Gujarat, Cradle and Harbinger of Identity Politics: India’s Injurious Frame of Communalism by Jan Breman and Ghanshyam Shah, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2022; pp 388, `1,200.
The Shudras: Vision for a New Path edited by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, New Delhi: Vintage (Penguin Random House), 2021; pp 272, ₹699.
India in the Interregnum: Interim GovernmentSeptember 1946–August 1947 by Rakesh Ankit, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xii + 376, ₹1,195.
What explains the electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the general elections in Assam in the face of huge mobilisations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill? The failure of the mobilisations to project an alternative, the BJP’s hold among tea tribe communities, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activism at the grassroots are possible reasons that blunted the impact of the anti-CAB mobilisations. However, ongoing protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act could unsettle the calculations of theBJP in Assam.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s tryst with secularism and communal politics may be enumerated through a critical rereading of the religious apprehensions expressed by the Christian community over the question of their right to propagation. Was Indian secularism an effective ideological substitute to communal politics or merely a tactical tool for achieving political gains during Nehru’s times? Nehru’s vision of secularism, in having to negotiate the politics of Hindu fundamentalism as well as Congress majoritarianism, was forced to accommodate the flavours of a majoritarian cultural climate with some preferential treatment to Hindu rights.
The National Health Policy 2017 makes a case for expanding private sector participation through collaboration. The policy offers little assurance of providing integrated and universal healthcare.
Ahead of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its allied organisations are making concerted efforts to achieve better coordination on the ground to consolidate the Hindu votes and crack the complex caste arithmetic of the state. With the Hindutva card unlikely to cut much ice with the backward castes and Dalits, it is crucial for the BJP, to calibrate its campaign strategy to offer these less empowered communities more political representation to reap electoral dividends in the impending polls.
Dalit and Adivasi politics, long enslaved by liberal civil society, has found a new voice in the aftermath of Rohith Vemula's suicide and subsequent student protests. The left-liberal establishments will benefit from standing together with this subaltern democracy in resisting the Hindu right-wing forces.
The people of India are disillusioned. The present phase of neo-liberal capitalism, and the changes that it spells, do not take into account the vertically and horizontally disintegrated working class and the structurally remodelled castes-communities. The Jawaharlal Nehru University debate around the constitutional right to speak only re-emphasises the fact that if we wish to stall the rise of fascism, the past needs to be reconstructed as a paradigm for the future.
