Articles by Sudha Pai

Uttar Pradesh, a key state in the race for power in New Delhi, is witnessing a resurgence of communal politics after a brief lull in the early 2000s. While the Samajwadi Party's attempts to win back Muslim support seem to have hit a roadblock after the Muzaffarnagar riots, the Bharatiya Janata Party hopes to revive its earlier appeal by promoting Narendra Modi and the Hindutva agenda. Though the earlier weakening of identity politics was expected to bring in a development-oriented politics, the state remains underdeveloped and caught between political parties that still play the same old electoral cards of division and promotion of strife.

the existing literature while celebrating assertion by disadvantaged groups and Politics of recognising their need for special representation points to the difficult problems involved in actually implementing them.

In the existing literature the concept of mobilisation is used to analyse electoral strategies employed by political parties to obtain votes from a section of the population - in this case dalits. This aspect has been extensively covered for both Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh during the 1990s. The attempt here is to understand the response of political parties to fundamental shifts in the democratic arena in the 1990s in these two states: the decline of the single-dominant party system and the emergence of narrower political formations based on identity which has created a more competitive environment. The differential patterns of mobilisation employed by the BSP and the Congress in the two states using state power from above to put into effect programmes for dalits in order to enlarge their support base among them are examined.

With the retreat of the interventionist state, development is often perceived as a product of partnership between the state and civil society with increasing emphasis on people's participation at the grass roots. Using a framework of collective action based upon social capital, this paper examines whether social capital is important for successful development outcomes at the grass roots in forest protection and watershed development. Three villages of Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh are the focus of the study.

Three developments, namely, the decline of parties, poor governance and a growing financial crisis with negative economic growth are collectively responsible for the political instability Uttar Pradesh has experienced. Due to ethnic mobilisation, parties confined to their narrow sectarian bases have been unable to aggregate public opinion, obtain majority support and form stable governments. This has led to short-lived coalitions, which have not been able to formulate long-term policies that can address the felt needs of the people contributing in turn to the breakdown of governance and instability. Fiscal indiscipline by governments has also pushed the state into a debt trap and serious economic decline, which is responsible for the disillusionment among the electorate witnessed in the recent elections. These negative features have developed since the late 1980s. The paper concludes that reform of parties is an urgent necessity without which the prospects of a functioning party system, effective governance and political stability remain dim.