India’s amiable history with Vietnam began with peaceful migration to Southeast Asia from the beginning of the Common Era and discovery of new land and sea routes. Yet, modern Vietnamese consider I...

This article examines the apparent paradox of India’s combination of durable democracy and electoral accountability with a capable bureaucracy, coinciding with a deficient development trajectory. I...

Environmental justice has experienced rapid expansion in its scope and conceptualization in the last three decades. Literature on environmental justice narrates how individuals and communities mobi...

The article examines the interface between the party system and the trajectories of center-state interactions in independent India. It argues that the Constituent Assembly put in place a strong-cen...

India today exemplifies the making of an “ethnocracy,” a polity in which the dominant ethnic group obtains political control and deploys the state apparatus to ethnicize territory and society. I il...

This paper seeks to understand the socio-political dimension of the political changes in Assam vis-a-vis “regionalism” and its contestations. The Changing contours of regionalism in Assam reflect i...

The present study delves into the complex interplay of decentralization, patronage, and rent seeking within the context of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA, Act) ...

Concepts like Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) and South – South Cooperation (SSC) have a significant impact on national strategies f...

Published in India Review (Vol. 23, No. 3, 2024)

Sovereignty is an age-old concept that continues to occupy centerstage in international law discourse. This article attempts to look at India’s tryst with international investment law through the p...

The Special Issue examines the salience of the sovereignty principle with reference to India and its engagement with other states and entities in the international system. It seeks to disaggregate ...

Notwithstanding India’s public stand professing its respect of the sovereignty principle, the imperatives of competitive international relations have necessitated the use of force against its neigh...

This article examines India’s treatment of data and its relationship with sovereignty. In the absence of international norms or standards, the article draws on the various data-related rules, regul...

India’s space program has for long been seen as an underexploited source of its foreign policy and diplomacy. However, there are grounds to support that this has changed under Prime Minister Narend...

In a federal political system like India, the role of the federal units bordering the neighboring countries becomes crucial in foreign policy-making toward neighboring countries. It is expected tha...

The Partition of India in 1947 was an epochal event; even after seven long decades, it looms large like an intractable question mark over the horizon of politics and history in the subcontinent. Th...

Long-standing democracies such as India were not exempt from the global trend of democratic retreat. India has come under increasing international attention due to certain domestic policies such as...

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with two Islamist movements in India since 2011, this article contributes to a better understanding of how Muslim community leaders try to spearhead third front all...

In a competitive political system where getting renominated is challenging and incumbency disadvantage is a reality, what factors compel an electorate to keep a certain leader in power for over fou...

We advance a framework for analysis of democratic contestation in the policy and media spheres, in the context of the interest group theory and the stages of public policy evolution, to assess whet...

ABSTRACT Scholarly writings on the politics of economic reforms in India have neglected the exponential spike in private wealth and plutonomic tendencies in the post-reform period. This article maps the political economy of the staggering rise and growth of superrich in India. It traces the roots of the state-capital relationship in the colonial period and provides the main contrast between the political

ABSTRACT This article examines how and to what extent ethnic diversity underpinned intergovernmental relations (IGR) in deeply divided societies like India. Central to this is the vertical and intermediating roles of political actors, structures and processes of Indian federalism in defining the ways in which ethnic diversity is territorially managed. Unlike Canada or Belgium which have more formal

ABSTRACT This paper studies the impact of social movements on the Indian state’s developmental paradigm. Adopting from Varigonda’s (2020) framework, the paper argues that the impact of social movements on state policy and its implementation is primarily determined by three key factors: the collective action repertoires of social movements; the politicization of the Indian state’s developmental paradigm;

ABSTRACT S.K. Patil, quintessential Congressman of Bombay city and cabinet minister in three central governments from 1957 to 1963 and 1964 to 1967, was the kind of figure in Indian politics, who personified Rajni Kothari’s Congress “system” of clients-patrons and chains-links. A Patelite, Patil was a thorn in Nehru’s side. A leader of the business community, he identified with a network politics involving

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