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This article reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy and how the former emerges from within democracy only to subvert it. The essay outlines important conceptual issues in the relationship between Hindu nationalism and democracy, discusses the relationship between the idea of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and ‘Hindu Rajya’, and delves into the complex interplay between Hindu nationalism and caste. This article ultimately argues that Hindu nationalism’s alignment with authoritarianism in a political style does not simply corrode democracy, but it also undermines all values. The objective of this analysis is not to provide a comprehensive explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism, as much as to reflect on the ways in which its ideology operates at multiple levels.

The rapid expansion of private higher education over the past four decades in India has transformed Indian higher education. This chapter has three aims. It provides the historical, economic, and political context for the privatization of higher education in India. It then examines the legal, regulatory, and institutional framework in which private education operates in India, and how these shape the opportunities and constraints for private education institutions. It then looks at the governance challenges of a new generation of private universities that might help increase the breadth and depth of private higher education in India. The chapter concludes with a prediction that the future success of private higher education in India will depend on two factors: broader growth of the Indian economy and willingness to expand and invest in education, and political and administrative choices over the regulation of the higher education system in India.

This essay proceeds with the view that the process of judicial appointments is as much political as it is legal, even though the arguments before the Supreme Court in the NJAC Case constantly treated it as a matter of only constitutional law. This essay argues that it is critical to be cognizant of the political events involving successive governments and Chief Justices wresting the power to appoint judges. It asks why and how the process of deciding upon an acceptable procedure for judicial appointments has become the source of an ongoing confrontation between the executive and the judiciary. It is argued in this essay that while the government and the judiciary might individually be justified in their stance, as a result of this conflict, public credibility of both these institutions has been adversely affected.

India faces a defining period. Its status as a global power is not only recognized but increasingly institutionalized, even as geopolitical shifts create both opportunities and challenges. With critical interests in almost every multilateral regime and vital stakes in emerging ones, India has no choice but to influence the evolving multilateral order. If India seeks to affect the multilateral order, how will it do so? In the past, it had little choice but to be content with rule taking - adhering to existing international norms and institutions. Will it now focus on rule breaking - challenging the present order primarily for effect and seeking greater accommodation in existing institutions? Or will it focus on rule shaping - contributing in partnership with others to shape emerging norms and regimes, particularly on energy, food, climate, oceans, and cyber security? And how do India's troubled neighborhood, complex domestic politics, and limited capacity inhibit its rule-shaping ability? Despite limitations, India increasingly has the ideas, people, and tools to shape the global order - in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, "not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially". Will India emerge as one of the shapers of the emerging international order? This volume seeks to answer that question.

This chapter outlines the analytical framework for the larger volume, situating the book’s inquiry of India’s institutional foundations in the larger context of the multiple transformations the country has experienced since 1947. In so doing, it explicitly seeks to build on a 2005 volume by Kapur and Mehta on India’s public sector performance. The chapter then explicates the central themes that characterize the eleven institutions, or institutional clusters, examined in the book. In the penultimate section, it discusses five central elements of the Indian state’s struggle to transition from “old order” to “new order” institutions. It concludes by arguing that serious institutional reform is vital if the country is to build and sustain an Indian state for the twenty-first century.

Indian constitutional law is of immense historical, practical, and theoretical significance. Almost all the issues that arise in the course of thinking about law in modern constitutional democracies find their most intense expression in the evolution of Indian constitutional law. India’s Constitution was the framework through which the world’s largest and one of its most contentious democracies was brought into being. It was the charter through which an ancient civilization was set on the road to modernity and radical social reform. It is the framework that provides for the management and accommodation of the most complex ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of any modern nation-State. It has been the site where different ideas of development have been contested and reimagined. It has been the normative and legal framework through which the world’s largest democracy contests its own future. The future of constitutionalism in the world depends a good deal on the future of the Indian experiment. In this chapter, we seek to achieve three outcomes. First, we explicate the historical commitment to the idea of constitutionalism. Second, we examine some of the major substantive tensions that have defined the contours of constitutionalism in India. Third, we consider the character of constitutional development in India, in particular the forces that have shaped its evolution.

The maturity and sophistication of the Indo-us relationship are such that both countries will be able to tolerate differences, while simultaneously strengthening the sinews of their interdependence.

The Indian Supreme Court’s chief duty is to interpret and enforce the Constitution of 1950. Running to more than a hundred-thousand words in its English-language version, this document is the longest basic law of any of the world’s independent countries. It contains, at latest count, 444 articles and a dozen schedules. Since its original adoption, it has been amended more than a hundred times, and now fills about 250 printed pages. It is fair to say that the Supreme Court, operating under the aegis of this book-sized liberal constitution, has by and large played a significant and even pivotal role in sustaining India’s liberal-democratic institutions and upholding the rule of law. 1 The Court’s justices, who by law now number twenty-six, have over the years carved out an independent role for the Court in the matter of judicial appointments and transfers, upheld extensive judicial review of executive action, and even declared several constitutional amendments unconstitutional. The Court upon which they sit is one of the world’s most powerful judicial bodies, and yet precisely because of this its career has been and remains shadowed by irony and controversy, with implications for democracy that are both positive and problematic. A simple issue-wise scorecard of the Court’s contribution to maintaining liberty and the rule of law might begin by noting that the Court has generally upheld basic freedoms associated with liberal democracy, albeit with some glaring exceptions. The Court has a relatively weak record when it comes to questioning executive action in cases of preventive detention. While the Court has generally upheld the right to free expression, it has given the state more leeway in Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. His most recent publications include The Burden of Democracy (2004) and India’s Public Institutions (coedited with Devesh Kapur, 2005). His essay “Hinduism and Self-Rule” appeared in the July 2004 issue of the Journal of Democracy.