Parliaments or legislatures are the keystone of democratic governance and they are critical in securing government accountability. This book presents a comparative analysis of the role of parliamentary committees in securing government accountability in the three largest and most important functioning democracies in South Asia: Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. The author compares the nascent democracy of Bangladesh with the stable and vibrant democratic system of India since its independence from the British in 1947 and Sri Lanka's longstanding and established democracy. He argues that in each country, parliament has been able to survive and perform the key parliamentary tasks of representation, legislation, oversight of the executive, conflict resolution and regime maintenance; concluding that parliamentary committees in Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka do not perform as successfully as their counterparts in the Western world in controlling the government and holding it to account; however, their role in securing government accountability is not irrelevant. Parliamentary Control and Government Accountability in South Asia will be a useful reference for studying third world parliaments in particular.

This book explores the institutionalization process with regard to the Parliament in Bangladesh, and seeks to identify the main constrains that hinder the Parliament from serving as the uppermost representative body for all segments of society. This book sheds valuable new light on key reform initiatives carried out by donor communities in collaboration with the Bangladesh Parliament between the years 1991 and 2015 by presenting an extensive selection of donor proposals to make the Parliament a more potent political institution. The book also focused on the barriers of strengthening oversight, fiscal oversight in particular, resourcing parliament and its secretariat, hindering gender equality and gender responsiveness, counteracting forces that are weakening rule of law, civil liberty of the citizens, constitutionalism and democratic consolidation in the country. The book presents a comparative picture of the pre- and post-reform Bangladesh Parliament, highlighting on the issue of how much the donor assistance can help promote institutionalization of the parliament and democratic consolidation of a developing country. The book will be of immense value to all scholars interested in democratic governance, administrative reforms, policy studies and the role of parliament as a watchdog ensuring accountability, transparency and national integrity.

Much writing on politics in Asia revolves around the themes of democracy and democratisation with a particular focus on political systems and political parties. This book, on the other hand, examines the role that parliaments – a key institution of democracy – play in East, Southeast and South Asia including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Parliaments in these locations function in a variety of historical, political and socio-economic circumstances with different implications for institution building and political development. This book examines questions like how accessible, representative, transparent, accountable and effective are parliaments? To what extent are parliaments able to hold other political actors to account or how far are they constrained by the political environment in which they operate? Going further, this book considers how new media such as the Internet and other social platforms, through providing avenues for individuals to articulate their views separate from official channels, are influencing the ways parliaments work. To stay relevant, parliamentarians need to reach out and engage these individuals in formulating, deciding and fine-tuning policies. In the information age, being a parliamentarian has become more challenging and how a parliamentarian copes with this change will shape the nature and pace of political development.

Partition and post-colonial migrations – sometimes voluntary, often forced – have created borders in South Asia that serve to oppress rather than protect. Migrants and refugees feel their real home lies beyond the border, and liberation struggles continue the quest for freedoms that have proven to be elusive for many. States scapegoat refugees as "outsiders" for their own ends, justifying the denial of their rights, while academic discourse on refugees represents them either as victims or as terrorists. Taking a stance against such projections, this book examines refugees’ struggles for better living conditions and against marginalization. By analyzing protest and militarization among refugees, the book argues that they are neither victims without agency nor war entrepreneurs. Through interviews, surveys, and statistical analyses, it shows how states have manipulated refugee identity and resistance to promote the ideal of the nation-state, thereby creating protracted refugee crises. This is evident even in the most humanitarian state intervention in modern South Asia – India’s military intervention in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971. The findings put forward provide the basis to understand the conditions under which violence can break out, and thereby have implications for host countries, donor countries, and aid organizations in the formulation of refugee‐policy. The book is of interest to scholars in the fields of South Asian studies, comparative politics, international relations, refugee studies, development studies, security studies and peace studies.

This book presents and analyses the oldest sub-national war of postcolonial South Asia, between the Indian state and the Nagas of Northeast India. It offers a serious and thorough political history on the Naga region over three periods, pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and comparative and theoretical literature, Marcus Franke demonstrates that agency and identity-formation are an on-going process that neither started nor ended with colonialism. Although the interaction of the local population with colonialism produced a Naga national élite, it was the emergence of the Indian political class, with access to superior means of nation and state-building, that was able to undertake the modern Indo-Naga war. This war firmly made the Nagas into a 'nation' and that set them onto the road to independence. War and Nationalism in South Asia fundamentally revises our understanding of the existing 'histories' of the Nagas by exposing them to be influenced by colonial or post-colonial narratives of domination. Furthermore, by placing the region into the longue durée of state formation with its involved technique of imperial rule, the book presents a new approach to the study of nationalism and war in South Asia in general. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, history, anthropology and South Asian studies.

The radical act of suicide protest is undertaken by social movement participants in order to demand a particular previously articulated political outcome. This book examines the history and impact of suicide protest, which has been increasingly used as a protest tactic since World War II, adding to a growing area of research on the ability of certain actions to impact policy in favour of movement goals. The book offers a combination of historical and contemporary cases analysis from South Asia, where different iterations of this tactic have been used extensively throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, including the use of fasting to the death, self-immolation, and deliberate drowning. Focussing on the success or failure or a particular action relevant to the movement’s broader mobilization strategy, the author examines the internal impact this has on the movement and the mechanisms by which suicide as a form of protest evolves. Providing a unique contribution to the field of comparative politics, political violence and social movement studies this book will be of interest to scholars working on political science, sociology and South Asian studies.

Despite a long historical experience of cultural, economic, political and social interaction with Europe, South Asia has never been a region of frontline policy for the European Union, which has gradually emerged as the largest trading partner of most South Asian economies, a major contributor of developmental aid, and home to a large diaspora, mostly in the United Kingdom. Containing nine chapters by emerging and leading scholars in the field, this volume critically examines the motivations, objectives and impact of the European Union’s development cooperation, economic and foreign policy towards South Asia. It raises and seeks to answers questions like – What role can the EU play in easing tensions between India and Pakistan in times of crisis? Is there an official EU policy regarding Kashmir or the challenge of terrorism? What is the nature and prospects of the India-EU strategic partnership? The book explores the European Union’s concerns and policies towards fostering democracy in the region. It assesses the crisis management capabilities of the EU in Afghanistan, its role in conflict resolution in Sri Lanka, and the patterns, characteristics and challenges confronted by the South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom. The study will be of interest to all those engaged in the fields of political science, international relations, European politics and foreign policy and Indian and South Asian foreign policy.

This handbook showcases the rich varieties of legislatures that exist in Asia and explains how political power is constituted in 17 jurisdictions in East, Southeast and South Asia. Legislatures in Asia come in all stripes. Liberal democracies co-exist cheek by jowl with autocracies; semi-democratic and competitive authoritarian systems abound. While all legislatures exist to make law and confer legitimacy on the political leadership, how representative they are of the people they govern differs dramatically across the continent, such that it is impossible to identify a common Asian prototype. Divided into thematic and country-by-country sections, this handbook is a one-stop reference that surveys the range of political systems operating in Asia. Each jurisdiction chapter examines the structure and composition of its legislature, the powers of the legislature, the legislative process, thereby providing a clear picture of how each legislature operates both in theory and in practice. The book also thematically analyses the following political systems operating in Asia: communist regimes, liberal democracies, dominant party democracies, turbulent democracies, presidential democracies, military regimes and protean authoritarian rule. This handbook is a vital and comprehensive resource for scholars of constitutional law and politics in Asia.

The book aims to explore South Asian third sector – the nonprofit organizations as provider of social services. The book defines social welfare and describe its relationship to social service programmes and individual well-being; understands the social policy development from the problem identification to policy implementation; describes the range of organization of social service agencies that are responsible for providing social welfare programmes; explores the various roles that professional and non- professional helpers provide in the delivery of social welfare and their influence in promoting change in policy development; and understands the umbrella concept of Child welfare, welfare of people with disability and elderly welfare in welfare policy.

In January 2011, parliament was restored in Myanmar after two decades of military rule. Startlingly, it began to repeal obsolete laws, scrutinize government expenditures, summon ministers to the floor, and discuss the state's annual budget. It also allowed its elected representatives to make public the grievances collected from constituents infuriated at enduring practices of land confiscation, petty corruption, and everyday abuses of power. Yet ten years later in February 2021, parliament was shut down, again, by a coup d'état. What has been learned in the span of a decade of post-junta parliamentary resurgence? How could an elected legislature resurface - and function - in a country that had only limited experience with parliamentary affairs and representative politics since its independence from British rule? What lessons can be drawn from the Myanmar case for parliamentary institution-building and legislative developments (and decay) in post-authoritarian and praetorian contexts? This book offers a compelling account of Myanmar's halting efforts to develop the institutional framework and practice of a parliament-based democratic governance between 2011 and 2021. It charts the stages of such a legislative resurgence, tracing its causes, and exploring how various institutional and political legacies both informed and constrained the re-establishment and operations of the Union legislature, or Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. Embracing both ethnographic observations and a methodical engagement with legislative proceedings and historical material, Renaud Egreteau investigates how parliamentary life (re)emerged in Myanmar in the 2010s. His analysis concentrates on key legislative mechanisms, processes, and tasks pertaining to government oversight, budgetary control, representation, and lawmaking and interrogates how they were learned, (re)appropriated, and (mis)performed by Myanmar's new breed of legislators and parliamentary staff until the 2021 army takeover.