Democracy Indian Style explores the social and cultural factors underlying India's successful democracy by describing and analyzing the life of Subhas Chandra Bose and his impact on India before and after independence. As a nation India is very old. Its political culture has deep roots in India's pre-colonial history, but it is also a product of Western-style democracy, which has shaped and even created the nation. The analysis is balanced between chapters that explain Bose's life and career and those that describe the Indian political system. Anton Pelinka 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. Democracy Indian Style offers one answer to the enigma of how Indian democracy succeeds, by describing the working of India's constitution, the weaknesses of its party system, and the specifics of Indian elections. The focus on Bose provides a second explanation for India's political success. 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 Indian politics.

As India’s power and prominence rise on the international stage, its longstanding tradition of democracy is under threat. Since establishing a secular and democratic constitution in 1950, India has held elections at the local, state, and national levels with frequent transitions of power between opposing parties. This commitment to democracy has provided political order to a country that is twice the size of Europe and with a stunning array of social and economic divides. Despite this rich tradition, India’s democracy faces an unprecedented threat with the rise of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. After decisively winning general elections in 2014, Modi and the BJP have pursued a range of anti-democratic policies in which the state and society are used to undermine the opposition, to stifle free speech, and to harass religious minorities. The Troubling State of India’s Democracy brings together leading scholars from around the world to assess the conditions of India’s democracy across three important dimensions: politics, specifically the state of political parties and the party system; the state, including the condition of federalism and the health of various institutions; and society, including NGOs, ethnic and religious tensions, and control of the media. Even though elements of India’s democracy seem to function—like its commitment to elections—the contributors document a disturbing trajectory, one that not only threatens to undermine India’s own stability, but could also affect the global order.

‘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. The volume’s case studies, drawn from across India and combined with a sharp focus on the concept of political society, provide those interested in Indian democracy and its changing patterns with an indispensable collection of works, brought together in their common pursuit of highlighting the limitations of different core concepts as formulated by Chatterjee. Centred around five themes – the relation between the civil and the political; the role of middlemen and their impact on the mobility of subaltern groups; elites and leadership; the fragmentation and intra-subaltern conflicts and their implications for subaltern agency; and the idea of moral claims and moral community – this volume re-frames issues of democracy and agency in India within a wider scope than has ever been published before, and gathers ideas from some of the foremost scholars in the field. The volume concludes with a rejoinder from Partha Chatterjee.

Study conducted in the Bīrbhūm District of West Bengal, India.

Though considerable research literature is now available on China–India relations, most of it still follows a conventional narrative, viewing the relationship through the narrow conflictual prism limited to South Asia than in the new, larger perspective, especially in the context of emerging East Asian dynamics. This book offers comprehensive analyses of some of these issues in papers addressing two broad themes. One, significant trends in the relationship between China and India on a range of issues, including economic development models, their military strategies, and the boundary dispute; and two, how others are responding to the rise of India and China and their impact on East Asia. Together, the chapters constitute a comprehensive study on both China–India relations and their concurrent rise, including a variety of perspectives and methodologies. Written by some of the top experts on the subject from India, China, Japan, and Taiwan and covering a broad range of issues, the book will generate considerable interest in understanding this relatively neglected dimension of today’s East Asia.

This book takes issue with existing theories of the relationship between democracy and economic liberalisation.

Soon after independence, Indian political leadership decided to pursue the attainment of four self-stipulated goals: to attain an improved standard of living through higher rates of growth, to establish a functioning political democracy, to achieve social equality through social re-engineering, and to make a quick transition in making government a servant of the public than being its master as was the case during the previous colonial regime. This book describes the journey from the past to the present in the articulation of these goals and evaluates the extent to which they have been achieved. This book is based on the belief that there is at work a principle of reciprocal causation between society and government. What society wants becomes a mandate for the government. That government is not a disinterested party and its actions, and failures to act, have an immense impact on the working of society. Premchand asserts that there is no aspect of civic life in India that is immune from governmental action. This relationship between government and society during the last six decades since independence is intensively examined. India is a land of paradoxes and surprises. The book covers political, social, and administrative developments during the last decades to provide perspective on the changing relationship between society and governments at various levels. This is followed by studies of the various ways in which classification systems are used in India today, the urban-rural divide, non-resident Indians as neo-change agents, emerging pattern of classes, and the resurgence of religion in everyday life. The final chapters deal with the vast range of discontents in governance, corruption and its impact on civic life, the myth of law and order, and the emergence of a public voice in policymaking. The work is fair, balanced, tough minded, and revealing. It is a must read for specialists, policymakers, and people worldwide for whom India is a civilization of inexhaustible interest.

This book, with theoretical and practical analyses of comparative political systems of Eastern countries (Asia and Africa), their political process and political cultures, describes and analyses the influence of political culture on political process in the Eastern world. It gives readers an opportunity to make a comparative appraisal of maturity of civil society in these countries as well as their specifics in political interactions and internal political competition seen through the eyes of a group of distinguished Russian researchers. The book concentrates also on specifics of political-economic and political modernization in the East, and assesses the prospects of an emergence of a Western as well as a non-Western democracy in the framework of Eastern political transformations. It also explains why the one-dimensional spread of democracy — completely negating or neglecting regional political-cultural specifics — may lead to war among civilizations instead of the formation of a more just and fair system of democratic governance.

A comparative study of the role of political parties and movements in the founding and survival of developing world democracies.