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

Five aspects of the BJP's election campaign contributed to its success in 2019. The first is the personal appeal of the prime minister, which again played a major role, like it did in 2014, as Narendra Modi led a hyper-personalized campaign. Second, this campaign focused on security-related themes which were especially relevant in the context of the India-Pakistan tensions. Third, the BJP campaign strategy was backed by the most formidable election campaign machinery assembled by any party in India since Independence. Fourth, the BJP saturated the public space with the prime minister's image, adroitly using the traditional mainstream media as well as social media. The party used religious appeal to address its core base of supporters while projecting the prime minister's image as a protector and sentinel. Fifth, the latter three aspects of the BJP's campaign were fuelled by unprecedented levels of campaign expenditure and by the opacity of political funding in India, which the BJP had made more impenetrable through the introduction of electoral bonds. The combination of these factors show that the 2019 elections were not business as usual; their singularity largely due to the decline of institutions regulating the electoral process, including the Election Commission of India.

Contemporary South Asia

The BJP’s 2019 election campaign: not business as usual

The rise of the BJP in national and state politics is often associated with a representation skewed toward traditional elite groups and the marginalisation of groups associated with other parties, such as minorities and various dominant OBC groups. This article examines the transformation of the sociological composition of the Lok Sabha over time and seeks to assess its elitist character, by providing descriptive statistics on five socio-demographic and economic variables: caste, religion, gender, dynasticism, wealth and occupation. Data suggests that political representation in India has by and large always been skewed toward the elites, but the composition of these elites has changed over time. For instance, the recent surge in the representation of the upper caste in the Lok Sabha pre-dates the rise of the BJP in 2014, and the marginalisation of minorities and women is a long-standing phenomenon. Since 2014 however, the BJP has contributed to enhancing a particular form of elite – those rooted in local and regional business networks.

The reconfiguration of India’s political elite: profiling the 17th Lok Sabha

Defying many odds, the BJP has held on to the political space it conquered five years ago and succeeded in expanding its territorial imprint. It did so through a campaign that was substantially different from the 2014 General Election campaign, which was marked by the rejection of the Congress and an enthusiastic embrace of the BJP's promise of development for all. Five years later, much has changed in India with regard to the political system, which has become more centralized and less liberal. Since the 2019 election, the second Modi-led government has pushed the transition from a de facto Hindu majoritarian state towards a de jure Hindu majoritarian state through the adoption of controversial policies affecting some of the basic normative tenets of India's old constitutional order, so much so that the BJP's rise to power has transformed not only the party system, but also the political system itself. This is reflected in India dropping several ranks in most indices of democracy. At the same time, Indian national and state politics have followed divergent paths: the BJP dominates the national stage unchallenged by any rival, but is finding it increasingly difficult to sustain its sway in state elections–leaving the question of the Hindu nationalist hegemony open.

World University root node

A new party system or a new political system?

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

A major political development in Uttar Pradesh in recent years has been the growing elitism in candidate recruitment by parties. While parties claim to have become more socially inclusive, they tend to enrol their candidates from among the new business elites of the state, who seek to further entrench their domination through participation in the democratic process. This has far-reaching consequences on backward class politics.

Economic and Political Weekly

The transformation of backward class politics in Uttar Pradesh

Political conservatism in India is usually associated with right-wing traditionalist positions infused with religion, or with forms of economic liberal conservatism, the kind of which the Swatantra Party briefly incarnated. This article asks if the notion of conservatism can be useful to study non-Hindu right parties, by considering the trajectory of the Samajwadi Party, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Born out of the socialist tradition, the Samajwadi Party spearheaded the struggle for reservations, secularism and the quest of power of the middle peasantry, in the early 1990s. It gradually transformed into a family holding associated with caste preferentialism, cronyism and the criminalization of politics. This article seeks to account for these transformations by examining the party's trajectory since its origins, its ideological underpinnings and the evolution of its sociological composition, placed in the context of changing electoral politics in UP.

Conservative in Practice: The Transformation of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh

Fulltext

Studying Indian Politics with Large-scale Data: Indian Election Data 1961–Today

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.