Politics, Society & History
September 29, 2023 2024-12-19 11:50Politics, Society & History
Politics, Society & History
Politics, Society & History
As societies have become culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, the politics of identity has assumed greater importance as well has taken new forms. Given the diverse manifestations of identity politics in today’s time, this particular constellation aims to draw insights from different disciplines like history, sociology, political science, philosophy, and economics to explore and understand the ever-evolving field of politics, its impact on issues vital to society and their roots in historical processes. Adopting a critical social inquiry approach, the constellation research will combine empirical research, theoretical reflection, and archival work to problematise ideas and raise questions pertaining to the political.
Constellation Lead
Dr. Ambreen Agha
Jindal School of International Affairs
Constellation Fellows
Dr. Kaushalya Bajpayee
Dr. Swapnil Dhanraj
Jindal Global Law School
Dr. Dalia Bhattacharjee
Jindal Global Law School
Projects
1. Pasmanda Politics in India: Beyond the Quest for Representation?
In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has made conscious political outreach to Pasmanda Muslims, who constitute 85 percent of Muslim population in India. With an eye on backward Muslims, the BJP planned a sneh (affection) and samman (respect) yatra in the year 2023 highlighting the plight of Pasmanda Muslims and Muslim women. However, these overtures belie the everyday violence that underpins the demonisation of Muslims by the majoritarian government, with the majority of victims belonging to the Pasmanda community, whether lynching, demolition of properties or incarceration. Highlighting the issue of disproportionate violence inflicted on Pasmanda Muslims, the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz report Bihar Caste Survey 2022-2023 and Pasmanda Agenda, stated, “Ninety-five per cent of the victims of mob lynching and excesses by government bulldozers belong to the Pasmanda community.” This contradiction complicates the categories of caste and religion in the (Indian) Muslim context. This study aims to explore the interplay of caste and religion in the backdrop of Hindu majoritarian politics that produces Muslims as homogenous category while at the same time projects itself as the messiah of the backward Muslims. in its politics of exclusion, and (mis)representation. Through
ethnographic fieldwork in Muslim-dominated Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh where BJP won in civic polls, this study will investigate how do Pasmanda Muslims reconcile with BJP’s duplicitous politics that promises to empower them on the one hand and systematically targets them on the other?
Ambreen Agha, Swapnil Dhanraj
2. Colonial Penal Regime and Surveillance of Women’s Sexuality
In the year 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down section 497 of the Indian Penal Code which punished adulterous men for having intercourse with another man’s wife “without the consent or connivance of that man”. The Court argued that this law treated men and women differently where a man could be punished but a woman was not an abettor in crime. Notably, as one of the judges argued: the law “perpetuates subordinate status of women, denies dignity, sexual autonomy, is based on gender stereotypes” and sought to “control sexuality of woman (and) hits the autonomy and dignity of woman”[1]. This remarkable judgment shed light on some of the early debates on the formulation of laws on adultery in colonial India and their continuation in the modern period. However, this document doesn’t tell us anything about how the laws on adultery were practiced in the frontier regions of India. This research project addresses this lacuna. The project will attempt to show how the colonial discourse on questions of adultery and elopement was different in the northwest frontier region of India from the so-called mainland region. Notably, in Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan where Frontier Crimes Regulations were imposed by the British to govern the ‘ungovernable’, women were considered partners in crime and thus punished for adultery. This paper will examine why this was the case.
Gagan Kumar
3. Frontiers as theatres of ‘small wars’ in colonial India, 19th century
The best-known paintings of nineteenth-century wars in the Indian sub-continent depict vast marshaled troops marching against each other or engaged in direct combat. Such battles certainly played a critical role in the early expansion of the British empire in the subcontinent. Yet, this paper will show that regular warfare was not the most dominant form of war-making for a large part of the nineteenth century. From the 1840s onwards, and even more so after 1857, most wars took place in the shifting frontier regions of the British Empire. This was particularly true in the north-western frontier regions of British India. In these regions, the most pervasive form of war was ‘small wars.’ The expression itself had little to do with the scale of combat. Colonial authorities used it to refer to the wars that they undertook against people whom they considered to be ‘absolute barbarians’, who were supposedly ‘beyond the pale of civilized diplomacy.’ ‘Small wars’ elicited retaliation from local populations, which kept the British presence fragile in these areas. Recent scholarship has largely focused on how colonial authorities sought to legitimize, through new legal regulations, the use of violence against frontier people who were adept at the ‘art of not being governed. By contrast, this research project will look at the specific nature of violence exerted in frontier regions during these wars. We will address the following questions: What were the repeated patterns behind the violence exerted both by colonial representatives and local populations? How do we interpret these specific forms of violence? What scale did this violence reach? To what extent did these repeated violent acts become normalized practices in official discourse as well as in popular imagination? We will also attempt to understand how the specific history of wars in frontier regions can contribute to our wider understanding of the construction and expansion of the British empire in South Asia and beyond.
Gagan Kumar
4. Chhath & Subalternity: Dismantling Hegemonies?
Chhath is traditionally a festival of the masses, celebrated mainly in Bihar, Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh. A marker of socio-cultural identity, this festival is an expression of indigeneity that resists any attempts at homogenization of identity, rituals and tradition. However, over the years, Chhath has moved out of its geographical confines into urban cities due to rapid migration. In these urban spaces, the celebrations of Chhath have led to its mainstreaming alongside other popular festivals like the Durga Puja. Primarily a subaltern festival that prevent(ed) appropriation by the social elites [Sinha, 2023], today Chhath is marked by a “reverse trend” with its entry into metropolitan cities wherein the elites have adopted the subaltern culture. Given this change in the social aspect of Chhath, this study aims to explore the continuities and changes that exist in the performance of the rituals in this four-day festival across the urban and the non-urban social settings. Does ritual performance enthrone hegemonic Brahmanical practices with the ‘priest’ as the centre of activity or does it dismantle the Brahmanical performativity? It has been observed that Chhath celebrations blur the social boundaries across religious, caste and gender lines in its
traditional non-urban spaces. How are these social boundaries navigated in urban spaces? Does the celebration of Chhath in metropolitan cities, continue to blur social boundaries or rigidify them? Taking a multi-site ethnographic approach and Chhath as the subject of study, this paper advances the argument that there is a link between human migration and mutation of socio-religious traditions.
Ambreen Agha & Kaushalya Bajpayee
5. “Anger”: Political Emotions, Feeling Publics and the Global Rise of Conservative Politics
In recent years, the role that emotions play in public life has taken centre stage in debates and discussions around the rise of populist leaders across the world. These debates have delved on the productivity and counter-productivity of anger as well as relating it to ‘dialogical politics”. In the philosophical traditions, anger has been relegated from the political sphere, that is primarily identified with “reason”. This dichotomy of reason and emotion is further problematized with the rise of right-wing populist parties that employ emotions and feelings of fear, anxiety, powerlessness and anger in their political rhetoric. For anger to be channelized, political parties create internal or external “enemy”. However, anger is not monolithic. Understood as a political emotion, anger is a heterogenous expression – an ongoing dialectical process that is both individual and collective, historical and social. This paper aims to conceptualise anger both as an expression of resentment that is mobilised by populist parties and an expression of resistance from below that challenges the dominant political narrative and hegemonic ideologies. In doing this, the paper will explore the manipulation and mobilization of resentment into collective political anger by the conservative parties and the existence of resistance movements to the exclusionary politics that comes with the resurgence of conservative politics, globally.
Ambreen Agha & Aejaz Ahmad Wani
6. Veil & the Ruling Elite: Affective Politics, Sartorial Choices, and the Misreading of Muslim Women
The hijab controversy in India, where the southern state of Karnataka upheld the High Court’s verdict on banning hijab in educational institutions, opened up questions about fundamental rights and ‘normative’ Islam with the issue of Muslim women’s agency at the center of the ensuing public debate. This intense contestation over hijab further reveals the underlying tensions that exist between the (Muslim) community and the (Hindu majoritarian) state with Muslim women’s substantive position as citizen-subjects in the public realm. The Indian state’s treatment of the hijab as an ahistorical entity reinforces stereotypes about Muslim women as “passive victims of oppression” and actively pushes them to the threshold of invisibilization. Historically tracing the ever-changing and multifaceted meaning of hijab across time and space, this paper argues that visual body politics is central to communal polarisation in India. Here, the public sphere emerges as a site that produces hegemonic masculinities articulated in the patriarchal language of discipline and domination. This article aims to excavate the imbrications and the changing meaning of hijab in Muslim societies arguing that there exists a direct relationship between political transition and the gendering of quotidian Islam. Taking the discourse beyond the visual performance of religion, the paper explores the active public presence of “alternative agencies” that co-inhabit the Muslim mosaic, thus problematizing the rigid binaries of liberal and conservative Islam/Muslim.
Ambreen Agha
7.“Tne Personal is Political”: Reproduction, Politics and Justice in India
Feminist theory, within its varied frameworks, has been dealing with motherhood as a concept of inquiry. Feminist scholars like Adrienne Rich, Andrea O’Reilly, Shulamith Firestone, Carole Pateman, and Sara Ruddick, among many others, saw motherhood as a key site of oppression of women in a patriarchal structure of power relations in the society. The American family researcher Margaret Movius argued that “the childfree alternative” should be viewed as “women’s ultimate liberation”. Studies adopting a qualitative approach to voluntary childlessness have identified a wide range of motivating factors for women, such as; lack of “maternal instinct”; dislike of, or disinterest in, children; fear of painful childbirth; humanitarian concerns about population growth; career orientation, and; a more satisfactory marriage. The feeling of freedom runs in the arguments for remaining childless. Research on voluntary childlessness demonstrates how childfree women are stereotyped as selfish, abnormal, immature, bitter and a child-hater. Patriarchal societies promulgate the dogma of motherhood which confines women’s mobility and makes it certain that they are compliant in delivering their duties to breed and rear children. However, what is important to note here is that these discourses completely ignore the reproductive rights and health of the women who are the center of such discussions. In this proposed research, we aim to adopt a reproductive justice approach to look critically at childlessness and motherhood and juxtapose these concepts with women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health. Such an analysis will help uncover the subjective meanings of women’s autonomy over their own bodies and choices as against the compulsory mothering role assigned to them by society. The current research aims to examine the intimate politics of reproduction in India as a category of analysis to further comprehend the significance of reproductive justice in these political dynamics.
Kaushalya Bajpayee & Dalia Bhattacharjee
8. Fiscal decentralization and voter turnout in national and state-level elections across socially fragmented India
It is observed that voter turnout in national elections (Lok Sabha elections) in India, the world’s largest democracy, is about 55-60% on average, but it varies across states in state-level (Vidhan Sabha) elections over time. According to the Election Commission of India, Indian citizens tend to vote higher in state elections than in national elections, which is unique as the trends are opposite in countries such as the United States and Canada, where turnout in national elections is approximately 40 percentage points higher than the state elections.
For an economy like India, political participation in the form of voter turnout is important for the legitimacy of democratic elections. In context of state elections, social networks have become increasingly intertwined with political participation. Second, the local leaders make decisions that are state-specific, which can have a direct and immediate impact on the community. The potential ramifications or ostracization that may result from abstaining from voting encourage voters to exercise their franchise. Also, populous constituencies with diverse interests might pose a challenge both for the political candidates and parties to effectively tailor their manifestos in a manner that resonates with the diverse perspectives of their potential voters. Lastly, citizens are more prone to voting when the government to be elected has more power in the form of a degree of fiscal decentralization (devolution of fiscal powers from national to regional governments). Among the rapidly developing economies of the world, India’s federal constitution is characterized by a relatively higher extent of fiscal decentralization. There might be the possibility that higher fiscal autonomy to states leads to higher voter turnout in the state. There is no empirical study that has tested this relationship for India’s regional economy.
The link between fiscal decentralization and voter turnout gap can be direct or indirect. India, being a diverse economy, has a high level of social fragmentation across caste, linguistics, and religious lines characterizing the voters. More autonomy to states in terms of fiscal powers in a largely divided state can influence voter turnout participation at national and state elections as it may involve more polarization and lesser participation in civic engagement from the communities. For others, community cohesion and homogeneity promote higher participation in elections, with voters typically participating more when surrounded by others who are similar to them. This could be a consequence of social pressure to participate that inspires homogeneity. Although this effect is usually attributed to neighbourhoods, it may be reasonable to extend it to larger communities whose members share a common and distinctive identity.
Given the above background and context, this research will examine how voter turnout in national and state elections is conditioned by social fragmentation and fiscal decentralization in the form of the transfer of resources from the center to the states. This work offers insights and perspectives on the impact of fiscal devolution on the electoral participation of citizens for national and state elections in regions that exhibit a heightened level of heterogeneity. This study will use information based upon diversity across social groups to capture the diversity covering 28 states of India from 2001-2021, covering three census periods.
Nupur Nirola, Atrayee Choudhury, Ambreen Agha