Zoya Hasan

Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State.

This volume challenges the assumption that Muslims in India constitute a homogenous community, with specific characteristics deriving from Islam. Instead it locates the community within the social, economic and political developments that have taken place in the sub-continent, pre- and post-Independence, in order to examinine how exactly the delineation of miority identity takes place. The implications of this process for women are quite clear; social reality is gendered, yet womens attempts to assert their rights have been constrained by the pressures of communal politics. The domain of cultural politics, has generated ideologies that have subordinated gender equality to minority identity. Through an examination of history, law, politics, work and culture, this collection attempts to explore how the construction of community identity has affected Muslim women in India, the processes by which such identities are constructed, how they are represented in the cultural domain, and how the ambivalence of womens multiple identities interacts with the above. Contributors include Barbara Metcalf, Feisal Devji, Paola Bacchetta, Elizabeth Mann, Shahida Lateef, Farid ud din Kazmi, Mukul Kesavan, and Amrita Chhachhi.

Quest for power : oppositional movements and post-Congress politics in Uttar Pradesh

Setting the analysis in a broader trajectory of change in Indian society and politics, this book explores the growth of the oppositional politics of farmers, other Backward Classes and Hindulva in Utta Pradesh and its majoritarian reformulation that contributed to the decimation of the Congress Party in the 1980s.

The Congress in a District, 1930-46: Problems of Political Mobilization

The United Provinces (UP) was the storm centre of nationalist activities in the 1920s and 30s. Yet the provincial and local base of the Indian National Congress, especially in the western parts, has not been adequately investigated. This paper seeks to fill in the lacunae by concentrating on the nature and character of the Congress movement in the Aligarh district during a crucial phase of nationalist activity: 1930-46. These years witnessed the unfolding of important political processes which influenced developments in UP at large. In a sense, Aligarh represented the very many strands which went into the making of nationalist politics in UP in particular, and the country in general. Politics in this district brought into sharp focus the problems of political mobilization as well as the interplay of communal forces which had a profound impact on the regions’ social and political life. Nationalist activity in Aligarh was sporadic and fragmented until the Rowlatt Satyagraha and the Khilafat and non-cooperation movements when

Democracy and Growing Inequalities in India

The success of India’s democracy has evoked widespread interest. It is rightly regarded as a postcolonial success story—a functioning democracy that has held free and fair elections and managed to remain pluralist and inclusive. Indian democracy has offered huge opportunities to confront and address the challenges on the development front through policies and practices evolved in the past six decades. Its numerous achievements notwithstanding, the failure to remove the division between the privileged and the rest is largely responsible for the inability to extend the reach of India’s economic and social development. The persistence of inequalities of various kinds is a major contributory factor in holding back the full potential of democratic politics. What follows is not a comprehensive account or stocktaking of India’s democratic experience and its impact on inequalities and vice versa. This lecture attempts to situate issues of inequality in the wider context of political democracy to explore the interaction between the two processes. It concludes with a brief discussion on the emerging relationship between democracy and inequality in the contemporary moment.