You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
India has taken so sharp a turn in recent years that the very centre has shifted considerably. What led to this swing? Is it possible to trace the path to this point? Is there a way back to the just, secular, inclusive vision of our Constitution-makers? This country has long been an outlier in its South Asian neighbourhood, with its inclusive Constitution and functioning democracy. The growth of Hindutva, in some sense, brings India in line with the other polities here. In Our Hindu Rashtra, writer and activist Aakar Patel peels back layer after layer of cause and effect through independent India's history to understand how Hindutva came to gain such a hold on the country. He examines what i...
Columnist, author and political commentator, Aakar Patel has long been a close observer of the political scenario. In Price of the Modi Years, he seeks to explain the data and facts on India's performance under Narendra Modi. Modi's predecessor, Manmohan Singh, had once said that Modi would be a disaster as prime minister. This book shows how. It concedes Modi's popularity; this is an accounting of the damage he has wrought. It is the history of India since 2014, assessing the damage across the polity from the economy, national security, federalism, foreign relations, legislations and the judiciary to media and civil society. Our memories are not long, news cycles are transient and incidents are forgotten or misclassified as being only episodic, unless documented, unified and placed together as a record. And, therefore, this book-a history of these present times.
A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the publi...
For much of the country's post-Independence history, Indian politics was dominated by a single towering figure: Jawaharlal Nehru. A leading figure of the Independence movement, and Mahatma Gandhi's chosen successor, Nehru, as India's first prime minister, from 1947 until his death in 1964, was the architect of its birth as a modern nation-state: a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic. In this volume, some of our foremost thinkers and writers examine the different aspects of Nehru's personality and his legacy. Nehru's influence stretched beyond the Freedom Movement and the political and bureaucratic boundaries of prime ministerhood. A man of letters, it was Nehru who initiate...
Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat asserts the existence of a much larger politics of violence, and tells the story of a disaster in Hindutva's laboratory which etched deep faults in Gujarat's social landscape. While capturing the predicament of the Sabarmati Express survivors, Scarred is an intense, moving portrait of refugees whose lives have been changed forever by the violence that followed. It tells the story of people fighting for justice amidst fear and turmoil, unable to return home. It is also an insightful look into the minds of the perpetrators of this violence, and the world they seek to construct--a world where the ghettoization and socio-economic boycott of Muslims have become the norm. What exactly happened in Gujarat in February 2002? Why did the country's political leaders fiddle while Gandhi's Gujarat burned? In this honest and thought-provoking book, Dionne Bunsha tries to answer these and many of the questions that we are still left with.
None
Foundation -- Transition -- Maturity -- War -- The wilderness.
This book examines how the BJP became the world’s largest political party. It goes beyond the usual narrative of the party’s Hindutva politics to explain how, under Narendra Modi, the party reshaped the Indian polity using its own brand of social engineering. According to the findings of this book, this reconstruction was cleverly powered by new caste coalitions, the claim of a new welfare state that focused on marginalised social groups and the making of a women-voter base. Based on data from three unique indices—the Mehta–Singh Social Index, which studies the caste composition of Indian political parties; the Narad Index, which calculates communication patterns across topics and au...
The great poet Ghalib, part of a long tradition of eclectic liberalism, found Benaras so compelling that he wrote his longest poem on the holy city, 'Chiragh-e-Dair' (Mandir Ka Diya or Lamp in the Temple): 'Ibadat khaana-e-naaqoosian ast, Hama na Kaaba-e-Hindostan ast. (Devotees make searing music with conch shells, This truly is the Kaaba of Hindustan.) Take Ghalib and his myriad followers out of the equation. Will Hindustan be left with a gaping hole or become something quite new? The Muslim Vanishes, a play by Saeed Naqvi, attempts to answer that question. Caste, the Hindu-Muslim divide, Pakistan-Kashmir-decibel levels on these subjects are too high, with each side fiercely defending their own narratives for a conversation to take place. What is the way out of this trap? Razor-sharp, gentle and funny, Saeed Naqvi falls back on a combination of grandma's bedside stories, Aesop's fables and Mullah Nasruddin's feigned foibles to spring an inspired surprise on us. Can it douse the flames?
The Pro-Incumbency Century: How Leaders Are Fashioning Repeat Mandates in India by Yashwant Deshmukh: Explore the dynamics of political leadership and governance in India with The Pro-Incumbency Century by Yashwant Deshmukh. In this insightful book, Deshmukh delves into the phenomenon of repeat mandates, where leaders secure consecutive electoral victories. Drawing on extensive research and case studies, he examines the factors, strategies, and public sentiments that contribute to political longevity, offering a compelling analysis of the changing landscape of Indian politics. Key Aspects of the Book The Pro-Incumbency Century: Political Leadership and Governance: The book provides a compreh...