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This paper attempts to answer the question: why do the police use deadly force in a democratic country? Police shootings in India are better known as encounters, a term that refers to a specific type of police contact—a spontaneous, unplanned ‘shoot-out’ between the police and alleged criminals, in which the criminal is usually killed, with few or no police injuries. The police use of deadly force remains largely unquestioned or unaccountable. This paper explores the wider structural and systemic factors that create conditions in which killing ‘hardened’ criminals seems to be the last resort for the police to gain some control in the fight against crime. Wider cultural and specifically police sub-cultural factors that make police killing of alleged criminals both feasible and acceptable in a democratic country are discussed. Based on a qualitative study of Mumbai police officers’ narratives accounting for use of deadly force, the paper draws upon wider policing literature in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, South Africa and certain Latin American countries to explain why this form of police violence occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that manifestations of the sacred in Hollywood biblical spectaculars, as well as in films from Bollywood (the Hollywood of Bombay), have been significantly contoured by a reticulate set of oral norms. That is, the films' depictions of hierophany are tied to a way of knowing that maintains roots in orality (as distinct from a way of knowing historically permitted and/or induced by a cultural investment in the written word). Such orally inflected norms as epical and exoteric abundance, melodrama, frontality, and a telescoping of the real into the mythic compel us to re-think the common critical assumption that religious spectaculars are not authentically manifesting the sacred or that they can only be operating as escapist metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mumbai has historically been a home to several struggles of urban underprivileged groups. The city assured spaces to slums in the past, albeit grudgingly. Cases of displacement were few and intensely contested. However, the last decade has witnessed a considerable expansion of the nature and scale of threats to the existence of slum-dwellers in the city. Attempts to organize slum communities began in the 1960s following a trajectory of locality development and then housing rights. The earlier vision of broad-based development and struggles of urban poor has given way to fragmented, issue-based and localized struggles. Intense politicization and competition for valuable resources and opportunities have fractured this potent constituency comprising about 60 percent of city dwellers. The paper traces the slippery and challenging terrain of organizing slum communities around their rights and raises questions about the location and nature of community practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With rapid privatization of solid waste management (SWM) across urban centers in India since the 1990s, the role of the state agencies is considerably diluted. The contract system in this sector is here to stay. This has implications for the large numbers of conservancy workers who are employees of the urban local bodies (ULBs) as well as those who perform the same functions as the ‘standard’ workers, but work on contractual basis. Through amendments in certain labour and environment related laws, SWM has been getting differently organized during the last seven to eight years in India. The labour question in the rapidly privatizing SWM sector in urban areas has several dimensions including that of job security, and conflicts between permanent and contractual workers and other groups who work with waste. All these categories of workers in urban India, whether within the formal or the informal sector, belong to socially and economically marginalized sections of society. Unionization of workers and struggles for their entitlements has been an important strategy. Several years of association with a trade union of conservancy workers in the city of Mumbai has enriched teaching of Community Organization (CO) through classroom-field interface with a focus on social action. This paper attempts to trace, through the lens of the interface between an academic institution (and its curriculum in CO) and a trade union, the struggles and success in assuring secure livelihood and entitlements for thousands of workers. Achievements of the union assume great significance as it gives others the confidence to continue with their own efforts at organizing the unorganized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]