India's policy orientation towards its immediate neighbouring countries in South Asia has been subjected to analyses mainly through the prism of foreign policy. In this article, neighbourhood is taken as a prism to categorise the phases of India's policy since Independence towards these countries. In this effort, certain trends have been identified in Indian foreign policy that cut across chronology of Indian governments in office. The article critically interrogates the Indian policy package towards India's immediate neighbours through interest based strategies that suit the changing external international political milieu. The Cold War years, the contradictory pulls of economic globalisation and regionalism and the drive towards global multipolarity affected the policy orientations of India towards its neighbours. The article concludes that the political logic of neighbourhood policy of India in South Asia is conditioned by adhocism.
International relations (IR) has seen theoretical reshuffling in the wake of changing realities. The process of globalisation initiated a concept of global politics with thrust in de-territoriality replacing the territoriality attached with the term geopolitics. Through the prism of geopolitics, India was the ‘mainland’ of the region and the other states of the region were the ‘hinterland’. With global politics, India again becomes the ‘mainland’ for global economic flows with its immediate neighbours as the ‘hinterland’. With geopolitics, India could afford to have frictions with its regional neighbours, an option that is not open to it with global politics. The article argues that India is reshuffling the South Asian region to meet the realities of global politics and concludes that while at the level of theory IR are changing towards de-territoriality, the ground reality imprints the importance of the realities of geography and demography of big nation states.
Gender remains an important issue area in governance in post-colonial democracies like India, which have a long past of patriarchal social structure. In West Bengal even after thirty-four years of continuous Left Front rule, gender never became the mainstay of Bengal politics. Trinamul Congress government in West Bengal from 2011 addressed the issue of gender parity perspective. During the period of Mamata Banerjee, as Chief Minister, women candidates were fielded in large numbers while girls were also encouraged to be economically self-dependent and socially aware. Taking policy perspective of women’s empowerment, this article deals with Kanyashree programme. Experience of the last ten years indicates that social violence against women and empowerment-centric progammes go together in creating a puzzle regarding awards received by GoWB on women-centric programmes. This article argues that the degree of inclusiveness of Kanyashree dodges initial politicisation, gradual normalisation and recurring criticisms and translates ‘development as freedom’ in practice in a highly politicised democratic milieu of our time.
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