ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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Deeply Flawed

Recent events in Nandigram have led to varied reactions. One, which has become more marked recently, is the at­ tribution of commonalities of these events with the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.

Lahore Notes, March 2000

I had a feeling that many Pakistanis have recently come to be persuaded that Indian society and polity have certain strengths which they had not previously suspected. I was often asked what accounts for that strength.

Constitutional Ideas and Political Practices

The conference on Constitutional Ideas and Political Practices in Delhi in January sought to counterpose the ambitious ideas embodied in the Constitution against the political practices of the past half century. The sessions centred on a series of major themes: overviews, organising principles, rights and justice, equity and polity.

T V Sathyamurthy The Man I Knew

Satish Saberwal Being pro-poor was central to T V Sathyamurthy's academic vision. In the late 1980s he accepted a project to produce a work on the Terms of Political Discourse in India' and injected it with his own vision of scholarship. This was reflected in his choice of both themes and of contributors: a good many of them were relatively unknown persons notable rather for their experience as activists in India's backwaters. Four volumes of papers emerged from the exercise and are all in paperback now.

PERSPECTIVES

Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today Gyanendra Pandey The dominant nationalist historiography that insists on the totalising standpoint of a seamless nationalism needs to be challenged not only because of its interested use of categories such as 'national' and 'secular' but also because of its privileging of the so-called 'general' over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the 'mainstream' over the 'marginal

Modelling the Crisis-Megasociety, Multiple Codes, and Social Blanks

Megasociety, Multiple Codes, and Social Blanks Satish Saberwal This paper presents a mo4el interpreting the social crisis in contemporary India in the following terms. The long historical social processes characteristic of India have been markedly different from those in Europe. Undergird- ed by the Roman Catholic Church and working with still older cultural resources, such as Greek logic and Roman legal techniques, European societies moved towards a unification of codes which facilitated an enlarging of operative scales, culminating in the megasocieties of our time. Colonialism fitted India with a megasocietal technosocial frame for its own purposes; but the highly segmented Indian social space had carried a multiplicity of codes. As these diverse codes flow into the megasocietal institutions, these latter move towards breakdown. In this and in other regards, the maintaining and the renewing of a megasociety calls for a range of institutional capabilities whose weakness or absence among us

Communalism Indian Malaysian

Communalism: Indian/Malaysian Satish Saberwal The Communal Edge to Plural Societies: India and Malaysia by Ratna Naidu; Vikas. New Delhi, for Institute of Economic Growth,

Profitable Philosophy of Interdependence

But the question still remains: which rationalising values define the modernisation process? One needs a theory of modernisation to set up the criteria of choice. Simply to equate modernity with rationality begs the question, or to set up a check list of attributes may well be arbitrary. This precisely is the context of the controversy on whether or not to include democratic participation as an essential of modernisation, or more subtly, in the discussion on how to distinguish modernisation from Westernisation.

Lebensraum for Psychology

Lebensraum for Psychology Satish Saberwal The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India by Sudhir Kakar; Oxford University Press, 1978; pp

PERSPECTIVES

Nalini Pandit Classes in Marxist theory are not mere economic categories. They are living social groups whose attitudes and responses are determined by historical and cultural factors. The materialistic interpretation of history does not imply an exclusive emphasis on the economic factor to the comparative neglect of others. The purpose of formulating a social theory is to understand the attitudes and responses of different social groups to particular programmes.

Aspects of African Socio-Economic Sustems

November 542, 1977 through the book at various places. We will cite just one more example. On page 45, the author suggests that though the desired amount of investment depends on the expected prices, its equilibrium value must be equal to the amount of savings. Since savings is determined by the current variables alone, the implication is that the self-contained equilibrium of the single period does not neglect the investment behaviour. Or, at the least, this equilibrium is compatible with an investment behaviour, even if in the neoclassical models it may not he spelt- out in so many words. This view again, is untrue. Suppose we ask the following question. If saving is determined by current income, and if it is not equal to the level of ex-ante investment, how are the two to be equated? One proposal may be that the current income will change tracing a dynamics of the income level. This was suggested in the "General Theory" and was developed, for example, by Harrod. Another proposal may be that some other variable may give way, tracing a dynamics of that variable, as is done in the ''Treatise" with prices by Keynes himself. But the peculiarity of the neo-classical method is that the income level and the prices are all given for a period by the full-employment conditions, and thus also the level of savings, which depends on the current variables alone. This level of savings has to be identically called the ex-post investment in the model. There is no ex-ante investment schedule at all. For, if there was one, and the ex-ante investment was different from the savings given by the full-employment of the existing resources, there would be no way of an adjustment towards an equality, without destroying the full-employment general equilibrium. An ex-ante investment schedule would thus mean a breakdown of the neoclassical equilibrium method itself.

Tanzanian Socialism

September 24, 1977 posed realisation cycles. In Hungary, out of 92 investigated great industrial constructions 64 were delayed, including 30 cases in which the delay amount-, ed to 3-5 years. In the USSR, the actual periods of constructions exceed the projected ones by 1.5 times. Out of 180 industrial constructions investigated in 1973, only 34 were finished in time, all the others exceeding their time- limits including 147 where the time taken was twice the allotted time, or even longer, Similar problems appear in all the other countries of Comecon.

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