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This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as citizens, programmatic policies and their local implementation, commitment to caste and party loyalties, and authority of charismatic leaders. The paper explores the roots of the political consciousness and rights awareness that underpin high levels of electoral participation. It suggests that elections form unique moments that allow ordinary people to experience an individual sense of citizenship and of democracy itself while at the same time allowing them to pursue projects of recognition, respect and assertion as members of communities. It is precisely this dual feature that makes voting so enduringly attractive to India's contemporary electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Indian economist K.N. Raj and examines his philosophies on economics. It is attested that Raj was known for his concern for the poor and his belief that the concept of inclusive growth is a central tenet of economic development. His professional history is provided, which includes his departure from a government job to focus upon teaching and conducting research at the Delhi School of Economics. Particularly focused upon in this paper are Raj’s attempts to develop Indian economic policies, his familiarity with the labour market, and his beliefs about economic implementation within the framework of democracy.

This paper argues that in contemporary Indonesia development is increasingly being posed as an ethical, rather than a political and economic, problem. I demonstrate this change by describing one of several moderate Islamic ‘spiritual reform’ movements that are active in state-owned enterprises, government offices, and private companies. These initiatives combine business management principles and techniques from popular life-coaching seminars with Muslim practice. I term this assemblage ‘market Islam’ and contrast it with what has been labelled ‘civil Islam’. I argue that market Islam seeks less to create commensurability between Islam and democracy and is instead designed to merge Muslim religious practice and capitalist ethics. Market Islam is thus less concerned with state power and the articulation of politics and religion, and more focused on eliciting the ethical dispositions conducive to economic liberalism. It is thus designed to create a form of effective self-management by making ‘people better from the inside’ and ‘breaking boundaries’ that are seen to afflict Indonesian development, such as those between Indonesia and other countries, between religion and work, and between individuals and the corporations for which they work. I conclude that market Islam is neither fundamentalist nor conservative, but rather involves breaking a series of boundaries that were constitutive of Indonesian modernity. Résumé Le présent article soutient que dans l’Indonésie contemporaine, le développement est de plus en plus présenté comme un problème éthique plus que politique et économique. L’auteur met en évidence ce changement en décrivant l’un des multiples mouvements de « réforme spirituelle » islamiques modérés à l’œuvre dans les entreprises d’État, les administrations et les sociétés privées. Ces initiatives combinent les principes et techniques de gestion d’entreprise issues de séminaires de coaching populaires avec la pratique de l’islam. L’auteur désigne cet assemblage par l’appellation « islam de marché» et le confronte à l’islam dit « civil ». Il affirme que l’islam de marché essaie non pas de créer des repères communs entre l’islam et la démocratie, mais de fusionner pratique religieuse musulmane et éthique capitaliste. L’islam de marché s’intéresse donc moins à la puissance de l’État et à l’articulation de la politique et de la religion qu’à la mise en place des dispositions éthiques conduisant au libéralisme économique. Il est donc conçu pour créer une forme d’autogestion efficace, en « rendant les gens meilleurs de l’intérieur » et en « brisant les barrières » qui grèvent le développement de l’Indonésie : barrières entre l’Indonésie et les autres pays, entre religion et travail, entre les individus et les entreprises pour lesquelles ils travaillent. L’auteur conclut que l’islam de marché n’est ni fondamentaliste ni conservateur, mais vise plutôt à abattre diverses cloisons inhérentes à la modernité en Indonésie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether and how parties reach across ethnic lines matters for the quality of democracy, the state of interethnic relations and substantive minority representation in plural societies. Existing explanations have focused on how politicians facing electoral incentives to seek broader support attempt to either redefine or transcend ethnic identities, but have overlooked the various ways, in which candidates from one ethnic community often directly address the ethno‐political interests, concerns and demands of other communities whose votes are being courted. To address this gap, we introduce the concept and develop a typology of cross‐ethnic appeals in plural democracies. Drawing on primary research in India and Kenya—two countries with salient ethnic divisions and ethnic party systems—we show that cross‐ethnic appeals are common, follow the logic of our typology, and can result in increased resources and representation for some electorally pivotal minorities, even going beyond what coethnic politicians have offered. The article contributes to the emerging academic literature on how parties foster cross‐ethnic linkages in plural societies. Our argument has implications for ethnic boundaries, the structure of political cleavages and the substantive representation of minorities in multiethnic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political commentaries on elections highlight the act and outcome of suffrage. Votes are tallied and trends analyzed as pundits distill election results, post facto, into predictable storylines said to reveal the so‐called pulse of the nation, littered with clichés about popular mandates and the people's verdict. Such accounts interpret elections as a straightforward index of a "popular will" without attention to their differentiated experience and how historically disenfranchised groups navigate their complex institutional landscape. Elections are not extraordinary events that transcend the inequalities of everyday life but a time when hierarchies are asserted, contested, and fortified. This occurs through the ballot as well as through the architecture of the institution and tactical use of its routine procedures. The Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK; Liberation Panthers Party), a prominent Dalit‐led (ex‐untouchable) party in India, is a case in point. Combining ethnography from inside a political campaign and interviews with VCK candidates, party leaders, and grassroots activists, this article employs election symbols as a diagnostic to study the architecture of the electoral institution, exploring how its tools and techniques—which are neither neutral nor freely available to all—consolidate structural advantages that privilege well‐resourced players while hindering those historically excluded from political power. [democracy, elections, inequality, India, caste, Dalits] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The status of India as the world's largest democracy is often lauded, but the re‐election of the overtly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 has increased concerns about the threat to India's multinational democracy and the rule of law. India is not the only democracy facing challenges related to majoritarian nationalism; there has been a worldwide rise in the language of majority 'rights' in democratic systems. The importance of analysing the extent to which the rights of majorities are being increasingly institutionalized within democratic systems has therefore increased. It is vitally important to identify whether tendencies toward ethnic democracy are increasing (and the conditions under which they do so). There may well be red flags that emerge in democratic systems, heralding the potential direction of travel. This article proposes a methodology to identify degrees of ethnic democracy using a combination of formal and informal measures and illustrates it by assessing India through an examination of anti‐Muslim policies and rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is one of the most diverse countries of the world but operates with a majoritarian Westminster constitution and simple plurality electoral system, albeit also with a federal structure. It was eventually coded as consociational by Arend Lijphart (1996) but this coding was questioned by authors such as Wilkinson (2000) and Adeney (2002). This article assesses the nature of both de jure and de facto power‐sharing in India over its 70 years of independence and tracks the evolution of de jure and de facto power‐sharing in relation to four dimensions of diversity: religion, caste, territory and language. It questions whether the electoral success of Hindu nationalism and the increasing acceptance of ethnic majoritarianism has reduced the degree of power‐sharing in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes India's recent enactment of universal primary education. This programmatic policy change is puzzling given the clientelistic features of Indian democracy. Drawing on interviews and official documents, I demonstrate the catalytic role of committed state elites, who introduced incremental reforms over three decades. These officials operated beneath the political radar, layering small‐scale initiatives on top of the mainstream school system. Following India's globalization in the 1990s, support from the World Bank gave committed officials the political opportunity to experiment with new programs in underperforming regions, which they progressively extended across the country. These incremental reforms supplied the institutional blueprint for India's universal primary education program. Along with state initiative from above, civil society mobilized from below, using the judiciary to hold the state legally responsible for policy implementation. Reforms exposed acute gaps in service delivery, propelling new civic demands for state accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both academic and activist discourse, particularly with regard to India, the concept of the informal sector has come to prominence, particularly after India's liberalization. This article demystifies the idea of the informal sector in India, revealing the multilayered existence of various groups of workers in vulnerable positions which are by no means inevitable or permanent but rather are the product of India's history and political economy. Accordingly, it is the case that certain interventions have the potential to transform the lives of India's unorganized workers, but such policy would need to target the specific needs of each unorganized group of workers. We argue that the concept and discourse of the informal sectors imply the permanence of unorganized, unregulated work. Conceptualizing Indian labor in this way leads to a position that the state should provide support and welfare measures to help workers survive at a bare minimum level of subsistence, but also to a fundamental failure to address the structural and specific causes of workers' vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT That the news matters is a fundamental postulate of modernity. Yet the ways people talk about the news varies across cultures and over time. In this article, I examine how such 'metapragmatic' speech about the news changed across a 15-year period, during which India underwent seismic shifts in its political and economic order. By unpacking and contextualizing five metapragmatic utterances collected between two fieldwork periods, 1992-93 and 2007-08, I examine how people used the tension between the concepts of 'news as public good' and 'news as commodity' to indexically position themselves as democratic citizens in a changing nation. Furthermore, I explore how and why these discursive practices changed during the Indian economy's so-called liberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This narrative looks at how the world's most populated democracy works using Hindu symbolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Conservative Party crisis over India to examine the relationship between diehard Conservatives and Britain's emerging democracy. Far from rejecting democracy outright, diehard rhetoric and mass communication demonstrates how they adapted to it and utilised it in pursuit of their objectives. The accommodation of diehard Conservatism within the Conservative Party was a necessary and mutual embrace. Contrary to popular image, it promoted Conservative unity and contributed to the party's remarkable electoral success. Unable to exact decisive victories, the capacity of diehard Conservatives to generate party crises over imperial questions, among grass-roots and back-bench Conservatives, ensured that they had a role in shaping the presentation and content of party policy. This had implications for leadership efforts to liberalise the party, and also popular perceptions of British imperialism and the feasibility of democracy in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion of marginalized sections and minorities remains one of the most vexing problems for democratic politics. This article discusses the enactment of a recent Indian law, 'The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act, 2006', as exemplifying the possibilities of inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic processes. The law was enacted in response to a nationwide mobilization of marginalized forest dwellers and their advocates demanding rights over forests. Grassroots-level formations representing forest dwellers came together across scales and spaces to form a network that successfully negotiated India's democratic politics to achieve the passage of the law. The case illustrates the role of grassroots mobilizations in creating alternate discourses of legitimacy, networking across scales and locations, and using spaces provided by representative democracy to include the voices and demands of the marginalized in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a bilingual or multilingual society, certain sectors may be regarded as disloyal should they speak the language of state enemies or be associated in one way or another with neighboring hostile countries. Within this framework, the present article analyzes how two deeply divided democracies, India and Israel, determined and implemented language and educational policies with respect to two major minority languages, Urdu and Arabic. A comparison is conducted between the policies of secular democratic India, regarding Urdu, a language of its Muslims minority, and of Israel, an ethnic democracy, regarding Arabic, the language of its Arab-Palestinian minority. The findings indicate that both states have consigned the minority language to a marginal position on the public stage. Moreover, albeit that a certain level of autonomy in the educational sphere is given to the minority, the educational status of the minority is markedly low in comparison to the majority. En una sociedad bilingüe o multilingüe, ciertos sectores pueden ser considerados como desleales si hablan el idioma de estados enemigos o fueran asociados de una u otra forma con países vecinos hostiles. Dentro de este marco, el presente artículo analiza como dos democracias sumamente divididas, India e Israel, determinaron e implementaron las políticas lingüisticas y educacionales de los dos más importantes idiomas minoritarios, el Urdu y el Árabe, respectivamente. Se lleva a cabo una comparación entre las políticas de la democracia secular de India, en lo que respecta al Urdu, un idioma de su minoría Musulmana, y de la democracia étnica Israelí, con respecto al Árabe, el idioma de su minoría Árabe-Palestina. Las conclusiones indican que ambos estados han consignado el idioma minoritario a una posición marginal en el escenario de la vida pública. Además, el status educativo de la minoría es considerablemente bajo en comparación con el de la mayoría, aunque un cierto nivel de autonomía en la esfera educacional es dado al idioma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have largely left unexplored the analysis of how ideas and practices of democracy have been internalized in the popular consciousness of different societies and neglected the development of an anthropology of democratization processes. Using the political ethnography of a powerful northern India caste (the Yadavs), the article unravels what I call the process of vernacularization of democratic politics, meaning the ways in which values and practices of democracy become embedded in particular cultural and social practices, and in the process become entrenched in the consciousness of ordinary people. The analysis of how the local idioms of caste, kinship, kingship, religion, and politics (‘the vernacular’) inform popular perceptions of the political world and of how the democratic process shapes in turn ‘the vernacular’ provides a line of inquiry to understand the rise of popular politics in different parts of the world. Résumé Les anthropologues se sont peu intéressés à la manière dont les idées et pratiques de la démocratie ont été incorporées dans la conscience populaire de différentes sociétés, et ont négligé le développement d'une anthropologie des processus de démocratisation. À travers l'ethnographie politique d'une caste du nord de l'Inde, les puissants Yadavs, l'auteur restitue ce qu'elle appelle un processus de vernacularisation de la politique démocratique, autrement dit la manière dont les valeurs et pratiques de la démocratie s'intègrent dans des pratiques culturelles et sociales particulières, et s'ancrent au cours de ce processus dans la conscience des gens. L'analyse des manières dont les idiomes locaux de caste, parenté, royauté, religion et politique (« le vernaculaire ») informent les perceptions populaires du monde politique et dont le processus démocratique donne forme à son tour au « vernaculaire » fournit une méthode d'enquête pour comprendre la montée en puissance de la politique populaire dans différentes parties du monde. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on liberal neutrality and the Indian case of pluralism. The case of Indian cultural pluralism poses fundamental challenges to the political theory of toleration. Analysis shows that the dominant way of conceiving state neutrality becomes untenable in the Indian context. Patterned after the liberal democracies in the West, the Indian state is the harbinger of religious conflict in India because of its conception of toleration and state neutrality.

This article explores why in India's Jharkhand, Mundas, often depicted as poor tribals, participate in elections to keep the state away, seeing it as foreign, dangerous, and juxtaposing its self-interested and divisive politics with a sacral polity, the parha. Munda disengagement with the state results from a complex combination of their contrasting the state with the sacral polity, historical experience of exploitation by state officers, and social relations with rural elites who, seeking to maintain dominance, reproduce Munda imaginings. The article thus draws attention to multiple co-existing notions of politics and the importance of a local political economy in the social production of cultural imaginings of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the politics and practices of gendered democratic citizenship in an educational setting in Kerala, India. Discourses of consumption as they intersect postcolonial cultural-ideological political fields; Focus on the contemporary trajectory among politicized male college students of a historically important masculinist political public; Logic and freedom of consumption.

The article compares the public policy experience of three nations, India, the United States, and South Africa. The article provides a brief rationale for affirmative action, describes the policy initiatives and the politics of preference, and presents an assessment followed by some concluding remarks. India, the largest working democracy, in an effort to transform an essentially unequal and hierarchical society into a "Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic" has over the last 50 years embarked upon a serious measure of "reservations to undo institutionalized social discrimination practiced over the millennia. The United States of America, an immigrant nation and the most stable democracy, has to come to grips with its ethnic diversity and more importantly undo the impact of past discrimination against minorities. South Africa, after a long rule by a tiny minority, has come into the comity of modern democratic nations only recently with the transfer of power to the majority blacks in 1994. While the experience of India and the United States in this context is formidable and long, the South African experience is nascent but important.

Focuses on the political and economic history in India. Details on the issue surrounding the development of the state of Emergency; Impact of the Congress and the government on the civil service of the country; Establishment of a new kind of legality for the Indian form of democracy.