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In recent years, the increasing refusal by disadvantaged castes, especially Dalits (ex-untouchables), to accept caste hierarchies has increased intercaste tensions and violence in rural India. But intercaste accommodations aimed at avoiding violence have also increased, more sharply than violent incidents. This study explains how accommodations are made, almost always between senior Dalit and 'higher' caste leaders. Contrasts and parallels between their calculations and perspectives are examined, along with their views of the painful ambiguities that attend such accommodations. The authority of these senior leaders within their castes is, for the present, crucial to making accommodations sustainable. Changes that undermine their authority may make accommodations more difficult to forge and to sustain, but those changes may also provide a new basis for such agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses headway made by governments in Brazil, India, China and South Africa in pursuing three goals: reducing income poverty; reaching the poorest of the poor and reducing inequality. Outcomes vary as we move up the ladder from the first and easiest of these challenges to the third and most daunting. Then the definition of poverty is broadened to include severe shortage of opportunities, liberties and capabilities. The paper discusses how the four countries performed in ameliorating several human development indicators and in enhancing poor people’s ‘political capacity’, the lack of which is an important dimension of their poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the roles that political leaders have played in the formulation and implementation of government initiatives to tackle poverty and inequality in Brazil, China, India and South Africa since about 2002. While research on social policy and welfare expansion in the industrialised world has largely ignored leaders, we stress the importance of politics and political agency, since political leaders often exercised decisive influence even if their decisions to prioritise certain issues and to adopt certain strategies depend on the convergence of other factors. We examine their management of tensions and opposition within their governments and their political systems – as well as what we can discern of their motivations and political calculations. We consider the impact on government initiatives both of their adroit machinations and, at times, of their ineptitude. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author chronicles experiences and learnings with British Indian historian Anthony Low on studies about the South Asian history, particularly the patterns of behavior in sustaining political culture in India. Topics discussed include comparative investigations on the political system, including engagements in local political fixing, arguments on politics and society in post-Independence India, and the barriers between regions, disciplines, and perspectives.

During its first year in power (2014–15), the government of Narendra Modi in India showed itself to be a precarious enterprise. The prime minister was beset by multiple antagonisms. He radically centralised power. This has enabled him to get some things done swiftly, but it has weakened him by choking off reliable information flows from below and by sowing discontent among his party and his supporters. An exercise in fiscal decentralisation to the state level in this federal system ran counter to his centralisation, but on close examination, it proved less than generous. His efforts to tackle two problems—bureaucratic paralysis and high-level corruption—contradicted one another. His efforts to transcend the ambiguities which ensnare every prime minister were unrealistic and triggered further discontent among party colleagues. Finally, his handling of religious polarisation became entangled in multiple antagonisms—between the expectations of Hindu nationalists (and his own legacy as a polariser) and his duty to maintain social cohesion; between political gains to be made from polarisation and political costs that attend it; between polarisers who sought to strengthen his hand and those who sought to polarise in order to undermine him. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In May 2014, a regional party in Odisha, the Biju Janata Dal, defied national trends by thrashing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress Party at both parliamentary and state elections. It offered voters a high-profile regional leader who had radically centralised power and retained the capacity to govern somewhat effectively, even forcefully. It thus countered the appeal of BJP leader Narendra Modi to offer those same things. This analysis examines how this state government – like a few others – was able to withstand the national swing towards the BJP and Modi. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When a political system is compared with others, one can learn fundamentally important things about it, which remain obscure or even invisible when it is studied in isolation. This paper illustrates this point by considering India. It focuses on several themes: the radical redistribution of power that has occurred there since 1989; two key consequences of that change; post-clientelist strategies used by Indian politicians in efforts to secure re-election; the emergence of small-time political entrepreneurs at the local level; and the fluidity of political identities. The article concludes with a discussion of the limited opportunities that colleagues in India have to undertake international comparisons, and a proposed partial solution to that problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No systematic, overall agenda for governance reform has ever been developed by national leaders in India. Each recent government in New Delhi has experimented with certain initiatives, but these have never added up to a fully elaborated strategy. To a great extent, this is explained by national leaders' awareness that most of the actual governing in India occurs at and below the state level in this federal system, and that the Constitution gives state governments control over several key areas in which governance reform might be attempted. They have also recognised that several state governments, led by a diversity of parties, have developed promising governance reforms - so national leaders' reforms have often consisted substantially of ideas borrowed from the state level. There are important exceptions to this - not least the recent passage of a Right to Information Act by the Congress-led government in New Delhi. But a great many promising governance reforms in India have emerged at the state level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an extensive literature on decentralisation, but most studies focus on one (or only a few) of the many cases that have emerged in recent years. The three papers which follow offer a welcome corrective by considering substantial numbers of countries, and by identifying priorities for future research. Treisman asks why governments do (or do not) pursue fiscal decentralisation and reaches conclusions that are both fresh and controversial. O'Dwyer and Ziblatt assess the impact of decentralisation on government effectiveness and efficiency. Their definitions and tools differ from those used by others, so their findings supplement but sit uneasily alongside other analyses. Schneider's complex paper considers the impact of various types of decentralisation on social policies. It will ignite controversy on several fronts – not least because it finds that deconcentration has the most positive impact, while others regard deconcentration on its own as a form of centralisation. The debates that these papers will fuel are badly needed, but contending analysts must find ways of countering the tendency to talk past one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews recent approaches by developing country governments to include ordinary people, particularly the poor, in democratic processes so as to benefit the people and protect democracy itself. Three issues currently characterise all aspects of government: centrist approaches, fiscal constraints, and resistance to reform. There have been five types of approaches to political reform, including elected councils, user committees, and other mechanisms, as well as efforts to engage civil society and elites in the process. This paper discusses how these efforts can be facilitated, and how to tackle resistance to reform, before going on to look at ways to measure the impact of such reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is time that India was taken more seriously in international affairs. Its economic reforms since 1991 have been cautious and limited, but they hold considerable promise for making India a more formidable partner and market. The reforms are also politically sustainable because they are gradual. India possesses a wealth of skilled political operatives who can sustain democratic processes amid economic reform and social tension. The net effect of its unparalleled social heterogeneity is to prevent conflict from becoming dangerously polarised. The pragmatism which is evident in the reforms has also begun to reshape India's approach to the wider world. Many painful dilemmas remain to be faced, but the outlook is encouraging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Potter, who ably edited this journal for many years (1989-1997), recently passed away. David was then offered a chance to help build a new kind of institution - the Open University. After undergraduate study at the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate from the London School of Economics, he took a job at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the author discusses the career of former editor of the journal David Potter, an article by Arudra Burra on the Indian Civil Service (ICS,) and an article by Richard Crook on bureaucracies in sub-Saharan Africa.