Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this critical political inquiry is to look into the conditions and dimensions of autonomy, their historical nature, and their political significance in terms of enriching democracy. The volume catalogues the resistance to the power of the state-the demand for autonomy in other words-that is encountered among various sections of society such as women, ethnic groups, and classes. In particular, the issues discussed are: women's autonomy; peace accords; the nature of federalism in the Indian constitution; autonomy and international law; resources for autonomy.

The COVID-19 crisis in India produced severe disruptions in labour's life and pro-cess, while it offered the rulers an opportunity to push further the neoliberal re-forms. In this context, questions of economy became a matter of life for millions of petty producers, informal labour including migrant labour, peasants, and other sections of society. The metamorphosis of economic questions into biopolitical issues had been never as evident as it was in the time of the pandemic. In the all round atmosphere of neo-liberalism where the state had retreated from public ed-ucation and public health, the priority for migrant workers was found to be absent. In this background the question of justice emerged as the backbone of rights. In-deed, one may ask: Will a rights-based approach to defend the existing entitle-ments of workers be enough? Or is there now an overwhelming need to centrally situate the issue of informal workers, of whom a significant section belongs to mi-grant population?

1968 saw a wave of protests and student radicalism in India, some of the tactics and issues of which were reminiscent of those in Europe and North America. The anti-imperialist theme was similarly strident, and the student and youth movement posed serious challenges to the old established Left, sharing traits of a global New Left agenda. The upsurge of post-independence radicalism in India, however, drew on different historical legacies, and exhibited many specific features, all of which culminated in the student and youth upsurge of 1968–69. In order to demonstrate the complex history and legacy of 60s radicalism in India, this essay takes us back to the sixties in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal had developed the tactic of occupation, which helped the movement crystallize and caused, ironically, the undoing of the mobilization in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history, and the radicals of today perhaps in their enthusiasm for the New Left ethos have ignored the history of the insurgent tactics of the past, especially tactics developed in the postcolonial context.

Recent studies on welfare state and schemes suggest a different way of understanding modern governance in which the study of the nation is not at the centre of political understanding. Instead, of significance in such studies is the inadequately explored history of governing a mobile, unruly world of population flows. These works have given us a sense of the hidden histories of conflicts, desperate survivals, and new and old networks. Studies of hunger in the nineteenth century, of itinerant movements, transportations of coolies, spread of famines, shipping of children and adult women, trafficking in sex and labour, and pieces of welfare legislation to cope with this great infamy tell us how actually we have arrived at our own time of subject formation. This is certainly different from conventional nation-centred histories. Working within this new strand of history writing, labour historians have tried to recognise the political significance of labour migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their works suggest a different way of writing the history of the nation form in the last two centuries, where the extra-nationalist narrative of mobile labour constitutes a different universe. Through all these studies two issues have come closer as marks of modern time – on one hand mixed up, messy, population flows, provoking desperate governmental responses, on the other hand innovations at a furious pace in humanitarian methods, functions, institutions and principles. Modern humanitarianism had to combine the old techniques with new ones of care, protection, information gathering, interference, intervention and invention of a skewed theory of sovereignty, a one-sided theory of responsibility, and the gigantic humanitarian machines which would be likened to the transnational corporations (TNCs). In practical terms this means today managing the societies which produce the obdurate refugees and migrants to stop them from leaving the shores, to keep them within the national territorial confines, and eventually to manage societies in 'an enlightened way'. Managing moving population groups became the deus ex machina of modern governmentality. This will not be a straightforward history, as national, gender-related, race, and several other factors contributed to the making of a hugely heterogeneous labour market. The subjectivities produced in that process have contributed to the contentious history of our time.