The Coffee House and the Ashram: Gandhi, Civil Society and Public Spheres

This paper considers what light the associational forms that Gandhi created shed on the debate about civil society and the public sphere in political and social theory. As John Keane remarks, "reflexive, self-organizing non-governmental organizations that some call civil society can and do live by other names in other linguistic and cultural milieus". How does his "Indian" variant square with the practice and concept of civil society and public sphere as they have evolved in European history, thought and practice

Upsurge of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India

This research paper examines the development of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India since its establishment and its governance inside the country. The BJP is influenced by the ideals of Hindu nationalism, and such ideals can be visible through the party’s responses to critical issues, such as the ongoing Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir and Jammu. This research paper reviews three issues that seem to be prominent in India and correlated to the influences of the BJP in the government: The Indo-Pakistani conflict, transformations of India’s economy, and religious discriminations

A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India

This article hypothesizes that economic reforms become sustainable when the discursive conditions prevailing in society tip against the existing paradigm under exceptional circumstances. Thus, unless the pro-liberalization constituencies dominate the development discourse, economic reforms, initiated under the exigencies of crisis and conditionalities, or carried out by a convinced executive with or without the stimulus of a crisis, will be reversed. The discursive conditions are determined based on eight factors: the dominant view of international intellectuals, illustrative country cases, executive orientations, political will, the degree and the perceived causes of economic crisis, attitudes on the part of donor agencies, and the perceived outcomes of economic reforms. The paper seeks to prove this “discursive dominance” hypothesis for the Indian case through a cross-temporal, comparative review of the evolution of economic policy in India over six different phases.India; Economic reforms; discursive conditions; discursive dominance;

Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition

The Modernity of Sanskrit by Simona Sawhney ably makes the argument for an ethically vigilant, politically active, and intellectually timely criticism. Sawhney describes the crisis as she sees it, proposes a counter-challenge, and then proceeds to demonstrate how this post-Babri Masjid critical practice (to use her own point of departure) could be realised. She reads Kalidasa’s Śākuntalam and Meghadūtam, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana and the Gītā in and of themselves, and also through 20th century writers in Hindi and Bengali, like Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Hazariprasad Dwivedi, Rabindranath Tagore, Buddhadeb Bose, Jaishankar Prasad and Mohandas Gandhi (Gandhi is the odd man out in this group of litterateurs, but more on that later). When we read this book we realise with a shock that lately in the humanities, the pressure of theory and the hegemony of history, not to mention the political economy of translation have basically crowded out literary criticism altogether. We cannot really remember the last time we encountered, in English, a close, careful reading of any Indian text, ancient or modern, where the textual object was not subjected to translation, philological reconstruction, historical analysis or theoretical treatment. Not that these operations are not valid in themselves, but none of them does what literary criticism does, which, as Sawhney reminds us, is to read the text. She brings the neglected critical idiom and the old-fashioned practice of criticism back to the table, judging our favourite texts in terms of categories like poetry, justice, violence, compassion, beauty and law, and revisiting a certain kind of value-based scholarship that we had set aside for the last two decades

Public Religions in a Postsecular Era: Habermas and Gandhi on Revisioning the Political

An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide