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In India, the past two decades have been crucial for the growing popularity of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). This is largely due to the burgeoning presence and significance of EDM festivals as a performative site of a contemporary Indian youth culture. A salient feature capturing the zeitgeist of twenty-first century, urban, modern Indian youth is EDM's gradual permeation into the cultural fabric of India through crucial collaborations with cultural industries like Bollywood. It is a truism that the legacy of Goa Trance remains a dominant point of reference in the global imagination of the Indian EDM scene. This article, however, argues that the contemporary mode of Indian Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) has largely developed independently of this legacy. The main proponent of contemporary EDMC in urban India has been the multiple greenfield EDM festivals held annually all over the country. This article draws on fieldwork data collected between 2016-2018 at Indian EDM festival sites. Using this empirical data, the article examines the 'performance' of Indian EDMC and considers whether it is viable to speak in terms of an Indian way of raving, as a variation of other 'local' ways of performing EDMC that may exist elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the reasons and the effects of the rise of digital platforms in India, specifically focusing on SVOD platforms. The proliferation of various digital video platforms of different types has been tremendous both in India and the world since early years of 21st century. Taking into consideration the fact that digitality in India is a recent phenomenon, the article, by drawing upon some of the most significant theories in new media studies analyzes the questions of remediation and mediatization in the context of streaming culture in India by taking an example of an emergent media form - web series. The article also takes into consideration the impact of infrastructural development of streaming culture in India, and looks at several examples illustrating digital revolution in India - the remediation of television and the regulation of SVOD content as an example of entanglement of media and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following decades of relative isolation, China and India have become the world's largest new traders. In this paper, we focus on their Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). While the two economies initially followed similar paths, with a growing number of PTAs signed in the first decade of the 21st Century, since 2011 India has taken a U-turn and stopped completing them. China, on the other hand, has widened and deepened its trade agreements. We present a novel theoretical framework to analyze international economic negotiations by emerging economies and use it to study the puzzling divergence of the trade policies of China and India. By adapting the two-level game framework to emerging economies, we argue that there are key differences in the political economies of countries like China and India (compared to Western industrialized ones), which requires a more specific focus on the domestic side of the two-level game. We show that accounting for non-legislative domestic ratification processes and for iterative games and experiential learning by domestic actors are crucial in understanding the trade strategies of emerging economies. While much of the literature explains large emerging economies by looking at external systemic factors, we instead suggest that their domestic politics trumps international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other issue has influenced the India–Pakistan relationship more adversely than the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. To understand the discourse surrounding the dispute, and how it has evolved within the foreign policies of both countries, this research undertakes a critical discourse analysis of both countries' official statements at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 1948 and 2020. The findings of this study are crucial to not only understanding how the two states have been internationalizing the Kashmir dispute but also what lessons can be learned from the past as both countries attempt to slowly reengage with one another. Our analysis points to the fact that both India and Pakistan's stances on the Kashmir dispute, despite their varying phases throughout the conflict, have essentially remained the same. We argue that, despite seeming to have converged toward some form of resolution during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the current context of India–Pakistan relations presents a worsening trajectory that has not been witnessed since their last major war in 1971. In highlighting the cyclical, almost scripted nature of this debate, this paper attempts to suggest ways to break free from age-old tropes and help pave the way toward more meaningful ways to redefine the issue in light of a radically altered geo-political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nexus between the International Peace Architecture (IPA) and the Eastphalian Peace. The IPA subsumes ideas, norms, legal frameworks and institutions established for the purpose of maintaining international peace. The Eastphalian Peace encompasses phenomena associated with the rise of Asian powers such as China and India in their efforts to maintain or reform the IPA to meet the challenges of peacebuilding, statebuilding and development assistance in the twenty-first century. This article examines the contributions made by China and India to the IPA and analyses how the emergence of the Eastphalian Peace would impact on Stage Six of the IPA which is supposed to connect Peace with Global Justice (PGJ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rio Tinto had been developing a diamond mining project in Madhya Pradesh for a decade when in 2017 it hastily abandoned the project. We analyse this counterintuitive exit through an ethnographic approach nested within a qualitative case study framework. We argue that the exit was caused by multi-scalar politics. Local protests over livelihood and labour issues –pre-emptively rearticulated by regional civil society groups through an ecological 'framing' – led to litigation. The national forest bureaucracy posed regulatory hurdles, and a change in the national political regime in 2014 brought to power a party that leveraged national capital of a certain variety, which weakened Rio Tinto's political position. Lastly, a slump in the global diamond market created economic uncertainties, finally leading to its exit. It has not, however, deterred the government from facilitating investment by Indian mega-corporate houses in mining diamonds, once again ignoring local dissent. Under the current regime in India, the space for activism is increasingly restricted, and that restriction, we contend, can lead to the disarray in strategising alliances and goals between ecological and social justice concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As oneness reflects the much-needed worldview in the 21st century, exploring how oneness behaviors might play out in different cultures seem a worthwhile scientific pursuit in the service of humanity. The main purpose of the present study is to test whether factor structure and measurement construct of Oneness Behaviors Scale is valid on the Indian sample. A total of 1040 participants (651 from Turkey 389 from India) participated in the study for testing the cross-cultural equivalence of the scale. The results demonstrated limited partial invariance of oneness scale across Turkish and Indian samples with suggesting most of items have been perceived and understood differently, even factorial structure is similar. With the very limited findings of invariant items between these cultures, making further tests would add to our understanding of oneness behaviors in terms of both research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 Indian national election delivered a convincing victory to the BJP and, along with it, prognostications of future BJP election wins. The BJP's victory was certainly impressive, but does it portend a prolonged period of BJP rule at the national level? As of 2019, any predictions of the BJP's long-term dominance are premature. The election revealed that the BJP possesses relatively few of the party-system advantages common to other dominant parties, including India's former dominant party, Congress, during its period of dominance. Whereas a party is ideally situated to become dominant when it is large, enjoys a deep and broad base of support, and faces an opposition that is both fragmented and stigmatized, the BJP's main advantage lies in its relatively deep support base in its political strongholds. On other dimensions, the BJP has far less in common with other dominant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a special issue of India Review on the consequences of the 2019 Indian general election for politics and public policy. The special issue assesses how four key policy and political domains are impacted by a second Narendra Modi-led BJP government: the party system, minority rights, the economy, and federalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy making in India is typically viewed as highly centralised and dominated by the Prime Minister's Office and bureaucracy. Yet in 2004, the Congress-Party-led United Progressive Alliance government launched a Composite Dialogue with Pakistan which included a place for Indian think tanks in the Kashmir dispute. We suggest that as India liberalised its economy amidst domestic political upheaval, think tanks were given greater access to domestic and foreign funding and adopted new roles in foreign policy making. In the case of the Kashmir conflict, peacebuilding think tanks were encouraged by the government to engage in cross-border activities that would build constituencies for peace with Pakistan and promote economic cooperation as an incentive for peace. While the government aimed to depoliticise the conflict, these think tanks used this opportunity to draw attention to marginalised perspectives and issues. Peacebuilding think tanks nonetheless faced significant challenges in shaping the peace process because of structural constraints regarding access to resources and lack of autonomy to further their agendas. This reflected resistance within the state to depoliticising a conflict that has long been India's central national security issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the connection of Hindi and Tamil films with outbound tourism from India. Some of the older Hindi and Tamil films portrayed foreign locations and their cultures in quite critical ways. Often protagonists in earlier films would go for a short trip abroad for immediate career-related needs and then return faithfully to their motherland. However, after the 1990s, Indians emerged as a confident globe-trotting people covering the entire planet for their career as well as tourism needs. This changing national trend accordingly found a voice in contemporary films too. Additionally, Indian films are increasingly sought after by dozens of countries from many parts of the world, not just by their respective consumers but also by their respective tourism boards and other agencies, so as to promote inbound tourism by Indians to those countries. Finally, this article concludes with the postmodern analysis of some of the contemporary Hindi films in the 21st century that are transcending spatial and other kinds of barriers in a truly globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the 'expanded state' in post-liberalisation India within the context of official responses to the Maoist insurgency in rural central and eastern India. I analyse a scheme called the Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellowship, which was launched as part of the central government's attempt to wean ordinary men and women away from Maoist insurgents through rural development. Under this scheme, young women and men are appointed to assist state officials in implementing rural development programmes in districts classified as 'Left-Wing Extremist'. What does the institution and practice of this fellowship tell us about the state in India today in the context of counterinsurgency and beyond? I address this question on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in an erstwhile Maoist district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. By closely shadowing the everyday work of one Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellow (PMRDF), I show how the PMRDF is located outside the state, and yet constitutes the state. By focussing on the role of the PMRDF, I reveal one of the many new configurations of the state that are emerging in India today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is prepared to argue the condition of decolonizing the field of criminal law – a field which is particularly important for being the first colonial transplant in this subcontinent. To put it another way, this paper is an attempt to locate the colonial elements that can be found in the Penal Code 1860 and to give a way forward to decolonizing such elements in the socio-political milieu of the twenty first century. It therefore explores the colonial origin of modern criminal law in India, which is followed by tracing out importance as well as the ways of decolonizing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Ocean region (IOR) is on the frontline of a global shift in the balance of power involving such countries as China, the United States, and India. Underpinning this transition is the growing relationship between India and the United States, which runs counter to Cold War-era trends and India's traditional reluctance to align with other major powers. However, the question of whether this tightening relationship between New Delhi and Washington can reach the level of an alliance remains to be seen, and will be shaped by various "convergence" and "divergence" factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Government of India embarked on a mission to issue each of India’s over one billion residents a unique biometric identification number, Aadhaar (literally, ‘foundation’). An Aadhaar database would link the demographic and biometric information (iris scans, fingerprints, facial photograph) of residents to a 12-digit number. India currently commands the world’s largest biometric database. While Aadhaar does not guarantee citizenship, benefits, or services, its architects submit that its reliable, real-time identity verification infrastructure potentially allows for the targeted delivery of any good to its intended recipient. Aadhaar is fashioned as an ID concerned with a pristine bodily uniqueness untarnished by the social, political, or economic. Aadhaar frequently provokes the questions: Who is the recipient of Aadhaar and to what community does Aadhaar afford membership? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in India’s capital, New Delhi, this article examines how Aadhaar comes to inform ideas of identity and belonging held by its implementers, as well as the population it targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, as in many other Asian countries, private tutoring to supplement school education and prepare students for competitive examinations is a burgeoning industry. These “tuitions” provide opportunities for self-employment, including for many women working in or near their homes. Through an ethnographic study of tutors in a Delhi neighborhood, this article presents tuitions work as a form of moral infrastructure. This infrastructure is foundational to the fulfillment of evolving social roles that comprise the realization of relational personhood in contemporary urban India. Consequently, it remains robust – indeed, continues to expand – despite encompassing conflicting projects and discourses. Through the case of tuitions, this article proposes a theoretical framework for conceptualizing infrastructures as channels for movement that articulate normative visions of and for society. These prescribed channels may simultaneously invite shortcuts, bypasses, and other unintended uses that incrementally transform those visions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Framed within a discussion of boundary work and its many facets, this article develops a critical understanding of the discourses that shape the material and symbolic hierarchies of power asserted by employers of domestic workers in Indian households. We analyze the nature of discourses that are mobilized in the boundary work practiced by different groups of employers in India as they negotiate their relationships with their domestic workers. Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai and Chennai, our analysis outlines two different discourses within the nature of boundary work – one centered on the trope of benevolent maternalism and another which mobilizes a market-based trope – and delineate how these diverge and converge in the relationship between employers and domestic workers. We also show how these discourses differ according to two key factors: on the one hand, whether the employers hire full-time or part-time workers, and on the other hand, the specific positional attributes of the employers in terms of age, occupation, and family background. We argue that these two discursive categories are not watertight compartments, but are located on a spectrum, and that employers therefore exhibit elements of both maternalism and market-based approaches within the relationship with their workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been much speculation about whether China will democratize and avoid conflict with India in the twenty-first century. Yet, few studies have investigated how contemporary Chinese view India and its democracy. Addressing this gap in the literature, the authors examined Chinese media coverage of India's two-month long April-May 2014 parliamentary election, the largest election in world history, through systematic analysis of over 500 articles from ten major mass media outlets and over 27,000 messages transmitted on Sina Weibo social media. As might be expected, Chinese mass media generally portrayed India and its elections in a condescending fashion while avoiding discussion of 'democracy'. However, the authors found a much broader array of viewpoints on Chinese social media including considerable praise for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and extensive discussion about the intrinsic and instrumental merits of democracy both in India and in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses whether neoliberalism is a viable model for India's foreign, economic and strategic policies in the face of rapid changes in the external environment. Topics covered include barriers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts to complete the economic reforms mission, doubts regarding the efficacy of Modi's policy on Pakistan, and the economy-first approach to foreign policy he adopted when he was elected to office in 2014. Also mentioned are typologies that classify Indian strategic paradigms, neoliberals' belief that India's transformation into an economic great power would result in India's ascendance as a military and diplomatic power and India's relationship with China, Pakistan and the U.S.

The article discusses how India's slow emergence as a regional security actor is a reflection of its strategic policy preferences. Topics covered include India's prioritization of defense against local threats on northern land borders, vested interests in strategic relationships with Russia, China and Middle Eastern countries, and factors limiting India's regional posture and partnership with the U.S. Also mentioned are recommendations for U.S. policy on ways to maximize potential policy convergence, the evolution of India's strategic autonomy doctrine, and preparations made for large-scale direct conflict.

This study contributes to existing research on the relative effectiveness of aid initiatives in addressing food insecurity in India. Specifically, it compares the effects of crop, livestock, credit, and WASH interventions implemented by a development NGO with the impacts of a public direct-transfer scheme on food security among communities in Uttar Pradesh. The NGO’s agricultural and WASH interventions and the government’s Antyodaya ration-card scheme appear to have the largest positive influence. Their positive impact can be enhanced by the presence of good governance and by the simultaneous application of several beneficial initiatives.ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a review of around 100 western English print press articles recording rape in India. No cases were reported prior to the tragic and brutal rape of Nirbhaya in Delhi on the 16 December 2012. The article presents a critical analysis of the dominant discourses running through the articles and highlights the extent to which the colonial lens is still present as the main perspective through which India is viewed. The article highlights how press narratives are problematic for two main reasons. Firstly, because of the narrow reporting of only rape which suggests it occurs only to middle-class or modern urban women, the daily experiences of low-caste and Dalit women for example is ignored. Secondly, we identify the construction of a problematic-male who is labelled deviant, sexually feral and the key perpetrator of all rape violence in India. This article in no way denies the reality of violence against women in India, quite the contrary, but argues that the distorting imperialist picture emerging through the press does not support the work of feminist activists in India whose nuanced and complex understanding of the realities of violence must lead the way to eradicating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections witnessed a significant shift in the political spectrum of the Bodo Territorial Autonomous District (BTAD) in Assam, with non-Bodos voting en masse for an independent candidate, a former United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) militant who was backed by a collective of non-Bodo organisations. Using the elections as a focal point, this paper aims to explore the larger political dynamics, political mobilisation and shifting alliances within a framework of contentious politics and collective action that unfurled during the elections and eventually led to an episode of targeted violence against the Muslim community in BTAD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 2002 pogrom, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, shifted his political repertoire from that of a Hindu Hriday Samrat (King of Hindus’ heart) to that of development and Gujaratiness. He claimed that he was a development man (Vikas Purush) and that he represented the 60 million Gujaratis as anaam admi(common man). He projected himself as an embodiment of their identity—asmita. This populist repertoire, which was explicitly articulated during the Sadbhavna mission in 2012, is in tune with the general trend of Indian politics where most of the Chief Ministers claim to epitomize one subnationalism. In the case of Narendra Modi, however, this regional identity was defined in religious terms and reflected a banalization of Hindutva, an original process that was more likely to happen in Gujarat because of the traditional definition of the state’s identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neo-liberalism is capitalism without leftist illusions (i.e. illusions that there can be such a thing as humane capitalism on a long-term basis). The article makes a series of critical comments on India’s neo-liberalism expressed in the form of the so-called New Economic Policy. It argues, New Economic Policy is more than a governmental policy. It is rather a policy of capital, mediated and implemented by the state. Neo-liberalism is a social-spatial project. Neo-liberalism in rural areas (agrarian neo-liberalism) is particularly ruthless. Neo-liberalism is implemented through, and entails, the transformation of space, and thus produces enormous spatial unevenness. Neo-liberalism is also a part of the imperialist project. Given New Economic Policy’s adverse impacts, it has inspired massive resistance from below. Interestingly, in spite of offering some opposition, the left has been, overall, a conduit through which New Economic Policy has worked. The article shows how a critical discussion on neo-liberalism has implications for understanding macro-structural changes in societies such as that of India, which have suffered not only from economic backwardness but also incomplete revolutions. A dialectical view of neo-liberalism and the New Economic Policy connects them both to the democratic and agrarian questions, the national question, and the question of socialism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about Indian Defense strategies against terrorism focusing on an attacks made on Indian security forces in Manipur and the unrest around shoot-to-kill powers as per the Indian Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Topics include coordination and cooperation among authorities in India and Myanmar, military policies by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and operations by the Indian Army. Also discussed is Indian's soft power and foreign policies, role of social media in politics, and use of hard power in Indian foreign policy. The article talks about 2001-02 Operation Parakram, a military operation against Pakistan.

The commercial discourses of the skin-lightening cosmetics industry in globalizing India have propped up the ideological legitimacy of colorism or skin color discrimination whereby dark-skinned Indians are viewed as inferior to and less valued than light-skinned Indians. Two episodes of NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt’s national public affairs television programWe the People(2008 and 2013) tackle the growing problem of commodity colorism in India. My textual analysis of these two episodes ofWe the Peopleexamines the ways in which Barkha Dutt takes up and creates a forum for debate on the incendiary issues of racism and colorism on her show. I consider the agents, institutions, and social structures she holds accountable in these programs, and I explore the perspectives on anti-colorism and anti-racism that gain visibility or get marginalized inWe the People’s televised terrain of democracy and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commissions of inquiry are unique tools of modern governance that represent ‘the people’, but in a manner quite unlike parliaments and other forms of elected political representation. Using as its example the 2007 Misra Report, this paper reveals how, in the production of a commission report, scores of non-state actors—‘stakeholders’ from a wide range of social strata—are enlisted to produce the policies that will then redound upon those very stakeholders. In thus consulting the people and eliciting their speech, commissions serve to publicly enact, in a controlled setting, the deliberative ideal of democracy that is otherwise absent in India. In this particular instance, the problematic status of Dalits is subsumed under the normative religious identity of the post-colonial Indian nation, a conclusion whose emergence through reasoned debate is publicly enacted in the form of the commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlighting legal–governmental techniques by which the public is conceptualised as the market and market activity as public agency, this article poses India as a key site for a globalised analysis of neo-liberal governance. It opens a genealogy for India's ‘emerging market’ governance that extends back to colonial modernisation, highlighting ties between a coercive state, its benevolent performance and the making of a market society. Such a long view challenges the free market vs. strong state opposition so central to contemporary neo-liberal thought. It also calls attention to the nexus between powers of emergency and emerging markets. Elaborating, the essay engages Foucault's analysis of neo-liberal political economy to read recent Indian jurisprudence on financial markets, the rule of law, and public interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Can the count of ‘likes’ recorded on the Facebook page of a party predict whether it will win the elections or not? To answer this question in the Indian setting in the context of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the political trend on Facebook was estimated using the numbers of ‘likes’ recorded on verified Facebook fan pages during the period of study—24 January to 12 May 2014. A strong positive correlation was found to exist between the number of ‘likes’ a party or its leader secured on their official Facebook fan page and their popular vote share. A single latent variable—presumably, the political preferences of the people—explained 91.37% of the total variance in those two variables. Furthermore, the time period during which the ‘likes’ were recorded was found to have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between the ‘likes’ and votes. It was found that the month preceding the voting period was the best to predict the vote share using ‘likes’—with 86.6% accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Delhi rape incident of December 2012 triggered wide-scale protests that lasted more than a year. Out of the demonstrations emerged a number of performances, the most popular being Maya Rao’s performance walk, which went through many permutations over a one and half year period following the attack. The emergence of theatrical performance amidst the ongoing protests implies the engagement of a more formulated critique of sexual violence against women, and the contexts in which it arises, than was present in the earlier, more spontaneous and less regulated expressions of anger and grief. Maya Rao’s performance activism, and its relationship to the changing scenes of neo-liberalism and the rise of right-wing political parties, provides an opportunity to analyze what political performance means in contemporary India. Maya Rao’s performance walk was subsequently incorporated into her comic solo show and can be understood as a strategic, postcolonial, and historiographical intervention that raises questions about the representation of rape, notions of a civil and political society, and the political function of theatre. This article critically engages with the part played by theatre and performance in the protests, drawing on an analysis of Maya Rao’s performances and an interview with the performer herself, to explore how theatrical practice contributes to changing understandings of political agency and ethical responsibility at the sites of democratic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 Lok Sabha election marks a watershed for Indian politics. The elections in the state of Assam have been marked by interethnic violence, fuelled by issues of indigeneity and ‘illegal’ migration. This paper primarily discusses the electoral result from the Kokrajhar constituency in lower Assam, the heart of Bodo politics and a hotbed for ethnic conflict. Two decades of armed struggle resulted in concessions granted to the Bodos, the largest plains tribe in Assam, in the form of a territorial council, under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian constitution. In the 2014 election, for the first time in the history of the constituency, a non-Bodo candidate won, with an impressive 51% of the vote share. The electoral outcome may be seen as a further polarization of the existing ethnic cleavage between Bodos and non-Bodos in the region. Using the theory of outbidding, it will be shown that the victory of a non-Bodo in the constituency may be seen as an outcome of a history of inter-group conflict in the region as well as intra-group rivalry among various factions of the Bodo leadership. Further, this case also illustrates that the propensity of the outbidding effect to foment inter-ethnic violence is greater in contexts where political institutions (in this case autonomous/territorial councils) encourage a singular axis of identity as a basis of mobilization. In conclusion, the paper discusses the implications of this election result for the politics of ‘ethnic homeland’ in Assam. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines patterns of voter turnout and electoral competition in India's urban parliamentary constituencies. It places the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in historical context, drawing on constituency-level data from national elections since 1977 to explore broad changes and continuities in electoral competition, party structures, and voter turnout, with particular focus on comparisons between urban and rural India. The purpose of the article is descriptive, seeking to fill a gap in the literature on electoral competition in urban India. I find evidence that India's urban constituencies have recently, on average, been less competitive and participatory than non-urban constituencies, though this has not been a consistent trend since the mid-1970s. This article concludes with a brief outline for a research agenda on electoral politics in urban India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) made its national debut in 2014. Arvind Kejriwal, the National Convenor and a founding leader of the AAP, had a decisive impact on the character of the party. This paper reflects on the significance of Kejriwal's leadership in relation to the literature on party systems and political leadership. In 2014, he attempted to open up a new political cleavage and add a new party to the national party system. His entrepreneurial activity drew attention to the issues of corruption and governance. Kejriwal's political leadership is assessed in terms of his ability to set objectives for the party, his interaction with followers, his efforts to represent those followers and the development of party institutions. Kejriwal's performance as a party leader in 2014 was uneven. The outcome of the Lok Sabha elections exposed the geographical limits of Kejriwal's appeal even as he attempted to provide national leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time in 30 years, a single national party has won a majority on its own in the Indian parliament, and does not depend on the support of regional party allies for a parliamentary majority. Yet it is too soon to pronounce the decline or marginalisation of regional parties in India's national political life. The aggregate performance of regional parties remained resilient in the 2014 elections, even marginally improving over 2009. This article considers whether the 2014 elections mark a critical break in the position of regional parties at the national level. The principal argument is that the 2014 elections do not reflect a fundamental alteration in the dynamics of political regionalisation. Rather they suggest a new phase in the impact of regionalisation on the party system at the national level. In a landscape of continually increasing voter choice, electoral outcomes at the national level have begun to narrow to favour a smaller range of parties since 2004. The number of parties able to achieve influence via participation in cabinet governance or coalition has begun to decline. Political fragmentation has not gone away, but its consequences for election outcomes have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India and Pakistan are currently engaged in a competition for escalation dominance. While New Delhi is preparing for a limited conventional campaign against Pakistan, Islamabad is pursuing limited nuclear options to deter India. Together, these trends could increase the likelihood of nuclear conflict. India, for example, might conclude that it can launch an invasion without provoking a nuclear reprisal, while Pakistan might believe that it can employ nuclear weapons without triggering a nuclear exchange. Even if war can be avoided, these trends could eventually compel India to develop its own limited nuclear options in an effort to enhance deterrence and gain coercive leverage over Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes important developments in Indian public finance from developmental, redistributive, and political economy perspectives. The detailed analysis of policies relating to tax, expenditure, deficits, and debt brings out the failure of these policies in achieving their objectives, which to a considerable extent is attributable to the constraints posed by political economy developments and particularly, the influence of special interest groups. The analysis of tax policy brings out the low revenue productivity on the one hand and severe distortions caused by it. The analysis of expenditure policy shows the proliferation of subsidies and transfers crowding out productive expenditures on social and physical infrastructure. The analysis of deficits and debt shows the inability of the central government in calibrating sustainable fiscal policies and underlines the need for an independent fiscal institution to monitor the budgetary process and report to the Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India’s unprecedented growth since the mid-1990s and increased macroeconomic resilience has been against the backdrop of wide-ranging reforms, growing trade and financial integration, buoyant external demand, and ample global liquidity. Looking ahead, like most emerging markets, India is likely to face stronger headwinds, with less buoyant external financing conditions, and potentially lower growth in advanced markets. This raises questions about the sustainability of growth, sources of future growth, and reform priorities for restoring the momentum of convergence to higher income levels. Using the “distance to frontier” approach, the analysis in this article finds that the sizeable convergence gaps with respect to advanced and other emerging market economies imply considerable opportunities for catch-up. But structural transformation and convergence to higher living standards in India will be conditional on policy and institutional reforms to alleviate market and government failures, as well as on the ability of labor and capital to move toward higher-productivity sectors and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Of the two principal components of social welfare policy—basic public services and social protection—India has focused disproportionately on the latter in the last two decades, expanding existing social protection programs and creating new ones. By contrast, the country’s basic public services, such as primary education, public health, and water and sanitation have languished. What explains this uneven focus? Why has India prioritized social protection over public services? This article considers explanations suggested by the existing literature on welfare states and concludes that they do not account adequately for the Indian case. Instead, it argues, the prioritization of social protection in India results from a combination of political, ideational, and institutional factors rooted in India’s political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Misgovernance in India ranks among its toughest problems to solve. Despite decades of seemingly progressive legislation, there is a simmering dissatisfaction even among those for whose benefits the legislation is designed. The electoral debacle of the UPA government in the parliamentary election of 2014 can be partly attributed to the disenchantment that a vast majority of people felt toward the governance issues. We argue that dynastic politics is the hallmark of many political parties in India and it prevents the emergence of meritorious leadership. Just as we need the process of creative destruction in the economic arena for sustained growth, we need a similar process in the political arena so that local leaders are chosen on the basis of their performance. The success of the new government at the center will depend on whether they succeed in jettisoning centralized decision making and moving the political process in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of new governments in Pakistan and India in 2013 and 2014, respectively, has sparked controversies about the likely trajectory of the enduring rivalry. Emerging individual and domestic conditions reportedly created new opportunities for incremental rapprochement. Equipped with strong political mandates and backed by powerful constituencies, Pakistan's Nawaz Sharif and India's Narendra Modi initially set out to stabilize and revive their countries’ fragile economies and declared improved bilateral ties as a key precondition for implementing their economic agendas. However, mutual recriminations and border tensions resurfaced soon to prevent the revival of the stalled diplomatic dialogue in late 2014. Drawing on a thorough review of research on rivalry maintenance and termination and, in particular, the assumptions of the punctuated equilibrium model developed by Paul Diehl and Gary Goertz, this paper demonstrates how the conflict's structural complexities are likely to persist and undermine the chances for conflict resolution in the years ahead. The prevalent role of the army and a vibrant anti-Indian Islamic ideology in Pakistan, the persistence of a conflict lobby in India, lingering territorial feuds and ever increasing power asymmetries between the two countries, and decreasing third-party mediation in the Indo-Pakistani conflict will likely suffocate any initiative, however well-intended or pragmatic it may be. Even if bold leadership manages to revive a comprehensive peace process, it would have to be based on systematic confidence building measures in order to make it resilient to crises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As middle-class Indian women become economically more active, it is worth exploring who is doing the housework. Are gender roles shifting within the household across the board in urban India? This paper shifts research attention away from the metropolitan cities to a smallmofussiltown, a relatively conservative urban centre where gender roles have so far been more resistant to transformation than in metropolitan cities that are undergoing radical changes about which much has been written. The methodological tool used in the study is a time-use survey, aimed primarily at extracting quantitative data, to make visible the unseen, unpaid and underpaid work and activities undertaken by women. Individual interviews were used to measure the actual workload of the women as a proxy indicator of gender disparities at the intra-household scale. The paper concludes that conventional sex segregation in household tasks has not changed significantly, and that women's various engagements in the public sphere have doubled the burden of responsibilities. The conceptual and methodological implications of the investigation lie in a reinterpretation of what constitutes ‘work’ for middle-class women, offering renewed understanding of the ways in which women (re)negotiate gendered responsibilities at home and outside of it in rapidly changing times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses whether the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s 2014 general election in which it won a majority of seats after seven successive elections from 1989 to 2009 that resulted in hung parliaments and minority governments, mostly minority coalitions, means the end of the coalition era in Indian politics and the beginning of a new era of one-party majority dominated by the BJP, reminiscent of the Congress-dominated one-party majorities that prevailed during the pre-1989 period. It argues that for a variety of mutually reinforcing reasons, including the dependence of the BJP’s majority on pre-electoral coalitions, its need for such coalitions for winning state assembly elections and expanding its base for the next general election, and its need for allies in the Rajya Sabha for passing legislation, that the era of coalition politics will continue, though with some changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper tries to analyze the different layers of the conflict in the remote Indian northeast. It looks at the different facets of this conflict, and argues that the conflict in the Indian northeast exists at many different levels. In relation to the different facets of the conflict, the paper has a special focus on human rights abuses, poverty, corruption, poor governance, administrative failure, the role played by external actors, and draconian laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Most of the conflicts have been associated with strong separatist tendencies and the issue of migration. The levels of violence have differed from place to place within the region. While violence has been successfully dealt with by the Indian government in states like Mizoram, the situation in states like Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland seems to be a work in progress. Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland have witnessed very high levels of violence since 1947, when India became independent from British colonial rule, until the present day. Methodologically, the paper follows a bottom up approach, and, to get first-hand information about the conflict, a series of interviews was conducted recently with some of the local residents of the region. The paper suggests demilitarization and infrastructure development in the region as the way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of globalization, multifaceted and complex changes have increasingly interconnected geographically dispersed places. A central question of globalization studies concerns whether top-down forces of globalization are forging a global culture or whether processes of globalization from below are able to push back against homogenization by appropriating global forces rather than simply being overwhelmed by them. In this paper, I develop the concept of intentional spaces to show how ideas move globally and how local communities appropriate these ideas, revealing the actual practices that happen in the middle of top-down and bottom-up processes of globalization. I identify three types of ‘intentional spaces’ – physical, pedagogical, and ideological – to document the middle: where top down global forces meet local responses, and how these processes unfold. These intentional spaces enable processes of globalization from below, particularly the development of a mode of critical education that is both political and anti-hegemonic. This critical education empowers local people to adapt global/Western perspectives and influences to indigenous perspectives and practices, creating its own discourses of globalization. I use the context of the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh to consider how national and international forces intersect with the local, and how local communities re-envision their participation in a modern, global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At various points in its existence, the Indian state has deployed technologies to govern the nation. Recently, the state has undertaken a number of large-scale projects to make use of digital technology. The most controversial of these is the Unique Identity (UID) project, which is registering biometric, along with demographic, information about residents. This paper seeks to understand what is at stake politically in this technological intervention. It aims to explore the political logics and consequences of such a biometric system. It argues that UID re-imagines the economy and the state–citizen relationship as a series of transactions. Theoretically, the main thrust of this paper is to understand the “general economy of power”, as Michel Foucault calls it, which is unfolding in India around the issues of capitalist growth, inequality, social protection and terrorism—and UID signals the technological potential for the convergence of these concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, using the 2005–2006 National Family Health Survey dataset from India, we study the likelihood of a school-age child working, combining work with schooling or being idle, rather than attending school full time. Our analysis finds that with the inclusion of household chores in the child labour definition, boys are significantly more likely than girls to be full-time students and significantly less likely to be working, being idle or combining school and work. There are also significant regional differences, with children from the north-eastern states significantly more likely to be in the idle category rather than in school. The likelihood of being in the idle category is also significantly higher for older children, children with pre-school age siblings, urban children, Muslims and children from Scheduled Tribes. Finally, parental education, household wealth and land ownership are significantly and negatively correlated with the likelihood that the child is working, but land ownership does increase the risk of a child combining work and schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The scale and extent of trafficking in people remain little explored in the Indian context. Trafficking in human beings, especially in women and children, has become a matter of serious concern in India. Bonded and sex labour comprise the vast majority of human trafficking in India, though child soldiering, forced begging and organ harvesting have also been identified. The accessibility of the trafficker to the prospective victim is an important factor in trafficking. The method adopted is usually influenced by the proximity or otherwise of the trafficker to the victim. Human trafficking poses enormous challenges to governance and law enforcement, and, at times, these challenges seem to be overwhelming. Even if it is something that is unlikely to be eliminated, however, more effective steps can be taken to contain or even reduce the scope of the problem by a concerted effort to raise the priority of combating human trafficking and by both exerting pressure on and enhancing capacity in a country such as India, which still lacks legal instruments and serious anti-trafficking activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact that the 2014 election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has on U.S. relations with India, referencing Modi's relationship with the U.S. as the chief minister of Gujarat, India from the early 2000s through the early 2010s. The role that China's increasing power during the 21st century plays in the United States and India's relationship is discussed. An overview of India's economic relationship with China, including in regard to the former's desire to integrate into the Asian region, is provided. India's relationship with Japan, including in regard to Japanese investment in Gujarat, is also discussed.