India’s vibrant civil society sector has become a powerful symbol of political participation in the country. It comprises a wealth of media organizations, caste and religion based associations, farmers groups, labor unions, social service organizations, and an almost limitless number of development organizations. Given this vibrancy, it is difficult to grasp the characteristics of civil society at the transnational or even the national level. Delving beneath the progressive surface to the local level, one finds a murky and multifaceted world of competing interests, compromises, uneasy alliances and erratic victories. The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India critically examines the enormous gap between the ways collective action in India is studied and the ways it operates on the ground. It identifies what influences the relative success or failure of different movements; the tools activists use to overcome obstacles; the traps that derail efforts to frame, politicize, and act on certain issues and assumptions about particular forms of action. The authors synthesize the experiences of a number of organizations and movements to identify the most effective tools that civil society actors at all levels can use to achieve positive social change.

Religious nationalists and women’s activists have transformed India over the past century. They debated the idea of India under colonial rule, shaped the constitutional structure of Indian democracy, and questioned the legitimacy of the postcolonial consensus, as they politicized one dimension of identity. Using a historical comparative approach, the book argues that external events, activist agency in strategizing, and the political economy of transnational networks explain the relative success and failure of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement rather than the ideological claims each movement makes. By focusing on how particular activist strategies lead to increased levels of public support, it shows how it is these strategies rather than the ideologies of Hindutva and feminism that mobilize people. Both of these social movements have had decades of great power and influence, and decades of relative irrelevance, and both challenge postcolonial India’s secular settlement – its division of public and private. The book goes on to highlight new insights into the inner dynamics of each movement by showing how the same strategies - grassroots education, electoral mobilization, media management, donor cultivation - lead to similarly positive results. Bringing together the study of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Religion, Gender Studies, and South Asian Politics.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are widely heralded as an opportunity for the poor to have greater access to information that can help them escape poverty. ICTs also provide local NGOs that work with the poor access to knowledge that can guide them in implementing better development programs. Such ideas reflect long-held notions about the role of knowledge provision as a tool for development. But as author Tanya Jakimow shows, the consequences of the information age are often unintended and deviate greatly from our image of an interconnected, modern world. Not only do most people remain largely excluded from ICTs, but when they do engage with these technologies, they do so in unforeseen ways. Peddlers of Information shows how local NGOs in rural India are actually using these technologies—particularly the internet—and the implications this has had for development work and ideas about poverty. Jakimow’s critique of dominant views on ICTs and her discussion of class and power relations in Southern organizations is essential reading for development scholars and practitioners.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) or billionaire philanthropy is like a Rorschach test – the same act can look very different depending on how we understand its intentions and its consequences. In this book the author examines the politics of CSR in India to assess its ability to advance inclusive and sustainable development. The focus is on how CSR is remaking the practices and agendas of civic organizations that are being encouraged to collaborate with business to advance equality and prosperity. Civil society organizations (CSOs) and corporations have a history of hostility to each other. According to CSO workers, businesses selfishly exploit workers, despoil natural resources, and distort democracy to serve their own profit-making ends. According to business executives, CSOs are hopelessly naïve, inefficient, and interfere in the market in ways that reduce economic growth. And yet, in the past decade more and more CSOs and businesses are collaborating in new ways. Individuals from both sectors are setting up social impact enterprises, and social investing funds are increasing. The more traditional forms of corporate-CSO collaboration have expanded as more funds are flowing from business to the social sector. The divide between the corporate sector and civil society seems to be narrowing. Why is this happening and what are its consequences? This book examines these trends in India, where since 2013 the state has mandated co-operation between the largest firms and NGOs in pursuit of inclusive and sustainable development. This book offers evidence that CSR is unlikely to contribute to inclusive and sustainable development. By claiming to be “helpers” corporations are able to silence their critics and thus avoid making the deeper shifts in business models needed in order to create a more just and sustainable society.

This book analyzes the ways in which organizations and individuals in India grappled with and contested definitions of democracy and unity in the decades directly preceding and following independent Indian statehood. The All India Scheduled Castes Federation and the All India Women’s Conference are used as case studies to explore Indian Dalit and women activists’ attempts to reconceptualize universal citizenship, Indian identity, dissent, and principled democracy during a moment of uncertainty in India’s political life. The author argues that, because the Indian nation and the Indian state remained in flux during the 1940s and '50s, marginal political actors, writers, social activists, and others were able to propose novel forms of democratic participation and new ideas about what it would mean to be a unified state that appreciates political responsibility, a respect for difference and a broader perspective of the population. Moreover, this book suggests that this redefinition of Indian politics is more widespread than generally understood and considers how strategies used by both organizations featured have continued to be part of the national story about democracy and dissent in India. Through an examination of public discourse, caste politics, women’s rights advocacy, and popular literature, this book excavates the traces of fundamental uncertainty regarding definitions and expectations of democracy and unity in India. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of modern South Asian history, democracy and nationalism, postcolonialism, gender studies, political organization, and global history.

The household has traditionally been neglected in studies of Asian political economy. While there is an emergent literature that looks at this relationship, to date, it is fragmented. The contributors consider how the household economy has increasingly been incorporated into development planning and policy making within both states and multilateral development agencies. They examine the social consequences of the tendency to view households as marketizable spaces, and explore how the household economy relates to broader structures of industrial production in the region. With case studies on Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and China, they provide a comprehensive picture of the centrality of the household economy to ongoing processes and struggles associated with the continuous economic transformation of the region.

In the current historical moment borders have taken on heightened material and symbolic significance, shaping identities and the social and political landscape. “Borders”—defined broadly to include territorial dividing lines as well as sociocultural boundaries—have become increasingly salient sites of struggle over social belonging and cultural and material resources. How do contemporary activists navigate and challenge these borders? What meanings do they ascribe to different social, cultural and political boundaries, and how do these meanings shape the strategies in which they engage? Moreover, how do these social movements confront internal borders based on the differences that emerge within social change initiatives? Border Politics, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, explores these important questions through eleven carefully selected case studies situated in geographic contexts around the globe. By conceptualizing struggles over identity, social belonging and exclusion as extensions of border politics, the authors capture the complex ways in which geographic, cultural, and symbolic dividing lines are blurred and transcended, but also fortified and redrawn. This volume notably places right-wing and social justice initiatives in the same analytical frame to identify patterns that span the political spectrum. Border Politics offers a lens through which to understand borders as sites of diverse struggles, as well as the strategies and practices used by diverse social movements in today’s globally interconnected world. Contributors: Phillip Ayoub, Renata Blumberg, Yvonne Braun, Moon Charania, Michael Dreiling, Jennifer Johnson, Jesse Klein, Andrej Kurnik, Sarah Maddison, Duncan McDuie-Ra, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Nancy A. Naples, David Paternotte, Maple Razsa, Raphi Rechitsky, Kyle Rogers, Deana Rohlinger, Cristina Sanidad, Meera Sehgal, Tara Stamm, Michelle Téllez

The Northeast border region of India is a crossroads of Southeast Asia, where India meets China and the Himalayas, and home to many ethnic minorities from across the continent. The area is also the birthplace of a number of secessionist and insurgent movements and a hotbed of political fervor and violent instability. In this trailblazing new study, Duncan McDuie-Ra observes the everyday lives of the thousands of men and women who leave the region every year to work, study, and find refuge in Delhi. He examines how new migrants navigate the rampant racism, harassment, and even violence they face upon their arrival in Delhi. But McDuie-Ra does not paint them simply as victims of the city, but also as contributors to Delhi's vibrant community and increasing cosmopolitanism. India's embrace of globalization has created employment opportunities for Northeast migrants in many capitalistic enterprises: shopping malls, restaurants, and call centers. They have been able to create their own “map” of Delhi and their own communities within the larger and often unfriendly one of the metropolis.

The Routledge Handbook of Politics in Asia is designed to serve as a comprehensive reference guide to politics in Asia. Covering East, South, Southeast, and Central Asia, this handbook brings together the work of leading international academics to cover the political histories, institutions, economies, and cultures of the region. Taking a comparative approach, it is divided into four parts, including: A thorough introduction to the politics of the four regions of Asia from the perspectives of democratization, foreign policy, political economy, and political culture. An examination of the "Big Three" of Asia – China, India, and Japan – focusing on issues including post-Mao reform, China’s new world outlook, Indian democracy, and Japanese foreign policy. A discussion of important contemporary issues, such as human rights, the politics of the internet, security, nationalism, and geopolitics. An analysis of the relationship between politics and certain theoretical ideas, such as Confucianism, Hinduism, socialist constitutionalism, and gender norms. As an invaluable and all-inclusive resource, this handbook will be useful for students, scholars, researchers, and practitioners of Asian politics and comparative politics.

India’s Northeast has long been riven by protracted armed conflicts for secession and movements for other forms of autonomy. This book shows how the conflicts in the region have gradually shifted towards inter-ethnic feuds, rendered more vicious by the ongoing multiplication of ethnicities in an already heterogeneous region. It further traces the intricate contours of the conflicts and the attempts of the dominant groups to establish their hegemonies against the consent of the smaller groups, as well as questions the efficacy of the state’s interventions. The volume also engages with the recurrent demands for political autonomy, and the resultant conundrum that hobbles the region’s economic and political development processes. Lucid, topical and thorough in analysis, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers in political science, sociology, development studies and peace & conflict studies, particularly those concerned with Northeast India.