Civility in Crisis: Democracy, Equality and the Majoritarian Challenge in India edited by Suryakant Waghmore and Hugo Gorringe, New Delhi: Routledge, 2021; pp 190, $48.95.
Even while proposing a statutory regulator for social media platforms under parliamentary oversight and structural reforms in platform design and treatment, one must not lose sight of the essentially political character of the disinformation problem that cannot be resolved through regulation and technological fixes alone.
The people’s mandate in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party has consolidated the aggressive, masculine, and religious majoritarianism of the “new India” cherished by the Sangh Parivar. This further squeezed the little public space available for the marginalised sections of the society, especially Muslims. The formation of a group of compromised citizens who are ready to give up their social and political rights for the right to live is burgeoning in the state.
It is argued here that the 1648 “Peace of Westphalia,” inaugurating the “secular state,” substituted language for religion as the basis for the state’s project of affectively unifying the nation. Working to build a truly neutral state, equally available to all its citizens, involves ensuring the freedom of critical discourse to question the proto-hegemonic narrative associated with every primordial (religious or linguistic) affi liation. The Westphalian-style sanctifi cation of these affi liations becomes pathological in a society that worships purity and hierarchy. Peggy Mohan, it is argued, provides a cogent characterisation of language on the basis of which one can overcome such pathologies and work towards a chauvinism-free model of democracy.
Politics in Latin America is in a state of fl ux, caught between the right and the left. In the presidential elections in Chile, the voting of Gabriel Boric—the youngest president in the history of the Chilean Republic (36 years old)—to power marked the end of the traditional alternation of power between the centre-right and centre-left since the return to democracy in the 1990s.
Discussions on the concept of independence and liberation are essential in the democratisation of politics in Goa. The foundation of Goa’s electoral politics stems from the politics of liberation championed by the first Chief Minister of Goa, Dayanand Bandodkar. This article traces this history till the present, identifying the key phases in Goa’s politics.
