Perspectives

The web version of this article corrects a few errors that appeared in the print edition.

Despite the steps towards gender responsive budgeting, the budgetary allocations for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment show a decline. Not only has the magnitude of the gender budget as a proportion of the total expenditure of the Union Budget decreased, but the projected gross budgetary support for the “women and child development” sector for the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period also shows a decline from the Eleventh Five-Year Plan if the allocations for Integrated
Child Development Services are not factored in. Will this affect the government’s ambitious gender agenda?

The cooperative movement in India was started by far-sighted colonial offi cials and later became an instrument of the development state in the post-Independence era, never really becoming a popular movement driven by its members. As the cooperatives have become central to government policy on rural credit, they have come to be entrenched power centres for doling out patronage, financial help and political support. This article proposes some measures for their successful reform.

The term Kashmiriyat has come to signify a centuries-old indigenous secularism of Kashmir. However, it is of comparatively recent origin, first used in the mid-1970s. This article throws light on the factors which necessitated its creation and how its use has evolved to signify the majoritarian infl ections of thatsecular ideal. By acknowledging the historical context of the term itself, we may be able to attend to the subtle implication of our exercise to retrospectively apply it to earlier historical contexts.

India and Sri Lanka are the two Asian nations with a long, continuous history of regular, multiparty, elections. Interestingly, both countries have witnessed a long-standing insurgency, that of the Kashmiris in India and of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. In both countries, peace and stability in most of the nation have coexisted uneasily with struggle and strife along the borderlands. This paradox is at the heart of this essay, which uses the juxtaposition of democracy and violence in south Asia to complicate our understanding of political ideas which had their origins in (and are still frequently identified with) the west.

A violent war raging in south Asia in 1971 resulted in the creation of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation state. Four decades on, Bangladesh has re-initiated a domestic war crimes trial process that contains its own power dynamics, exclusions and silences. This article weaves through divergent layers of the complex politicisation of memory by various actors. It provides a brief background of the current impasse, the fractured process and the hierarchical nature of various international discursive interventions delegitimising the trials and considers popular protests in Shahbag, Dhaka, through which collective remembrance becomes a distinct and disputed social and political practice.