Politics and Left Unity in India

Politics and Left Unity in India
Author: William F. Kuracina
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351679392

The historical assessments of Left unity in 1930s India misrepresent activities designed to achieve unity. The common treatment of the relationship between Indian socialists and communists emphasizes disunity and the inability to find common ground. Scholarly discussions about unity in fact highlight its impracticality and the inevitability of its failure. This book proposes that during this moment, for socialists and communists, unity was not just an ideal, but was in fact considered to be a possible and very realizable goal. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideological fissures as the literature does, the book explores the possibilities for unity. The author investigates the United Front as a conceptual framework for collaboration, as a scheme for assessing the extent to which cooperation between socialists and communists was feasible and practicable during the mid-to-late-1930s in India. He employs the notion of United Front as an instrument for identifying and compensating for the prejudices which permeate sources about the cooperation between the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) and the Communist Party of India (CPI). The author challenges the historicism found in extant scholarly assessments of Left unity by illustrating the ways in which the partners engaged in united front activities and approached the common goal of Left unity despite their fragmented ideological perspectives. The book presents the United Front not as an unsuccessful phase of collaboration, but rather as a concerted attempt to achieve ideological convergence and Left homogeneity which ultimately failed to radicalize Indian nationalism because, in reality, conditions for Left unity did not exist. The book will be of interest to academics studying South Asian history and politics in particular, and socialism, communism, nationalism and imperialism more generally.

Politics and Left Unity in India

Politics and Left Unity in India
Author: William F. Kuracina
Publisher: Routledge Studies in South Asian History
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-12-12
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367889180

The historical assessments of Left unity in 1930s India misrepresent activities designed to achieve unity. The common treatment of the relationship between Indian socialists and communists emphasizes disunity and the inability to find common ground. Scholarly discussions about unity in fact highlight its impracticality and the inevitability of its failure. This book proposes that during this moment, for socialists and communists, unity was not just an ideal, but was in fact considered to be a possible and very realizable goal. Rather than focusing exclusively on ideological fissures as the literature does, the book explores the possibilities for unity. The author investigates the United Front as a conceptual framework for collaboration, as a scheme for assessing the extent to which cooperation between socialists and communists was feasible and practicable during the mid-to-late-1930s in India. He employs the notion of United Front as an instrument for identifying and compensating for the prejudices which permeate sources about the cooperation between the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) and the Communist Party of India (CPI). The author challenges the historicism found in extant scholarly assessments of Left unity by illustrating the ways in which the partners engaged in united front activities and approached the common goal of Left unity despite their fragmented ideological perspectives. The book presents the United Front not as an unsuccessful phase of collaboration, but rather as a concerted attempt to achieve ideological convergence and Left homogeneity which ultimately failed to radicalize Indian nationalism because, in reality, conditions for Left unity did not exist. The book will be of interest to academics studying South Asian history and politics in particular, and socialism, communism, nationalism and imperialism more generally.

The Indian Ideology

The Indian Ideology
Author: Perry Anderson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788732715

The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most populous democracy. Even critics of Indian society still underwrite such claims. But how well does the “Idea of India” correspond to the realities of the Union? In an iconoclastic intervention, Marxist historian Perry Anderson provides an unforgettable reading of the Subcontinent’s passage through Independence and the catastrophe of Partition, the idiosyncratic and corrosive vanities of Gandhi and Nehru, and the close interrelationship of Indian democracy and caste inequality. The Indian Ideology caused uproar on first publication in 2012, not least for breaking with euphemisms for Delhi’s occupation of Kashmir. This new, expanded edition includes the author’s reply to his critics, an interview with the Indian weekly Outlook, and a postscript on India under the rule of Narendra Modi.

The Success of India's Democracy

The Success of India's Democracy
Author: Atul Kohli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521805308

Leading scholars consider how democracy has taken root in India despite poverty, illiteracy and ethnic diversity.

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India

Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India
Author: Kenneth Bo Nielsen
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2018-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1783087498

Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground. Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India analyses the movement by Singur’s so-called unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. By foregrounding the everyday politics of popular mobilization, the book sheds new light on the movement’s internal politics as well as on contentious issues rooted in everyday caste, class and gender relations.

Left Transnationalism

Left Transnationalism
Author: Oleksa Drachewych
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773559949

In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).

Malevolent Republic

Malevolent Republic
Author: K. S. Komireddi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 178738005X

After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India's past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi's decisive electoral victory. If secularists fail to reclaim the republic from Hindu nationalists, Komireddi argues, India will become Pakistan by another name.

Fractured Forest, Quartzite City

Fractured Forest, Quartzite City
Author:
Publisher: Yoda Press Sage Select
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9789353885540

A sprawling megacity of nearly twenty million people, Delhi has forgotten its ecological history, a key part of which is the Ridge, often referred to as Delhi's 'green lung'. At various points, Delhi has been a crucial hub of politics, warfare, trade and religious expansion on regional and global levels. Placing Delhi's environment at the front and centre of its unique history, the book tells the tale of the Ridge, which resonates far beyond the boundaries of India's capital. The Ridge offers a crucial vantage point for viewing these historical and geographical interconnections. Its trees can't be separated from the stones below them, nor the cities that rose and fell around them. Only with this perspective does a clear picture of the Ridge - and Delhi as a whole - emerge.

The Phoenix Moment

The Phoenix Moment
Author: Praful Bidwai
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9351775178

'Praful Bidwai's analysis and conclusions compel serious engagement both by academics and political leaders.' - K.N. Panikkar 'Bidwai's assessments will undoubtedly trigger further discussion.' - Romila Thapar 'Praful raises the right questions and is scrupulously fair.' - Susan George India still has a significant and relatively powerful communist movement. In spite of the massive setbacks communist parties have suffered in and since the 2014 national elections, and their general decline during the past decade, the Indian Left is a significant component of the political spectrum. It is represented in virtually every state in the form of trade unions, peasant associations, women's organizations and student unions, and in state legislatures, municipal bodies and village councils. The Phoenix Moment seeks to understand how a communist movement, almost unique within the world's capitalist democracies, flourished for so long in India, and what accounts for its initially gradual and then rapid decline. It also asks how far and in what manner the Left has accomplished its goals; whether it could have achieved more and what its future prospects are. Crucially, political analyst Praful Bidwai investigates whether the Left's core agenda of progressive or socialist transformation can yet be reinvented and restored to relevance - either with its own agency or through other forces, formations and initiatives. Given the paucity of analytical literature on the mainstream Left at the national level, Bidwai's timely and deeply insightful book fills a crucial void.