Articles by Indrajit Roy

Ashis Nandy’s colleagues and well-wishers ought to have publicly questioned the caste-centered comments he made at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Instead, they have turned the issue into one of academic freedom, freedom of speech and the like. India’s self-styled progressives have to learn to treat dissenters with more respect. They may think of themselves as being champions of India’s marginalised. But if the marginalised do not agree with this assumption, they cannot be threatened that they will be “losing their friends”. This attitude that ‘the intellectual’ knows best has to be eschewed and replaced by one of greater humility. They have to stop attributing rationality and reasonableness to themselves and irrationality, emotion, passion and sentiment to the dissenting subalterns.

Pro-poor and democratic development processes demand, among other things, the integration of revenue appropriating and fund expending institutions. Experience from the metropolis of Ahmedabad, recently ravaged by inter-religious civil strife, indicates that a number of village and town councils continue to exist within urban limits, saddled with functions that they are not authorised to execute. Moreover, urban development agencies compete with these bodies to provide services to citizens. Having neither representative membership nor tax based income, these agencies implement programmes with the support of the state government, thereby consistently limiting the scope for local bodies to emerge as institutions of self-governance.