The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast by Arkotong Longkumer, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021; pp 321, price not mentoned.
The Shudras: Vision for a New Path edited by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd and Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, New Delhi: Vintage (Penguin Random House), 2021; pp 272, ₹699.
India in the Interregnum: Interim GovernmentSeptember 1946–August 1947 by Rakesh Ankit, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xii + 376, ₹1,195.
Women and girls participate in the Hindutva movement, espousing its exclusionary and violent practices, while simultaneously negotiating its patriarchal norms that govern their own lives.
Ahead of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its allied organisations are making concerted efforts to achieve better coordination on the ground to consolidate the Hindu votes and crack the complex caste arithmetic of the state. With the Hindutva card unlikely to cut much ice with the backward castes and Dalits, it is crucial for the BJP, to calibrate its campaign strategy to offer these less empowered communities more political representation to reap electoral dividends in the impending polls.
Dalit and Adivasi politics, long enslaved by liberal civil society, has found a new voice in the aftermath of Rohith Vemula's suicide and subsequent student protests. The left-liberal establishments will benefit from standing together with this subaltern democracy in resisting the Hindu right-wing forces.
Narendra Modi recently described himself as an Ambedkar bhakt and also assured Dalits that he would never dilute reservations even if B R Ambedkar himself were to come back to life and demand their revocation. The faux pas reveals the desperation of the Hindutva forces to woo Dalits by misrepresenting Ambedkar and the critical role reservation plays in the political schema of the ruling classes. Reservations, which are assumed to be a boon for Dalits, have actually been the tool of their enslavement.
A communal flare up may have been avoided in the Bhojshala complex at Dhar in Madhya Pradesh, but majoritarian Hindu groups continue to stoke popular communal passions unabated.
In the 2015 Bihar elections, Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies led at the outset but lost badly to the Grand Alliance when votes were counted. The familiar themes of caste and development--along with governance, class alignments, the reservations issue, and communal polarisation--were all important, but the mishandling of them by BJP leaders turned them to their rivals' advantage. The BJP campaign suffered from the over-centralisation of power in the hands of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. A detailed account, based on fieldwork and interviews with those on the ground, explains how BJP lost in Bihar.
