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Abstract
Gandhi and Ambedkar offer a fascinating picture of community organizers fighting against caste oppression and caste discrimination. Both were committed to transforming the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions of 'Dalits'†. They claimed that only through social action could societal transformation take place. As a result, they placed a strong emphasis on mobilizing the public against untouchability. They envisioned the removal of untouchability through popular struggles and popular participation. Not only did Gandhi and Ambedkar undertake popular campaigns, but they also saw them as necessary and beneficial. This paper explores the implications of integrating the constructs of the Gandhian and Ambedkarian models to tackle the problem of untouchability. It re-reads the Constitution of the Anti-Untouchability League (AUL) which was prepared by Gandhi himself in January 1935 in conjunction with a comprehensive letter penned by Ambedkar in November 1932, containing a plan of action for the AUL to carry out for the uplift of 'Dalits', to shed light on the lessons that are still important for the modern-day community organizers in India. The paper argues that synergizing Gandhi's and Ambedkar's emancipatory discourses can enrich the present-day activism for social action combatting untouchability.

This study examines whether investing in R&D reduces the impact of exogenous shocks like the COVID‐19 on stock market performance and accounting performance of manufacturing firms in India. For the sample of listed manufacturing firms, the paper finds that the firms engaged in R&D activities had lower negative cumulative abnormal return than those firms that did not invest in R&D in the pre‐pandemic period using multiple event windows. The result suggests that R&D investments can lower value erosion for the shareholders during a severe crisis period. Further, using a difference‐in‐difference fixed effects model, the study finds that manufacturing firms engaged in R&D activities in the pre‐pandemic period exhibited higher return on sales and growth of total income during the pandemic quarter vis‐à‐vis the non‐R&D firms. The favorable accounting performance indicates the possibility of firm‐level R&D being associated with the firm's ability to adjust its functioning during a crisis, thereby reducing the effect of the crisis. Finally, the study documents that government intervention to reduce the spread of the virus had a differential impact on firms based on their industry of operation. The findings have implications for investors, corporate managers, and policymakers in India.

This article contests the conventional view that the 'Depressed Classes' lost out on representation by agreeing to joint electorates in the Poona Pact. It analyses the results of the elections to the provincial legislatures in British India that took place in 1936–1937 and 1945–1946 under the Government of India Act, 1935, to concretely appraise the working of the Poona Pact. The article argues that reserved seats, primary elections and cumulative voting redeemed the ability of the Poona Pact to provide both descriptive and substantive representation for the 'Depressed Classes'.

The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic demands imperative discussions in the field of health security and global governance. Traditional studies on health care and global governance have acknowledged the significance of "global" as it rested on the fact that epidemics and pandemics are not restricted within national boundaries. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the hierarchical division of norm diffusion. Despite the structural inequalities, the patterns of behavior of various countries, such as China, the USA, Italy, South Korea, and India, in managing the crisis suggest a favorable ground for bringing in the importance of national-level decision-making in the global versus local debate. Building upon the arguments from norm theories of diffusion, the article contributes to our understanding that for an effective analysis of the politics of global health governance, the power of local channels in the diffusion of essential health norms cannot be undermined. The article studies the role played by the local-level diffusion processes, in this case, the national state actors in reshaping and integrating essential health norms to make it workable for broader global relevance. As a result, following the norm theories of diffusion, this article analyzes the global–local dynamics with regard to public health in the context of the spread of the COVID-19 health security threat.

In this article, the author begins by grasping the present crisis through the social anthropological description ofoverheating. She then locates "Generation Z (Gen Z)" as a generation born into an overheated era and distinguishes their socio-political struggle for intergenerational climate justice from preceding generations. Following that, the author presents an analysis of the oppressive adultist dimensions of the challenges confronted by Gen Z activists like Greta Thunberg. She does so by engaging with examples from the German context. The objective of the discussion on adultism faced by Gen Z activists consequently establishes that young activists demonstrate relentless courage and hence their contribution deserves a legitimate place in rethinking socio-political "education." Her reading reveals that young activists are simultaneously resisting adult opposition and contributing to educating older generations about the intergenerational dimensions of the climate crisis. Therefrom, the author proposes that one may re-think the matter at hand from a childist standpoint which implies a re-cognition of pupils' agency within education i.e., intergenerational relating, as something that adults can also learn from. She suggests that an integral dimension of reflexivity in further developing childist educational theory and praxis, entails a conscious commitment tolettingchildren and youth teach adult educators too.

Russia's robust engagement with China coupled with the recalibration of its ties with Pakistan, coming at the backdrop of Russia's increasing estrangement with the West, Pakistan's dissatisfaction with the USA over the suspension of security assistance, and India's closeness toward the latter are leading scholars and political analysts to remark that Russia, China, and Pakistan are gradually inching toward the formalization of an 'axis' or a strategic 'counter alliance' in a bid to push for a greater bipolarity in world affairs. Though there are not enough signs to prove that Russia–China–Pakistan 'axis' is a reality, what is of significance is the emergence of converging interests among these three states that is gradually leading toward deeper engagements among them. It is in this broader context that the article will endeavor to analyze the factors propelling such a development and seek to discern the possible implications it may have on the time-tested ties between Russia and India. The study will move beyond the realist concepts of a power-centric and relative-gain approach that presents this trilateral engagement as a 'counter alliance' to the USA and India's supremacy in the region; instead the article argues that the factors as presented in the realist narratives are inadequate to explain the nature of Russia–China–Pakistan engagement in the light of (a) Russia's invested relationship with India that is steeped in historical nostalgia which makes it highly unlikely for Russia to turn against the latter; (b) second, Russia's tactical relationship with Pakistan inevitably weakens one leg of the so-called axis; (c) third, Russia's robust partnership with China invalidates the realist argument that Russia retains an interest in countering China's growing status as a countervailing power in the region; (d) fourth, the 'other' ( i.e., the USA and India) vis-à-vis which the realists attempt to posit the Russia–China–Pakistan 'axis' as a counter strategic alliance is itself noninstitutionalized and fraught with many challenges.

This paper analyzes Bithia Mary Croker's ghost stories of the British Raj to argue that Croker in her texts reframes the eighteenth-century Orientalist Gothic writing tradition to critique British imperial presence in India. I specifically discuss two of Croker's short stories, namely "To Let" (1893) and "If You See Her Face" (1893) published in her anthology of Indian ghost fiction To Let (1893). The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century British India under the vigilance of the Empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. In my critique of the two stories, I take a transhistorical approach wherein my analysis starts with and builds upon the eighteenth century and moves into the late nineteenth century. The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century India under the vigilance of the British empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. The short stories build upon and expand the eighteenth-century gothic tradition that threads together the internal and the external, in this case the "others" of the British empire. They use Orientalist gothic elements to reflect the growing contentions in the Indian city of Lucknow against British imperial forces that also compromises the apparently safe and secure domestic space of the colonial dak bungalows. In doing so, Croker uses the figures of racial and gendered others to subvert the politico-cultural hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

Public policies are reflected in the public domain more by how laws are implemented on the ground than by what their legislative content is. The departures from legislative intent are often scripted by the non-legislative actors at the cutting edge level in public organizations and people outside of the reference frame are often at their wits' end as to why such departures take place at all. This essay takes up two Indian laws—one provincial and the other federal—and relying upon Michael Lipsky's theory of street level bureaucracy, seeks to explore why two critical provisions thereof remained mostly unimplemented right since their legislation. Why do the street level bureaucrats mostly intend to depart from the avowed intent? Do they really stand to gain in such a scenario of non-implementation? If so, how? These questions are discussed in an expanded way in regard to the Bengal Excise Act, 1909 and the Narcotic Drugs & Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have recently gained attention for representing knowledge about a particular domain. Since its advent, the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud has constantly been growing containing many KGs about many different domains such as government, scholarly data, biomedical domain, etc. Apart from facilitating the inter-connectivity of datasets in the LOD cloud, KGs have been used in a variety of machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) based applications. However, the information present in the KGs are sparse and are often incomplete. Predicting the missing links between the entities is necessary to overcome this issue. Moreover, in the LOD cloud, information about the same entities is available in multiple KGs in different forms. But the information that these entities are the same across KGs is missing. The main focus of this thesis is to do Knowledge Graph Completion by tackling the link prediction tasks within a KG as well as across different KGs. To do so, the latent representation of KGs in a low dimensional vector space has been exploited to predict the missing information in order to complete the ...

This paper analyzes Bithia Mary Croker's ghost stories of the British Raj to argue that Croker in her texts reframes the eighteenth-century Orientalist Gothic writing tradition to critique British imperial presence in India. I specifically discuss two of Croker's short stories, namely "To Let" (1893) and "If You See Her Face" (1893) published in her anthology of Indian ghost fiction To Let (1893). The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century British India under the vigilance of the Empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. In my critique of the two stories, I take a transhistorical approach wherein my analysis starts with and builds upon the eighteenth century and moves into the late nineteenth century. The paper traces how Croker uses two distinct characteristics of eighteenth-century colonial Indian society–-the tradition of nautch performances and the architectural space of the dak bungalows–-which continued into early-nineteenth century India under the vigilance of the British empire to simultaneously attack the imperial consciousness and dislocate the imperial heartland from within the colony. The short stories build upon and expand the eighteenth-century gothic tradition that threads together the internal and the external, in this case the "others" of the British empire. They use Orientalist gothic elements to reflect the growing contentions in the Indian city of Lucknow against British imperial forces that also compromises the apparently safe and secure domestic space of the colonial dak bungalows. In doing so, Croker uses the figures of racial and gendered others to subvert the politico-cultural hierarchies of race, class, and gender.