Content area
Full Text
Jakub Zaj czkowski, et. al. (eds.), India in the Contemporary World: Polity, Economy and International Relations (New Delhi : Routledge, 2014), Pages: 522, Price: Rs. 696.50.
The title of this book resonates with its spirit and themes that deal with contemporary polity, economy and international relations of India. It covers a huge canvas of contemporary Indian reality through a myriad of approaches enunciated through narratives involving culture, society, democracy, economy, development, and security. From culture to economy and security to foreign policy, the book provides a rare glimpse into the understanding of India's socio-cultural, economic and security policies apropos the EU. It is divided into four parts dealing with four different but inter-related themes.
The first part titled "Culture, Society and Democracy" has five chapters under it. The first chapter probes India's democratic success as a "deviant" case. The author attributes India's resilience, when many other postcolonial transitional powers have failed to become successful states, to India's "counterfactual democracy". While it does not fail in mentioning about the roadblocks and irritants in India's democratic transition, an impression is created that the process of the transition has been relatively smooth. The second chapter maps the graduation of the voting situation and rights in India right from its independence. It mostly relies on the data (mostly between 2004 and 2009) collated by the National Election Studies (NES). The chapter gives a good socio-economic analysis of how elections are voted-in by various sections (class, caste, age, party, etc.) of the Indian electorate.
The third chapter looks at the present Indian state under a postmodernist discourse where nationality and identity can exist without each other. Quite rightly, the chapter points out that if postmodernism involves doing away with the central authority in the state, India remains modernist in its state behaviour. It goes on to analyse India's border problems with its neighbouring countries vis-à-vis people's identity created by the state's institutionalisation of its borders. Identity and the territorial aspects are represented in a cause-effect relationship with the sovereignty of a state, making sovereignty a deliberate political act rather than an offshoot of natural state discourse. The fourth chapter uses the framework of humanism to assess violence and non-violence in the freedom movements of India and Africa. In a...