattern generally assumed in the literature, we contend that optimal governance outcomes will be observed at intermediate levels of party system size and stability. Only under these conditions