Articles by Gurpreet Mahajan

After independence, the quest for unity required actions through which trust was created and an enabling environment provided so that different points of view could be presented and discussed, in place of being pre-judged and dismissed as suspect or politically motivated. It was a deeper commitment to a diverse India that prompted this form of action; it could not have been otherwise.

On merit, competence or commitment to work, Dharma Kumar needs no defence. But we must take cognisance of and fight the patriarchic attack on a woman which ignores her academic persona and re-presents her as a social butterfly.

Analysing the debate around state-civil society relationship in modern western and Indian political discourse, the paper points out the hiatus between the 18th and 19th century political thinking and later 20th century political thought. The second half of the 20th century is characterised by a loss of faith in the institutions of the state and looks towards civil society to preserve essential human and democratic rights. As against this, the paper advocates a return to an earlier rights-based conception of civility by enforcing universal laws through the instrument of the state. Since the state alone can create conditions necessary to protect the institutions of civil society from internal disruptions, the paper argues against detachment of civil society from the state. Instead, the institutions of civil society are very much part of democratic constitutional state, which alone will ensure social equality and non-discrimination along with individual liberty.

What Is New in the Old Lamp Gurpreet Mahajan This paper argues that the value of postmodernism derives from its power of negation. Its critique of objectivism and the 'metaphysics of presence' offers a new philosophical framework within which elements of the early critiques of enlightenment/modernity can be incorporated and given a more comprehensive form and analytic depth. However, when the concepts employed in the critique are transformed into affirmative norms, they yield an attitude of scepticism and nihilism within which every kind of 'coherent' and 'meaningful' enquiry becomes suspect. Consequently, to retain at least some of the philosophical insights of postmodernism, we need to make a distinction between its potentialities of negation and its norms of affirmation. We need also to rethink the concepts through which anti-foundationalism is given a positive content.

the left. The rally declared Laloo Yadav as the illegitimate' product of the 70s movement and projected the CPI(ML) struggle and the social forces unleashed by it as its true legatee. According to this logic the JP impulse failed because it could not link itself to the most oppressed sections of the populace which constitute the radical base for a genuine programme of social change.