Sanjay Ruparelia

Ruparelia confronts one of the most striking developments in modern Indian politics: the increasing influence of communist, regional, and lower caste-orientated socialist parties on politics since the late 1980s. In particular he traces these their attempts to construct a progressive 'third force' vis-àvis the historically dominant Indian National Congress and Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the subsequent decline of the broader Indian left as a collective political power. Ruparelia develops an original theoretical argument, deploying an innovative conceptual grammar of institutions, power, and judgment to explain the vicissitudes of the contemporary Indian left over the past two decades. Divided We Govern is a fine-grained analytic narrative to explain the vagaries of power-sharing in contemporary Indian democracy. It draws together a variety of tools and resources to create a dynamic causal account of multiparty governments and their function only partly captured by many scholarly analyses and the theories on which they rely. Ruparelia's narrative comprises information gathered from newspapers and periodicals, party manifestoes, and government documents; original statistical analyses of official electoral data and national election surveys; and the rare testimonies of senior party leaders, high-ranking government officials, and seasoned political journalists, obtained through dozens of in-depth interviews and intensive fieldwork.

Coalition Politics in Modern India

Divided We Govern

Sanjay Reddy

Stuart Corbridge

John Harriss

A number of large-scale transformations have shaped the economy, polity and society of India over the past quarter century. This book provides a detailed account of three that are of particular importance: the advent of liberal economic reform, the ascendance of Hindu cultural nationalism, and the empowerment of historically subordinate classes through popular democratic mobilizations. Filling a gap in existing literature, the book goes beyond looking at the transformations in isolation, managing to: • Explain the empirical linkages between these three phenomena • Provide an account that integrates the insights of separate disciplinary perspectives • Explain their distinct but possibly related causes and the likely consequences of these central transformations taken together By seeking to explain the causal relationships between these central transformations through a coordinated conversation across different disciplines, the dynamics of India’s new political economy are captured. Chapters focus on the political, economic and social aspects of India in their current and historical context. The contributors use new empirical research to discuss how India’s multidimensional story of economic growth, social welfare and democratic deepening is likely to develop. This is an essential text for students and researchers of India's political economy and the growth economies of Asia.

Sanjay Ruparelia

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