State Formation and Radical Democracy in India analyzes one of the most important cases of developmental change in the twentieth century, namely, Kerala in southern India and begs the question of whether insurgency among the marginalized poor can use formal representative democracy to create better life chances. Going back to pre-independence, colonial India, Manali Desai takes a long historical view of Kerala and compares it with the state of West Bengal, which like Kerala has been ruled by leftists but has not had the same degree of success in raising equal access to welfare, literacy, and basic subsistence. This comparison brings the role of left party formation and its mode of insertion in civil society to the fore, raising the question of what kinds of parties can effect the most substantive anti-poverty reforms within a vibrant democracy. This book offers a new, historically based explanation for Kerala’s post-independence political and economic direction.

Between the 1910s and the 1970s, an eclectic group of Indian thinkers, constitutional reformers, and political activists articulated a theory of robustly democratic, participatory popular sovereignty. Taking parliamentary government and the modern nation-state to be prone to corruption, these thinkers advocated for ambitious federalist projects of popular government as alternatives to liberal, representative democracy. Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought is the first study of this counter-tradition of democratic politics in South Asia. Examining well-known historical figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, M. K. Gandhi, and M. N. Roy alongside long-neglected thinkers from the Indian socialist movement, Tejas Parasher illuminates the diversity of political futures imagined at the end of the British Empire in South Asia. This book reframes the history of twentieth-century anti-colonialism in novel terms – as a contest over the nature of modern political representation – and pushes readers to rethink accepted understandings of democracy today.

This book is the most comprehensive analysis of the Kerala Model of Social Development to date. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it sheds new light on the paradoxes of the Indian state and critiques its model of economic development.

Close to the turn of the century and almost 45 years after Independence, India opened its doors to free-market liberalization. Although meant as the promise to a better economic tomorrow, three decades later, many feel betrayed by the economic changes ushered in by this new financial era. Here is a book that probes whether India’s economic reforms have aided the development of Indian Muslims who have historically been denied the fruits of economic development. Maidul Islam points out that in current political discourse, the ‘Muslim question’ in India is not articulated in terms of demands for equity. Instead, the political leadership camouflages real issues of backwardness, prejudice, and social exclusion with the rhetoric of identity and security. Historically informed, empirically grounded, and with robust analytical rigour, the book tries to explore connections between multiple forms of Muslim marginalization, the socio-economic realities facing the community, and the formation of modern Muslim identity in the country. At a time when post-liberalization economic policies have created economic inequality and joblessness for significant sections of the population including Muslims, the book proposes working towards a radical democratic deepening in India.

Understanding India's politics and governance requires an examination of how politics and governance occur in the regional States, which constitute the federal units of India.This book addresses the issues of federalism, power-sharing and constitutional reforms, and their effects on governance in Indian States. Located within the growing literature on new State politics in India, this volume presents a critical, in-depth analysis of politics in Bihar, West Bengal and Tripura — these States being units of analysis for more general implications.What common obstacles have impeded development in each State, and what factors have favored recent, rapid development in some States but not others? The issues of caste conflicts, ethnic conflicts and other collective identity issues will be examined in this book — a pioneer volume with detailed, empirically-based research on the implications of State-centric politics in India.

16. Political Regimes and Economic Reforms: A Study of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

This invaluable collection of information provides an in-depth guide to the regional dimension of the politics and economy of this vast and complex country. Incomparable in its coverage, which includes a detailed chronology for India as a whole, a bibliography, contact details for leading officials, and an historical account and economic survey for each of the twenty-nine states and seven territories, it supplies the reader with a more complete understanding of India as a whole.

This work deciphers how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in India's Bhil heartland. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India.

Throughout the 20th century, electricity was considered to be the primary vehicle of modernity, as well as its quintessential symbol. In India, electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums were spent on the project from then until now. Yet despite all this, sixty-five years after independence nearly 400 million Indians have no access to electricity. Electrifying India explores the political and historical puzzle of uneven development in India's vital electricity sector. In some states, nearly all citizens have access to electricity, while in others fewer than half of households have reliable electricity. To help explain this variation, this book offers both a regional and a historical perspective on the politics of electrification of India as it unfolded in New Delhi and three Indian states: Maharashtra, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. In those parts of the countryside that were successfully electrified in the decades after independence, the gains were due to neither nationalist idealism nor merely technocratic plans, but rather to the rising political influence and pressure of rural constituencies. In looking at variation in how public utilities expanded over a long period of time, this book argues that the earlier period of an advancing state apparatus from the 1950s to the 1980s conditioned in important ways the manner of the state's retreat during market reforms from the 1990s onward.

The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies provides diverse and cutting-edge perspectives on this fast-changing field. For 30 years the world has been caught in a long ‘global interregnum,’ plunging from one crisis to the next and witnessing the emergence of new, vibrant, multiple, and sometimes contradictory forms of popular resistance and politics. This global ‘interregnum’ – or a period of uncertainty where the old hegemony is fading and the new ones have not yet been fully realized – necessitates critical self-reflection, brave intellectual speculation and (un)learning of perceived wisdoms, and greater transdisciplinary collaboration across theories, localities, and subjects. This Handbook takes up this challenge by developing fresh perspectives on globalization, development, neoliberalism, capitalism, and their progressive alternatives, addressing issues of democracy, power, inequality, insecurity, precarity, wellbeing, education, displacement, social movements, violence and war, and climate change. Throughout, it emphasizes the dynamics for system change, including bringing post-capitalist, feminist, (de)colonial, and other critical perspectives to support transformative global praxis. This volume brings together a mixture of fresh and established scholars from across disciplines and from a range of both Northern and Southern contexts. Researchers and students from around the world and across the fields of politics, sociology, international development, international relations, geography, economics, area studies, and philosophy will find this an invaluable and fresh guide to global studies in the 21st century.