Rajeshwari Deshpande

States as laboratories: The politics of social welfare policies in India

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of India’s states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India’s federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push toward rights-based social provision. Yet, it is India’s states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. Drawing on a comparative research program across pairs of Indian states, three critical factors explaining how state-level political environments shape social policy are identified: the role of policy legacies in shaping policy frames; the role of social coalitions underpinning political party competition; and the role of political leaders in strengthening state capacity to achieve program goals.

Seeking OBC Status: Political Strategies of Two Dominant Castes

This article investigates the claims of backwardness made by two dominant castes, the Lingayats in Karnataka and the Marathas in Maharashtra. It argues that the narratives of OBCization of the Lingayats and the Marathas present an interesting account of how the dominant castes manipulate the state institutional discourse of reservations to seek political legitimacy. The article also attempts to posit the claims of backwardness of these two castes against each other in order to develop a comparative understanding of the state-specific patterns of caste politics. Finally, the article tries to assess whether and how the dominant castes are able to (re)construct their dominance under the changing circumstances and what the implications of this strategy are for the project of hegemony.

Political Science in India: Who Teaches What, to Whom and What for?

The title of the note may sound provocative but the note is not. The proposed discussion forum in the journal intends to begin a sincere conversation on themes related to teaching and learning political science in India and this introductory note to the section thus tries to simply engage in a stock checking exercise to flag off the issues and challenges in the field. The challenges are far too many since the field of discussion is dotted with a lot of absences. Many of these absences are about the systemic flaws and about policy inadequacies in the arena of higher education in India and therefore may be beyond the immediate scope of this note. And yet, these larger inadequacies mark both, an essential backdrop and an important arena for long term interventions by academic practitioners. The other kind of absence that again mainly results from a disjointed policy discourse is a criminal neglect of pedagogic issues in Indian educational sphere. The teacher training programmes in the country are in a pathetic state and the structuring of academic discipline of education is skewed. That creates a serious impediment to healthy discussions on teaching learning activities. The situation worsens as every year thousands of ill equipped educationists enter the job market. The third lack is about public recognition of the importance and role of social sciences. The educational system in India is unfairly tilted in favour of the natural and the ‘applied’ sciences and considers doing social sciences as a worthless exercise. In the context of all these more general challenges perhaps the most immediate concern for the current conversation is a near complete absence of discussion on pedagogic issues within the realms of Indian political science. It is a near complete absence that was only occasionally stirred by a few efforts in the past. In the post emergency context, the Delhi Political Science Association launched a journal called Teaching Politics that continued throughout the 1980s. That journal was an ambitious attempt on the part of political science teachers to ‘promote a grass root level movement for third world orientation in the study of political science’ (Teaching Politics, 1978). The journal was not entirely devoted to pedagogic issues but provided an important platform for these discussions along with its publication of research based articles. Around the same time, a few political scientists led by the Political Science department at MS University Vadodra came up with a detailed plan of curricular development in Indian political science. More recently, the NCERT textbooks of Political Science published during 2006–2007 must be seen as yet another important intervention of conscientious political scientists in re-imagining the discipline.1 The NCERT textbooks tried to develop a new understanding of politics for school children and also tried to free them from the ‘passive learning’ processes at least to a certain extent. All these efforts were remarkable but rare and thus only underline the need to institutionalize a more routine conversation on issues of teaching/learning political science in general and Indian politics in particular. In this section of the journal, we welcome short notes how we can take such initiatives forward.

Book Review: Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India

Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2011. 324 pages. ₹ 795.

Book reviews and notices : ZOYA HASAN, E. SRIDHARAN and R. SUDARSHAN, eds, India's living constitution: Ideas, practices, contraversies. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002. xiii + 446 pp. Notes, references, index. Rs. 675 (hardback)

the face of authoritarian challenges faced by the polity. Now it is the review of the constitution and the deepening of political crisis that have prompted constitutional experts to revisit the terms of discourse in Indian constitutionalism and politics at the turn of the century. The work under review is an excellent exercise towards these purposes. It is the outcome of an international conference organised by the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in January 2000. As suggested in the title, the work undertakes a detailed review of the career of the democratic ideas and organising concepts (whether explicitly present or implied) in the constitution, and the controversies surrounding these concepts. The discussion is divided under three main sub-themes. ’