Six decades of independence

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 33-40

  Ganguly, Sumit ^a,b  

^a Department of Indian Cultures and Civilizations ^*  (India)

^b INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248329202     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2007.0024     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social and Economic Requisites for Democracy," American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 69-105.
2. Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Modernization: Theories and Facts," World Politics 49 (January 1997): 155-83.
3. For example, British colonial officials saw to it that much of the senior Congress party leadership spent the Second World War in detention even as the leaders of the Muslim League and the Indian Communist Party faced few restrictions. Neither of the latter two entities was known for internal democracy or commitment to liberal-democratic norms.
4. For an articulate exposition of this perspective, see Rajeev Bhargava, "Democratic Vision of a New Republic," in Francine Frankel, et al., eds., Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
5. Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: The Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
6. Consider, for example, the brilliant self-critique that Nehru penned as early as 1937 under a nom de plume. Chanakya [Jawaharlal Nehru], "The Rashtrapati," Modern Review, November 1937.
7. All children attending primary school in India are required to learn three languages: their mother tongue, Hindi (the dominant language of northern India), and English. For a particularly thoughtful treatment of this subject, see Jyotindra Das Gupta, "Language Policy and National Development in India," in Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, eds., Fighting Words: Language Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
8. For an ideologically charged and partisan critique, see Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Historical and Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
9. Jyotindra Das Gupta, "A Season of Caesars: Emergency Regimes and Development Politics in Asia," Asian Survey 18 (April 1978): 315-49.
10. Sumit Ganguly, "The Crisis of Indian Secularism," Journal of Democracy 14 (October 2003): 11-25.
11. For a nuanced discussion of India's democratic political culture and its discontents, see Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
12. Amelia Gentleman, "Killings in Delhi Slum Expose Unequal Justice for India's Poor," International Herald Tribune, 6 January 2007.
13. On the question of deaths in police custody, see the National Human Rights Commission annual report for 2004-2005, available at www.nhrc.nic.in.
14. Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Indian Parliament as an Institution of Accountability (Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development, 2006).
15. A formal commitment to secularism was added to the Indian Constitution of 1950 as late as the Forty-second Amendment, which dates from 1976.
16. The rise of the BJP is discussed at length in Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Zed, 2002); for an astute analysis of the 2004 election results,
17. see Steven Wilkinson, "Elections in India: Behind the Congress Comeback," Journal of Democracy 16 (January 2005): 153-67.
18. On this subject see Ganguly, "The Crisis of Indian Secularism."
19. Some of these concerns are dealt with in Jagdish Bhagwati, "Secularism in India: Why Is It Imperiled?" at www.columbia.edu/ jb38/Secularism%20in%20India.doc.
20. On this point see the discussion in Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs 76 (November-December 1997): 7.