Department of Political Science

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

The article focuses on two moments in India’s political history, in which out-rightly expressed dissent underlines analytical shifts in the nature and course of the country’s democracy. It asks two questions: First, what does a self-proclaimed, democratic state do with peaceful dissenting artists? The second question follows from this. If indeed the state stigmatizes and suppresses that dissent, what does the artist do? By foregrounding the relationship between the dissent and offence-taking, the article shows the increasingly complex changes in the nature of the democratic state, role of the art market therein, the dynamic patterns of dissent itself, which underline the cyclic outbursts of violence against artists. © 2021 Lokniti, Centre For The Study Of Developing Societies.

Studies in Indian Politics

The Double Life of Dissent: Art, Politics and the Predicaments of Democracy in India

The 1981 Dalit mass conversion to Islam at Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu, arguably began the Hindu Right's political rise. The conversion raises two different concepts for understanding mass conversion's relationship to democracy. Though it is commonly framed in terms of B. R. Ambedkar's thought, whereby conversion's core is an interior psychic process of changing principles to see the world differently, I suggest that Meenakshipuram's event may more appropriately be framed by E. V. Ramasami's [EVR] thought, whereby conversion's core is an exterior somatic process of changing appearances to be seen differently in the world. These concepts of conversion raise alternative engagements with issues of text, force, foreignness, time, and Marxism. The argument is prefaced by a discussion of freedom's typology (Berlin), subaltern representation (Spivak), and religious mass (Geertz/Asad), which I argue favors EVR's concept of conversion over Ambedkar's. Such issues are not unimportant in an age of rising right-wing populisms globally.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Two Concepts of Conversion at Meenakshipuram: Seeing through Ambedkar's Buddhism and Being Seen in EVR's Islam

Since the end of the 1980s in India, groups associated with various political parties, religions, regions and castes have come to regularly attack artists and damage artworks. Straining relations between religious communities concomitant with the decline of secularism–as a practice if not as a norm–in Indian politics provides the context for such competitive and violent proclamations of ‘hurt sentiments.’ However, this paper focuses on the complementary explanations of how the rule of law has also come to not appear as a straightforward ‘solution’ to this ‘problem.’ It shows the fragility of the fundamental right of free speech and expression in India today, where the shifting legal regime is hardly an assurance against the concrete alternatives of lethal threats and violence, which have legitimized, over time, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued, ‘the insidious idea that it was not the state’s job to protect freedom, but to discipline that freedom in the name of some conception of propriety’ (Mehta, 2012). To be sure, the focus of this paper is not to slam vigilant, and even, as many would argue, necessary laws and regulatory bodies, but to explore how the legal reasoning and workings might have actually come to be a rational choice for offence-takers, to develop theoretically and apply practically in their endeavours. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

South Asian History and Culture

Art, law and the violence of offence taking

This article outlines the conceptual foundation of India’s free speech regime by focusing on the debates of the Constituent Assembly (1946–1949), and traces the development of the Article 19 of the constitution, which guarantees all citizens the right to free speech and expression, albeit certain ‘reasonable restrictions’. While offering a synoptic account of the conservative side of its development—as framers negotiated the discrepancies between their imagined ideal and the existing, often-conflicting reality—the idea here is not to uncover some grand master plan of Indian democracy from which it has faltered, but to explore ways in which it might lend a fissure to violent outbursts of ‘hurt sentiments’ in contemporary India, which impinges upon the idea and enjoyment of free speech in general, and freedom of artists in particular. © 2017, © 2017 Lokniti, Centre For The Study Of Developing Societies.