This article discusses the case of the Bundelkhand Development Package (BDP). It shows how such short-term developmental policies for drought-affected regions in the country lack long-term policy imagination. The research reveals that there are major gaps between the government’s version of the package’s implementation and the situation at the ground level. The politics behind the package has failed to generate a more cohesive and consensus-based developmental policy framework for the region. Consequently, even after almost a decade, many parts of India continue to face farmers’ suicides and other calamities. The article largely analyses published government data on the progress of the package. It also includes some interviews and narratives as primary sources of information.
This article provides a critical analysis of approaches of international relations (IR) in India in general and studies of post-Soviet countries in particular. It is argued here that methodologically the Indian IR has been dominated by the discourse analysis. The critical questions of everyday forms of social life and its impact upon transformation of state and institutions are at the margins of the disciplinary analysis. This phenomenon can be related to an absence of the 'ethnographic turn' in the Indian IR scholarship. Even Soviet/Russian studies, despite history of very strong India-Soviet/Russia bilateral relations, are quite narrow in their scope and lack field-based ethnographic studies. This article further argues that promoting usage of ethnographic method can be a useful methodological addition in making IR study and research in India more broad, critical, relevant and grounded.
There has largely been a consensus among comparative political scientists regarding the relevance of a participatory and transparent democratic constitutionmaking process in democratic transition and consolidation. However, there are fewer attempts to see any linkage between postcolonial India and post-Soviet processes of democracy-building. Questions related to the differences or similarities between the two contexts have not received much attention, especially from the scholars of the Global South. This article attempts to explain such interlinkages between the Russian and Indian case. Though the process of democracybuilding started much earlier in the case of India, certain parallels or complexities can be identified through a comparative analysis of the two cases. The study draws on secondary literature to substantiate the arguments. It attempts to argue that in case of India, the idea of constitution-making was largely driven by the logic of an alternative collective rationality through deliberation and accommodation, whereas in case of Russia it was a symbol of implementing the already dominant socioeconomic model without following a process of deliberations among various sociopolitical groups.
This study attempts to argue that the farmer’s encirclement of Delhi in 2020–2021 was not merely a sporadic form of protest or agitation as widely argued. Instead, it indicates the emergence of a new form of farmer movement in contemporary India. Formation of a hybrid political agenda is at the core of this movement. Temporally, organisationally and ideologically, this movement has been able to bring agrarian politics to the forefront of Indian politics after a gap of three decades. Temporally, there has been a continuity of protests by farmers since 2017 involving diverse issues which concern the rural economy and society. Organisationally, farmers adopted traditional as well as modern forms of mobilisation. Coming together of farmer unions from various parts of India is also an indicator of the innovative organisational methods. Ideologically, the current movements are an outcome of a hybrid agrarian politics that includes formation of an inclusive agenda, and a participatory form of farmer identity. The three sections of the article deal with each of these indicators.
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