bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Philosophies of Life
Authors: Flood Gavin
Published: March 2019

On the one hand, we have the development of science from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, while on the other, we have a focus on life in philosophy at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Here, life is understood in terms of nature as a dynamic process linked to impulse or drive. Partly stemming from a mystical discourse in the seventeenth century, the concern for life comes to be disseminated through the history of both Romantic poetry and Romantic philosophy. This vitalist spirit can be traced through to the twentieth century. Life itself comes to be articulated through a mystical theological discourse that ends in Romantic poetry and through a philosophical discourse that ends in phenomenology.
Spenser, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Decline of the Preacher’s Plough
Authors: Mottram Stewart
Published: March 2019

This chapter focuses on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1598), showing how both use the language of medieval rural complaint to attack greed among the protestant owners of former monastic lands. Beginning with the Calender’s September eclogue, the chapter brings new evidence to bear on previous identifications of the shepherd, Diggon Davie, with the Elizabethan bishop of St David’s, Richard Davies, tracing the influence of Davies’s Funeral Sermon (1577) for Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, into Diggon’s language in ‘September’. The language of medieval complaint had blamed unscrupulous abbots for enclosing ploughlands, but in his own writing, Richard Davies argues that post-dissolution landowners were having an even more detrimental impact on the religious life of rural Wales, not only refusing to free up former monastic lands for ploughing but also hindering the work of the ‘church-ploughing’ preacher, because refusing to pay preaching ministers a proper wage. The chapter shows how Spenser uses the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale to turn Davies’s local response to the situation in St David’s diocese into a general complaint against unscrupulous farmers of church livings across England and Wales. It concludes by exploring Spenser’s similar attitude in A View towards Adam Loftus and other protestant farmers of church livings in late Elizabethan Ireland, arguing that Spenser here evokes the ruins of churches and monasteries in order to return to his comments in The Shepheardes Calender on the greed of post-dissolution landowners and their neglect of the preacher’s plough.
‘Where ruine must reforme’?
Authors: Mottram Stewart
Published: March 2019

Chapter 4 sets John Denham’s response to the renovation of St Paul’s Cathedral in light of widening religious divisions among English protestants in the 1630s and early 1640s, reading Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642) alongside Denham’s other works from 1641–2, including his play, The Sophy. The chapter establishes that Denham’s ‘anger’, in Coopers Hill, at the monastic dissolutions under Henry VIII is best interpreted in light of Denham’s reaction to the threatened dissolution of cathedrals under reforms proposed by the Long Parliament in 1641. Denham’s anger at the monastic dissolutions has been dubbed Laudian, even ‘anti-Protestant’, but the chapter argues that his reaction is in fact a characteristically protestant response to the excesses of reformation iconoclasm, as first practised under Henry VIII, and, in the early 1640s, under Long Parliament presbyterianism. The chapter roots Denham’s pity for the monasteries within an English reformation tradition—stretching back through Herbert to Spenser—that was at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic, and it shows how Denham’s praise for Laud’s cathedral restorations is derived from his understanding of the Caroline church as the rightful heir of the sobrieties of the Elizabethan religious settlement, as this settlement had been lauded by Spenser, Herbert, and other writers before him. Denham therefore uses ruined abbeys and restored cathedrals to represent two possible futures for the established church, at once celebrating the status quo and demonstrating the ease by which the violence of the early reformation could turn inwards, against the edifice of English protestantism that Laud had laboured to restore.
The Paschal Gospel
Authors: Behr John
Published: March 2019

Chapter Two considers the ways in which the Gospel of John has come to be understood in ‘apocalyptic’ terms, following John Ashton, suggesting instead that the Gospel of John is best understood as a ‘paschal gospel’ in an ‘apocalyptic’ key, noting the implications that this has for understanding the genre of the Gospel and its relation to the Apocalypse, as a two-part work. The chapter further explores what is meant by the term ‘apocalyptic’, especially the correspondence between above and below, and the beginning and the end, as a fundamental feature of Christian theology (‘on earth as it is in heaven’, Adam and Christ), and the modern debate about how apocalyptic thinking works, whether as an ‘eschatological invasion’ or an ‘unveiled fulfilment’, and so what is meant by ‘salvation history’, treating such figures as J. Louis Martyn and NT Wright. The chapter concludes by suggesting that early Christian exegesis, as practiced by the apostles themselves and then the Fathers, is best understood as an ‘apocalyptic’ reading.
Theory: Understanding Budgeting in International Organizations
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical contribution of the book as it seeks to go beyond recent discussions that consider either principal complexity or agency complexity as key drivers of organizational dynamics in international organizations. It also introduces the main outcomes of interest with regard to UN budgeting: proceduralization, routinization, and budgetary segmentation. By combining both types of complexity and by studying these outcomes, one can make predictions about the types of budgets to expect in international organizations; one can make assumptions about various dynamics of IO budgeting procedures; and one can understand how conflicts in international bureaucracies relate to disagreements amongst member states. This advances important conceptual and theoretical debates that started, in particular, with Hawkins et al.’s Delegation and Agency in International Organizations. It also enlarges a theoretical understanding of budgeting under complex principal–agent constellations more broadly.
ILO: Simple Procedures Despite a Tripartite Principal
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 6 underlines the unique principal structure of the ILO, with 50 percent of seats in its Conference and its Governing Body assigned to national social partners, that is, workers’ and employers’ representatives. Against expectations, this complex principal constellation only has limited effects on proceduralization in the ILO; administrative decentralization of the organization and the growing shift to voluntary financing of technical assistance at field level are at least as important. Instead, there are typical instances of complex P–A constellations in the ILO that one also finds in other cases, such as the special role of the main contributing states in the budgeting procedures, a dynamic that is much more pronounced as a driver of principal complexity than the role of regional groups and of social partners.
WHO: Between Regional Principals and Philanthrolateralism
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

The case of the WHO reveals the largest discrepancy between key formal rules governing budgeting procedures and the reality of budgeting dynamics and administration. The highly regionalized and fragmented structure of the WHO results in a budget process that is much more complex in practice than formal rules suggest. To accommodate strong regional interests and regionally organized principals, while at the same time managing budget constraints, the WHO budget process combines bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal administrative and political coordination. Due to the increasing importance of earmarked voluntary contributions for the financing of the WHO to approximately 80 percent of its budget, including very substantive financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of around a quarter of its budget, new administrative structures and procedures have been introduced. For example, the Financing Dialogue has become a new element of budgeting in international organizations that attempts to regain control over an ever-more segmented budgetary landscape.
Key Findings: Principal–Agent Complexity and Budgeting in the UN System
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 9 combines insights from the datasets presented in Chapter 4 with the case studies in Chapters 5 to 8. A key insight is that present-day budgeting and resource decision-making, with segmented budgets and informal proceduralization, cannot be understood without considering complex interests of states and of other donors, and without paying attention to decentralized or otherwise fragmented IO bureaucracies. Methodologically, the chapter reflects on how insights from a comparative approach to UN and IO budgeting need to be combined within a systemic research perspective that looks at the UN system as a whole. Thus, the complex P–A model developed in this book both answers and raises questions for a better understanding of budgeting dynamics within IOs. In the final section, the chapter returns to foundational disciplines to discuss how the findings of the book contribute to the disciplines of political economy, public policy, international relations, and public administration.
The Future of UN Budgeting: Complexity and Prospect for Reform
Authors: Patz Ronny , Goetz Klaus H.
Published: March 2019

Chapter 10 is an outlook to the ongoing reform of United Nations budgeting introduced by the new Secretary General António Guterres, in light of the theoretical and conceptual discussions as well as the empirical findings presented throughout the book. It shows how the theoretical dynamics and main topics identified throughout this book, and in particular in Chapter 5, affect reform discussions and reform dynamics. Whereas some reform is taking place, principal and agency complexity prevent a major overhaul of the system as the fragmentation of the UN system is hard to overcome, and because key member states or groups of member states are bound to lose influence, even if only over a few elements of micromanagement that have become part of the pathological budgeting dynamics in New York—a pathology that is much less driven by IO bureaucracy and much more by states and their complex, historically shaped interests.
When a Child
Authors: Newell Quincy D.
Published: March 2019

Jane Elizabeth Manning was born in southwestern Connecticut, the child of a freed slave. Although Jane’s family owned their home, her father’s death in 1825 was an economic blow. This may have been the reason that Jane was sent to work at a young age, likely as an indentured servant. As a young woman she gave birth to a son. She never identified the child’s father, and her silence suggests that her pregnancy was the result of sexual assault. Jane joined the Congregational Church in 1841, and then joined the Mormon Church in the winter of 1842–1843 after hearing an LDS missionary preach.
We Walked
Authors: Newell Quincy D.
Published: March 2019

Jane Manning experienced the gift of tongues shortly after her conversion, an event she took as a confirmation of her decision to join the Mormons. The rest of the Manning family appears to have converted to Mormonism after her and, together with white converts from the area, they all left Connecticut for Nauvoo, Illinois, under the direction of LDS missionary Charles Wesley Wandell. The practice of racial segregation on boats and railways meant that for much, if not all, of their journey from Connecticut to New York City and then up the Hudson River and west on the Erie Canal, the black and white members of the group were separated from one another. At some point during the trip, the black members of the group were refused further passage, so the Mannings walked the rest of the way. Jane’s memory of this portion of the journey emphasized God’s providence. When they arrived in Nauvoo, they found a bustling city that was struggling to accommodate newly arrived converts, many of whom were poor and vulnerable to the diseases that plagued the city.
The Beautiful Nauvoo
Authors: Newell Quincy D.
Published: March 2019

Jane Manning’s first job in Nauvoo, Illinois, was as a servant in Joseph and Emma Smith’s Mansion House, where she had access to many aspects of Mormonism that were otherwise tightly controlled. While doing the laundry, she later said, she went into a trance-like state in which the Holy Spirit told her about temple rituals. Manning learned about the LDS practice of polygamy from some of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Joseph Smith’s mother allowed Manning to handle objects she said were the Urim and Thummim, seerstones Smith used as conduits for divine communication. According to her later statements, the Smiths also offered to adopt Manning as a child. This offer may have been motivated by Manning’s fatherlessness, a problematic state in the strongly patriarchal religion that may also have motivated her reception of a patriarchal blessing. This period in her life ended decisively with Joseph Smith’s 1844 murder.
Postscripts on Independence
Authors: Thakur Vineet
Published: March 2019

India and South Africa, two states that bookended the process of twentieth century decoloniszation, punched above their weight in global politics in their initial years of liberation. This book analyses the foreign policy ideas, identity, and institutions of these two newly independent states. Theoretically, it argues that foreign policy is often more than just a reaction to global events; rather it is a site where ideas of nationhood are legitimized. Nehru’s India advanced the idea of ‘civilisational pacifism’ through its foreign policy, in turn sanctifying a particular idea of India—a non-violent, secular, and civilizational state. Likewise, in South Africa, ‘rainbow nation’ and ‘African renaissance’, two ideas internalized in the country through its foreign policy, contest for predominance. The book also narrates the institutional history of the early years of the Ministry of External Affairs in India and the Department of International Relations and Cooperation in South Africa. In particular, it investigates the relationship between the political leadership and the foreign office bureaucracy in these two countries and discusses how this relationship affected decision-making. The traditions of national identity-making in these countries have also influenced their respective ideas of bureaucratic ‘professionalism’, which lay at the heart of understanding why the two ministries have developed different organization cultures. This book is the first detailed theoretical and historical comparative analysis of the foreign policies of two emerging countries from the Global South: India and South Africa.
Indian Foreign Policy
Authors: Thakur Vineet
Published: March 2019

This chapter discusses the relationship between India’s national identity and post-Independence foreign policy. It argues that India’s discourse about civilizational pacifism is central to how India was imagined from the time of emergence of the Indian nationalist consciousness. Before independence, three stages of emergence of this discourse can be traced on which finally Nehru grafted his own idea of India. Within this context, it then explores Nehru’s criticisms of the dominant approach to IR—realism—and looks at his alternative vision for Indian foreign policy as well as the world. It also examines the critiques proffered on Nehru’s foreign policy in the initial years and argues how these criticisms did or did not differ from the broader discourse about India’s civilizational pacifism.
How the Deal Was Born
Authors: Ravi Chaitanya
Published: March 2019

The chapter begins with a brief history of lukewarm Indo-US relations during the Cold War and the reasons for the lack of depth. The chapter then traces the converging trends including the collapse of the Soviet Union, India’s neoliberalization, India’s 1998 nuclear tests, the Indian American diaspora, the rise of China and re-emergence of Russia that resulted in movement towards a Indo-US strategic embrace undergirded by a grand nuclear accommodation of India’s hitherto sanctioned nuclear programme culminating in the July 18, 2005 joint statement. Multiple narratives of the nuclear deal’s origins are explored and the more salient ones are highlighted. The chapter ends with a brief summary of the constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach’s key principles such as thick description, multidimensional narration and rejection of technological determinism.
Nuclear Partition
Authors: Ravi Chaitanya
Published: March 2019

The second chapter begins with an explanation of the origins, evolution, and organizational infrastructure of the Indian nuclear programme. Three Science and Technology Studies (STS) case studies deploying the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach are introduced in the theory section and their combined insights are used to organize various individual and collective actors in India based on their initial reactions to the nuclear deal. The chapter then focuses specifically on the debate between two powerful bureaucracies (Department of Atomic Energy [DAE] and Ministry of External Affairs [MEA] within the Indian state over the civilian-military proportions of the separation plan and the status of the fast breeder reactors). The MEA’s generalist vision and the DAE’s narrower departmental vision are observed in the form of two contending separation plans with different civil-military facility balances and rival safeguarded versus unsafeguarded statuses of the fast breeder reactor. The DAE’s tactics to win the debate are elucidated.
Pipeline versus Reactors
Authors: Ravi Chaitanya
Published: March 2019

This chapter concentrates on the period from July 2005–March 2006 and examines the way in which the nuclear deal and the US-India strategic partnership wrapped around it influenced India’s energy and foreign policy, in particular the Iran–Pakistan–India (IPI) natural gas pipeline and Iran–India relations. The chapter follows the shifting relationships between Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar; External Affairs Minister, Natwar Singh; and Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. An important part of the chapter is the US Ambassador to India David Mulford’s role vis a vis the IPI pipeline and the factors that gave rise to the idea of a nuclear deal with India among a small coterie in the State Department. The chapter concludes with the collision of the rival energy initiatives, the strategic paradigms wrapped around them and the way in which the nuclear deal prevailed over the pipeline with Natwar’s exit and Aiyar’s dismissal being important milestones.
Nuclear Politics
Authors: Ravi Chaitanya
Published: March 2019

Chapter 5 describes how the Left upped the ante following the announcement of the Indo-US bilateral 123 agreement and successfully prevented the UPA from moving forward with the agreement until November 2007. A key question arises as to why the Left suddenly turned around to allow the UPA to proceed with the nuclear deal in mid-November 2007. The chapter delves into the political situation in the Left’s bastion of West Bengal during the September–November period and shows how the fear of adverse political fallout from a botched up police operation to resolve a festering land acquisition conflict in Nandigram ahead of crucial village body elections caused the Left to reverse course on the nuclear deal. The evidence indicates that the Left’s concession was only temporary and was designed to prevent an alliance between the Congress and the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), the Left’s regional rival ahead of village body elections.
Time and Temporalizing Tactics I
Authors: Bajpai Anandita
Published: March 2019

Chapter 2 illustrates how in order to give currency to the reforms, the PMs conjure the idea of an idealized future. Growth is presented as a human necessity and reforms become the inevitable means to realize the dream of growth for all. India’s move to the future is presented not as an uncalculated measure, but a controlled trajectory which does not succumb to ‘unlimited capitalism’. However, behind this rhetoric emerges the category of an ‘other within’ India- large sections of Indian population who are no immediate winners of the reforms but are tranquilized, by being relegated to a “waiting room” condition. Trickle down is legitimized by informing people that they ought to wait for the benefits of the transitions to reach them. The PMs also paradoxically employ a vocabulary of the socialist past to project the future. Although what is being introduced is a drastic shift, the resources used to present the new borrow heavily from the lexicon of Nehruvian developmentalism. Thus, the new is sold by using a vocabulary which is not so new.
Conclusion
Authors: Bajpai Anandita
Published: March 2019

The Conclusion presents a review of the key findings. It draws the consistencies and the inconsistencies in the rhetoric of Prime Ministers Rao, Vajpayee, Singh and Modi. It engages in a transversal discussion of how the vocabularies of Nehru’s ‘New India’ differ from the texture of the ‘New India’ after 1991. The next section elaborates on the category of what I have called ‘Airport Literature’ (mainly because of its overwhelming presence at Indian airports). This literature celebrates India’s market liberalization and is part of the changes it seeks to glorify. The conclusion discusses how the genre of speeches speaks to this genre of literature. The last section returns to the debate of New World Orders to establish how the Indian state has attempted to recalibrate its position in the wider changing architecture of geopolitics and open markets and how the PMs as the voice of the state have attempted to legitimize their own authority as the voice of the nation.
Torture, Notions of ‘Justice’, and Petty Sovereigns
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

This chapter asks the questions of why and how police personnel engage in torture and how such practices impact and shape the self-understanding of those who enact the violence of the state. Drawing on ethnographic field-material including long conversations with police personnel, the chapter argues that illegal violence is not always carried out by hiding it or by renaming it as legal force. Violence is often sustained due to its glorification as a way of delivering ‘justice’ beyond the liberal-constitutional model. By deciding to torture and kill beyond the limits of law, police personnel display operation of a sovereign power at the locales. Torture in police stations is so routine, that they are often used merely for impressing spectators. At another level the chapter also discusses how the practices of torture are produced as ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ at the same time.
Spaces of Abjection and a ‘Civic-Disciplining’ Model of Policing
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines the discursive production of some spaces as ‘filthy’ and ‘criminal’ places, and thus requiring a specific form of policing. By attaching meanings to geographical spaces and people therein, such constructions create a division between a ‘self’ to be protected and an ‘other’ to be policed, and in the context of a postcolonial society ridden by hierarchies of various nature makes for easy accommodation and tolerance of violence. The chapter draws on texts of laws and court judgments, reports of state bodies and rights advocacy organizations, and personal interactions and ethnographic observations in the field. Focusing on everyday policing practices in contemporary Delhi, and conceptualizing categorizations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘civilized’ and ‘criminal’, ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, the chapter looks for their implications in the acceptance and understanding of the role of the state in society.
(Mis)Use, Agency, and Acceptance
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

The chapter examines how those who are often targets of police violence relate to the institution, and in the process raises questions about agential location of those in the margins in their interactions with the state. The attempt is to uncover the ideas of people in the margins, about what the state should be, and what role it is expected to play, for them to accept it as legitimate. It is argued that the interactions of marginal sections with the state despite its violence, is marked either by selective appropriation or by resigned participation, which often create some spaces for people, but at the same time also help in letting the state further reach the locales. The chapter draws on observation of policing practices, conversations with families of people who died in custody, post-mortem reports, FIRs, and other government records etc.
Of Blessings and Banes
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

Lakhipathar in Assam is defined as a margin due to both its lack of ‘order’ or ‘normalcy’ and its precarious physical location at the edges of the proclaimed territories of India. It is this unruly margin where the rebel organization ULFA fighting for Assam’s secession had its central head quarters. With the intention to introduce the field-site to the readers, here I discuss the socio-historical and geographical cultural background of the ULFA camp in Lakhipathar and go on to discuss how the media reported the first moment of conflict between the state and ULFA in Lakhipathar. I also discuss briefly the field-work anxieties of a researcher. The chapter draws on memory based oral narratives and personal observations in the field, archival sources, literary works, and newspapers of the time.
ULFA in Lakhipathar
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

Studying the ULFA movement at its peak during late 1980s, as it was experienced in Assam and in and around Lakhipathar more specifically, this chapter marks out different perspectives from which ULFA was looked at and understood. The chapter also offers an analysis of the implications this divergence in perspectives has for the emergence and strength of an alternative source of authority. The primary material that I work with in this chapter is mostly drawn from the field, complemented by a few interviews with movement leaders. The chapter enables us to understand the specific legitimate space of authority that the ULFA had occupied in Lakhipathar in the pre-operation Bajrang years. The chapter provides the ground work for the larger argument of the work, about acceptance of power structures and wielders of violence, however fractured that may be.
The Making of an Authority
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

This chapter examines how the everyday social life of contemporary Lakhipathar is shaped and influenced by its extraordinary past of violence. Examining the place of the army in the present, it analyses what ‘peace’ and ‘normalcy’ mean in contemporary Lakhipathar and how notions of community and belongingness, right and wrong are conceptualized in the shadow of an armed force. The chapter brings up parallels between the period when ULFA was uncontested and was seen as the authority in Lakhipathar, and the contemporary period, when the army’s existence in Lakhipathar has come to be accepted as part of the regular, and as contributory to the civic life the people, by using examples from sport, culture and community life. The chapter draws on ethnographic field material, both in the form of narratives and field observations.
Conclusion
Authors: Khanikar Santana
Published: March 2019

If the state in democracies like India engages in violence, then is this state still accepted by the people? The conception of legitimacy in this study is about observable behaviour, about if and why people accept power holders as authority, and not about whether it is the ideal way to engage with violent power holders within the discourses of normative political theory. And what we see in both the field-sites of this study, is acceptance, though it may be slow and appear flickering or contextual at time. The specific vision that the nation-state is, marked by geographical boundaries and internal sovereignty often needs to use violence to legitimize its existence. Such use of violence does not appear to be leading to a dis-illusionment with the form or the institutions of the state.
Introduction
Authors: Kapur Devesh , Vaishnav Milan
Published: March 2019

Across the world, democracies are showing signs of stress. One of the many factors underlying this ‘democratic malaise’ is the inability of representative governments to manage the deluge of money in politics. To date, the vast majority of the literature on political finance has focused on the developed world. Yet, the flow of money is likely to operate very differently in developing democracies, and with distinctive consequences. This chapter serves as an introduction to this edited volume, which seeks to shed light on the methods, sources, and implications of political finance in a major developing country setting—India. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, the findings contained in this book suggest a range of theoretical and empirical implications for the comparative social science literature on money in politics.
Builders, Politicians, and Election Finance
Authors: Kapur Devesh , Vaishnav Milan
Published: March 2019

In many developing countries, politicians often turn to private firms for illicit election finance. In sectors where firms are highly regulated, politicians can exchange policy discretion or regulatory favours for financial support during elections. This chapter explores this dynamic by focusing on the role of the construction sector in India, a domain where regulatory intensity is high. Specifically, we argue that builders will experience a short-term liquidity crunch as elections approach because of their need to re-route funds to campaigns as a form of indirect election finance. We use variation in the demand for cement, the indispensable ingredient for construction, to investigate the presence of an electoral cycle in building activity consistent with this logic. Using a novel monthly-level dataset, we demonstrate that cement consumption does exhibit a political business cycle supportive of our hypothesis.
Navigating Fiscal Constraints
Authors: Collins Michael A.
Published: March 2019

In recent decades, India has witnessed an upsurge in electoral participation among lower-caste voters. This broadening social profile of democratic practice occurred alongside a pluralization of the party system marked by the entry of new contenders advocating on behalf of lower caste groups. Coincident with this transformation of the political arena, the country recorded an alarming growth in gross electoral expenditure. Today, reliable estimates peg India as the world’s second most expensive democracy in terms of aggregate campaign spending. This chapter examines how the most prominent Dalit (ex-Untouchable) party in Tamil Nadu—Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) or Liberation Panthers Party—navigates the challenges associated with election finance, investigating how VCK candidates mobilize resources to sustain competitive campaigns. Fiscal constraints incentivize smaller parties to join coalitions spearheaded by their more established counterparts, yet these electoral arrangements do not strictly entail a quid pro quo exchange of vote-banks for financial and canvassing support, but entail complex negotiations that structure the terms of electoral participation.
Money and Votes
Authors: Björkman Lisa , Witsoe Jeffrey
Published: March 2019

While ‘vote buying’ theories tend to treat parties to cash exchanges as either transaction agents or as information-gap bridges, this paper seeks to show that people involved with moving money are key actors in broader political economies, and that the networks through which cash flows are the very same ones through which the resources of off-season social and economic life is produced, assembled, and transformed. We draw from our respective ethnographic research in two very different (in some ways even ‘most different’) sites in contemporary India—the first from the city of Mumbai and the secondly from rural Bihar. Examining the origins and distribution of exchanged money in our sites unsettles received wisdom concerning the directional flow of monetary exchange, demonstrates that money originates not just from parties but rather from a wide variety of sources and that the money that changes hands at election time produces and articulates socio-political networks that infuse everyday life far beyond election day.
Conclusion
Authors: Kapur Devesh , Sridharan Eswaran , Vaishnav Milan
Published: March 2019

In this concluding chapter, we set out to do five things. First, we present key stylized facts that summarize the current realities of India’s political finance regulatory ecosystem. Second, we briefly review an important recent development on the policy front: India’s sudden and dramatic decision to ‘demonetize’ the rupee. Third, we discuss the motivations for pushing for deeper changes and outline the central tenets of a ‘grand bargain’ for electoral reform that combines both carrots and sticks in order curb some of the most distortionary impacts that money is having. Fourth, we briefly assess the question of whether the upstart Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) represents a new model of politics that combines internal party democracy with greater transparency in electoral funding, as some analysts have argued. Fifth, we conclude with some thoughts on a future research agenda.
Introduction
Authors: Kale Sunila S. , Dubash Navroz K. , Bharvirkar Ranjit
Published: March 2019

The introductory chapter lays out the rationale for the volume and provides a framework for analysing the political economy of Indian electricity. We first present a historically-rooted political economy analysis to understand the past and identify reforms for the future of electricity in India. We next outline an analytic framework to guide the empirical chapters of the book, which locates electricity outcomes in the larger political economy of electricity, the field of politics that are specific to each state, and each state’s broader political economy. The chapter ends by providing concise synopses of the state-level narratives of electricity in the fifteen states included in the volume.
Disempowerment of Incumbent Elite and Governance
Authors: Siddiqui Md Zakaria
Published: March 2019

Bihar’s electricity sector was in a low level equilibrium for many years, with limited rural electrification. Under Lalu Yadav in the 1990s, although Bihar’s power sector deteriorated, newly empowered lower castes demanded public service improvements, including in electricity. When Nitish Kumar became chief minister in 2005, and even more so in his second term, he was able to capitalise on this demand and benefit politically by providing increasingly reliable and universal electricity. Conditions for reform were favourable: initially, low political pressure and stress on the regulatory process because of low access, high political support for enhanced access, central funds for grid-extension, and the availability of low-cost market purchases enabled Bihar to take advantage of surplus power in other states. Consequently, Bihar was able to shift from a low level equilibrium to a virtuous cycle. To sustain this cycle, however, Bihar will have to avoid future subsidy traps and potential future supply constraints.
Efficiency and Welfare
Authors: Sudhakar Meera
Published: March 2019

Owing to historically-rooted regional imbalances in levels and modes of development; the state in Karnataka has struggled to provide resources for the less-developed, and agrarian northern districts that also play a key role in the competitive politics of the state. Until the 1980s, cheap hydro power accommodated these rising demands, even as dynamic tertiary economies centered on Bengaluru were creating a new political and economic image for the state. Rather than adopting strict economic principles in which cost-of-supply determines tariff and all regions are treated equally, Karnataka’s reforms involved a strategy of bureaucratic negotiation that has enabled wealthier regions to offset some of the costs associated with ongoing public subsidies to the northern regions and farmers. This has led to a relatively stable equilibrium, although arguably one that is dependent on continued willingness of wealthier regions to sustain this arrangement.
Poverty in the Midst of Abundance
Authors: Swain Ashwini K.
Published: March 2019

Madhya Pradesh is in a low level equilibrium of low quality supply, high loss levels, low collection efficiency, and growing subsidy. This outcome persists despite a reform effort, but one which only consolidated bureaucratic control and introduced a tariff shock without tangible gains to the population. The state has bet on electricity supply as a growth industry, increasing capacity five-fold since 2000, but the resultant overcapacity could further limit room to manoeuvre. The electricity sector continues to be perceived as a political risk, a perception shaped by a post-reform loss by the reforming party, the India National Congress, in 2003.
Endless Restructuring of the Power Sector in Odisha
Authors: Das Mrigakshi , Nayak Mahaprajna
Published: March 2019

Odisha in the mid-1990s was a poor state with limited rural electrification but plentiful vast coal and ample hydro supply. Enabled by a cross-party consensus that the state should become the “powerhouse of India,” Odisha was the first Indian state to take a World Bank package to design and implement reforms, including distribution privatization. The state utilities initially profited from selling cheap hydro power to neighbouring states, but the effect of reforms on citizen-consumers was negative: tariffs for existing consumers increased and rural electrification all but stopped under private discom ownership. This low-level equilibrium was sustained throughout the 2000s when a new conjuncture of factors imperilled sector finances: centrally-funded grid expansion led to an increase of costly-to-serve rural consumers, increasing demand forced a turn to higher cost thermal power, and industrial customers shifted to captive power. The failure of reforms is underscored by cancellation of the last three private licenses in 2015, throwing the problem back into the state’s hands. Odisha risks tipping from a low level equilibrium to a vicious cycle.
Electricity Distribution in Rajasthan
Authors: Sareen Siddharth
Published: March 2019

Rajasthan went from very low levels of electrification and limited capacity to high levels of electricity consumption, greater access, and greater generating capacity over the last two decades. An important factor is that geographic variations within the state also lead to very different cost-to-serve conditions, although a single tariff is levied across the state, raising challenges to managing geographic diversity. Both major parties—INC and BJP— have taken turns offering greater power subsidies, focused on short-term thinking about the potential electoral benefits of power rather than long-term planning for the overall financial and technical health of the sector. Despite reform efforts, loss levels have not been staunched, financial health continues to decline, and the situation is exacerbated by unwise high cost supply choices, leading to a declining spiral.
Insulated Wires
Authors: Chatterjee Elizabeth
Published: March 2019

West Bengal had been in a low-level equilibrium characterized by low access levels but also, therefore, limited demands for subsidies. Nonetheless, declining finances prompted the long-standing CPM government to undertake reforms, but these were focused in internal restructuring, including successful negotiations with labor unions, with positive outcomes for loss levels and discom finances. However, the 2011 elections brought a change in government in part due to larger state politics around industrial policy, and the winning TMC initially returned to a more populist tack. The effect of blocking additional tariff hikes, and expanding rural electricity access led to worsened discom finances. There are signs that the TMC may slowly come to believe in the electoral benefits of a long term power sector view, one that limits the temptation for populist policies. If so, the turn toward a vicious cycle between electoral and power politics may be avoided.
Art Attacks
Authors: Maheshwari Malvika
Published: March 2019

Since the end of the 1980s in India, self-styled representatives of a variety of ascriptive groups (religious, caste, regional, and linguistic among others) have come to routinely damage artwork, disrupt their exhibition, and threaten and assault artists and their supporters. Often, these acts are said to be a protest against the allegedly ‘hurtful’ or ‘offensive’ artworks. They are even claimed to be a prescient call to save the identity of the community, in a manner that makes the communal identities hinge entirely on that artistic (mis)representation. Yet, at the time of these attacks, many who indulge in this kind of violence have seldom heard of the artist before or even seen, read, watched, let alone engaged with the artwork. Such is the wrench on the right to freedom of speech and expression in general, and on the physical safety and security of artists in particular, that has inspired fear, anger, and discomfort within the art world, marked by ominous declarations of a ‘cultural emergency’ owing to the loss of lives and property, and without the due processes of law—a consequence that was hardly synonymous with art practice in India, at least until a few decades ago. This book tells the story of violence against artists in India, marked by the intensifying sense of insecurity, fear, frustration, and anger within the art world. But to bring out its complexities—to build an analytical account for understanding what such destructive and even competitive attacks on artists convey about India’s liberal democracy, given that violence in its many avatars has not so much been an aberration to the form of India’s liberal democracy as much as its very condition—the book attempts to map the concrete political transformations that have informed its dynamic unfolding. In other words, as opposed to simply adding to the prevalent commentaries on violent regulation of free speech in India, this work focusses on the dynamics of violence in that regulation. Based on extensive interactions with assailants and artists, I argue that these attacks are not simply ‘anti-democratic’. But are dependent in perverse ways on the very logics of democracy’s functioning, as much they are contained by it, along with the wider material conditions that have prevented both free speech in India, and India at large, from being immutably locked in a downward spiral.
Introduction
Authors: Maheshwari Malvika
Published: March 2019

Niraj Jain remembers 9 May 2007 as the day the ‘world finally recognized’ him.1 The ‘glory’ it brought upon him was such that even nine months later he triumphantly recounted his leading role in the incident at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) of Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Vadodara, the third-largest city of the western state of Gujarat. It was the annual examination–exhibition of the final-year Fine Arts students; Jain was among the visitors, though it remains disputed whether the exhibition was open to the public at large or was restricted to members of the faculty. As Jain entered the exhibition hall, he began making telephone calls to the police and to his ‘contacts’ in the local press, and with uncharacteristic efficiency they reached the scene within minutes. In their presence, Jain went on to abuse, manhandle, and threaten a final-year Masters student S. Chandramohan—whose works were on display—for creating allegedly obscene and vulgar (...
M.F. Husain and the Making of a Campaign
Authors: Maheshwari Malvika
Published: March 2019

Building upon the evidence examined in the previous chapters, Chapter 5 analyses the single most widespread and virulent campaign of violence against an artist—that targeting M.F. Husain, mapping precisely the transformation of disconnected, and varied attacks on artists into waging campaigns against them. True, the attacks on Husain since the mid-1990s, and responses in his name, enlarged the word-stock surrounding him, but buried within it the static and isolated view of violence hardly explains the logic and the process of Hindu nationalists’ sustained and obsessive, often even pointless, preoccupation with him. The progress and shifts in their campaigns underline varied and evolving attitudes towards his alleged offences, not always related to the images in question. Given Husain’s extraordinary stature within the art world, and within the world of violent offence-taking, an understanding of the build-up of the campaign waged in his name is essential for any analysis of the phenomenon of violence of offence-taking and its discipline-enforcing attitude towards artists.
The Making of Parliament as a Gendered Site of Representation
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

The chapter outlines the historical development of parliamentary institutions in India. It embeds Parliament in its colonial history—as an institution as well as a site of representative politics—as well as in post-colonial transformation. Parliament is analysed not only in its changing socio-economic context, the socio-cultural background of its members, and role of parliamentary procedures in seeking to check executive powers and influence policy but also in how efforts are made to indigenize the space through changing its aesthetics. The Indian Parliament emerges as a gendered institution which the inclusion of a few women cannot radically change; it also emerges as a gendered worksite, a fact that is important in order to understand the gendered performances of women and men in parliamentary debates, law-making, and leadership roles.
Sustaining Participation
Authors: Rai Shirin M. , Spary Carole
Published: March 2019

This chapter addresses the questions of why women stay on in politics and why they leave it. It examines the issue of sustainability of political participation—something that is rarely focused on in the studies in representative politics. It explores the party’s support of women’s parliamentary careers by examining the re-nomination and re-election of incumbent women members of Parliament over successive parliamentary terms. It shows that pressures of work, the conditions of work, the levels of political and the institutional support available to women members by political parties and Parliament, the pressures of expectation of constituencies, travel, and life–work balance all contribute to the sustainable participation of women in Parliament. It concludes that the sustainability of women’s participation in parliamentary politics is very largely affected by party, institutional, and leadership norms, and suggests that treating the Parliament as a place of work can open up avenues for gender-based reform.