Battles Half Won

Ashutosh Varshney

Description

This lively collection of essays by Ashutosh Varshney analyses the deepening of Indian democracy since 1947 and the challenges this has created. It examines concerns ranging from federalism and Hindu nationalism to caste conflict and civil society, the north south economic divide, and politics of economic reforms. Accompanied by a substantial overview tracing the forging and consolidation of India s improbable democracy, the book, full of original insights, portrays the successes and failures of our experience in a new comparative perspective, enriching our understanding of the idea of democracy.

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184348
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ashutosh Varshney

BATTLES HALF WON
India s Improbable Democracy
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
List of Tables and Figures
Preface
I. Democracy
1. The Odyssey of an Improbable Democracy
2. Why Democracy Survives
3. Is India Becoming More Democratic?
II. Religion, Language, and Caste
4. Contested Meanings: India s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety in the 1980s and 1990s
5. Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond
6. How Has Indian Federalism Done?
7. Two Banks of the Same River? Social Orders and Entrepreneurialism in India
8. Caste and Entrepreneurship in India (with Lakshmi Iyer and Tarun Khanna)
III. Economic Development
9. Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eradicated Poverty?
10. Democracy and Markets in India
Notes on Chapters
Endnotes
References
Copyright Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
BATTLES HALF WON
Born in India, Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Brown University, where he also directs the India Initiative. Previously, he taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His books include Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India , Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India and India in the Era of Economic Reforms. His honours include the Guggenheim and Carnegie awards and the Gregory Luebbert Prize.
He is a contributing editor for the Indian Express , and his guest columns have appeared in many newspapers, including the Financial Times.
Praise for the Book
Sauteed with insights of top-of-the-shelf scholars in political science, sociology and economics, his freshly-minted prose in the refurbished essays published earlier in top academic journals reminds one of pentimento in painting, where images painted over by the artist become starkly translucent, revealing an earlier design trapped under the layers of the present work. Whatever it is, Varshney, in his masterly Tocquevillian tone, has reaffirmed that India that is Bharat is perpetually being reconstituted by politics alone - Financial Express
Battles Half Won elevates the discourse on Indian politics by grounding its cause-and-effect relationship to democracy in empirical claims and sharp analyses - The Hindu
Varshney exudes a kind of intellectual self-confidence that enables him to escape a familiar failing of most professional political scientists, especially those who research and analyse the Indian political landscape, characterised by an inexplicable inability to remain unintimidated by the political correctness of the week . . . It is this refreshing autonomy that makes this collection of articles a sobering read - Biblio
A dense, many-layered book . . . the academic will find it useful for the wealth of data it carries; for the lay reader, many of its pages will be eye-openers - Book Review
Ashutosh Varshney draws on his best recent work [here] . . . to produce a book of enduring value. It takes us on wide ranging, theoretically sophisticated and deeply researched engagements with major topics in Indian politics . . . While India s battles may be only half won , we are given good reasons to believe that battles will continue to be won and that its improbable democracy will persist -Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne H. Rudolph, Professors of Political Science Emeritus, University of Chicago
More than six decades after India s Independence, its democracy s resounding resilience is the conundrum that Ashutosh Varshney sets out to examine. In the process he has written a masterly book that combines scholarship, acute powers of analysis and great linguistic style, which makes it a pleasure to read even as it forces one to think -Kaushik Basu, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and C. Marks Professor of International Studies, Cornell University
Ashutosh Varshney is a world-class scholar of Indian politics. His writings are erudite and insightful . . . This collection of his updated essays deserves to be read widely -Atul Kohli, David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
To Vibha and Kartik
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
Table 2.1 India s Religious Profile
Table 3.1 India s Caste Composition
Table 4.1 Indian National Congress (INC) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) National Election Results, 1952-2009
Table 5.1 Hindu-Muslim Riots in 28 Indian Cities, 1950-95
Table 6.1 Pride in India, 1990-2005 (per cent)
Table 6.2 Subjective National Identity in India, 1998-2005 (per cent)
Table 6.3 India s Principal Languages
Table 6.4 Distribution of Languages across States in India
Table 6.5 State-wise Revenues and Expenditures, 2006-07
Table 6.6 Distribution of Religions across Indian States (per cent)
Table 7.1 North and South: Economic Growth Rates, 1960-2007 (per cent per annum)
Table 7.2 Per Capita Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) Growth Rates (per cent per annum)
Table 7.3 Growth in the Number of Enterprises
Table 7.4 Growth of Rural Enterprises, 1998-2005
Table 7.5 Growth of Urban Enterprises, 1998-2005
Table 7.6 Percentage of OBC Ownership of Enterprises, 1998
Table 7.7 Percentage of OBC Ownership of Enterprises, 2005
Table 8.1 Share of Enterprises and Employment by Caste Category, 2005
Table 8.2 Trends in Enterprise Ownership and Employment Generation by Caste Category
Table 8.3 Firm Scale Characteristics by Caste Category
Table 8.4 Percentage of Firms in Different Industrial Categories by Caste of Owner
Table 8.5 Determinants of SC/ST Share in Enterprise and Employment
Table 10.1 Party Positions in the Lower House of Parliament, 1984-89 and 1991-96
Table 10.2 Perceptions of Economic Reforms According to Various Communities, 2004 (percentage of row totals)
Table 10.3 Perceptions of Economic Reforms According to Various Communities, 2009 (percentage of row totals)
Figures
Figure 3.1 All-India Hindu Ritual Hierarchy
Figure 3.2 OBCs and Dominant Castes
Figure 5.1 Everyday Engagement in Villages and Cities
Figure 5.2 Civic Life and Ethnic Conflict
Figure 6.1 Percentage of Central Revenue Transferred to the States
Figure 8.1 Employment Generation in SC Enterprises
Figure 8.2 Employment Generation in ST Enterprises
Figure 8.3 Employment Generation in OBC Enterprises
Preface
For political science, which is my disciplinary home, India s democracy is a baffling phenomenon. Theories predicted democracy s demise in India, but that has not happened. Indeed, the opposite has transpired. Democracy is now firmly institutionalized. Elections are the only way to come to power; governments are openly and freely challenged by a whole host of actors, institutions, and organizations; incumbents routinely lose power in freely contested elections. Several inadequacies remain, but much has been achieved.
The aim of these essays is twofold. Not only do I seek to convey my understanding of why, in a highly counter-theoretical way, India s democracy has survived, but I also analyse the achievements and failures of Indian democracy. In the process, the interaction of democracy with caste, religion, language, and economy features widely in the book. India s democracy is shaped by these social and economic factors and, in turn, it influences them.
The essays presented here cover a period of twenty years of writing. With the exception of the first chapter, all chapters were originally published as articles, mostly in scholarly journals. While the original argument remains intact in each essay, all essays have been significantly updated for this volume. As far as possible, repetition has been avoided, though some foundational ideas are bound to figure prominently in several essays.
My understanding of Indian democracy has emerged out of a scholarly college formed seamlessly since my days as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At JNU, Sudipta Kaviraj, now at Columbia, greatly shaped my understanding, though I was never formally his student. At MIT, the late Myron Weiner mentored me with remarkable intellectual commitment and grace. Since starting my American career as a professor, my principal institutional homes-Harvard, Michigan, and Brown-have turned out to be stimulating intellectual sites, but they have not been my only sources of inspiration. As my career evolved, an invisible college of scholarly interaction emerged. Debating and critiquing in seminars and conferences, and reading drafts and published work, in addition to field research, generated new ideas.
For the arguments presented in this volume, I would especially-and thankfully-like to acknowledge intellectual exchanges over the last two decades with Amit Ahuja, Kanti Bajpai, Jagdish Bhagwati, Jonah Blank, Marshall Bouton, Kanchan Chandra, Pradeep Chhibber, Anis Dani, Jorge Dominguez, Sumit Ganguly, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Joshua Gubler, Stephan Haggard, Robert Hardgrave, John Harriss, Patrick Heller, Ronald Herring, Stanley Hoffmann, the late Samuel Huntington, Christophe Jaffrelot, Niraja Jayal, Rob Jenkins, Stathis Kalyvas, Atul Kohli, Margaret Levi, Daniel Levine, Roderick MacFarquhar, Scott Mainwaring, James Manor, Pratap Mehta, Uday Mehta, Mick Moore, James Morone, Ashis Nandy, Deepa Narayan, Phil Oldenburg, Robert Putnam, Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan, Biju Rao, Sanjay Reddy, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, Jeff Sachs, Teresita Schaefer, James Scott, Amartya Sen, Rajath Shourie, Bhrigu and Prerna Singh, Eswaran Sridharan, Alfred Stepan, Ashley Tellis, the late Myron Weiner, Rina Williams, and Yogendra Yadav. Not all are, or were, India specialists, but their intellectual curiosity and questioning contributed to greater rigor, or greater breadth, in arguments.
At Penguin, this volume went through several editors. Finally, Kamini Ma