Suchergebnisse

Caste and power : competing discourses in colonial Bengal -- Caste and popular religion : revolt against hierarchy and its limits -- Caste and social reform : the case of widow remarriage -- Caste and gender : social mobility and the status of women -- Caste and the territorial nation : Hindu Mahasabha, partition, and the Dalit

India–New Zealand relations, which could be historically dated back to the days of the British Empire, lacked until recently in substance and were rocked by several irritants, the most important of which were the divergent views on the issue of nuclear non-proliferation. However, in last one decade or so there have been some remarkable developments in this bilateral relation, as the security interests of the two nations have converged, volume of trade increased, educational ties grew stronger and people-to-people contacts improved significantly. While there still remain some challenges, as negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement have taken longer time than expected, there are also immense possibilities. This essay looks critically at those challenges and possibilities in the relationship between two countries, which on the one hand share some historic common grounds, but are also set apart by geography as well as numerous systemic dissimilarities.

In the early days of independence the province of West Bengal witnessed a violent communist upsurge in 1948–50. In many ways the events of this period foreshadowed what happened in this province during the Naxalite experiment of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This paper, using recently declassified IB records, seeks to reconstruct this less-known episode in the history of the communist movement in India. It was apparently an attempt to revive the Tebhaga movement, which was left half way in 1946. But in areas it touched on a variety of issues affecting marginal peasants and industrial workers in the early years of independence. In the end it appeared that the mass support for this attempted 'people's democratic revolution' was sporadic, localised and issue-based. In 1950, following an intense internal ideological debate within the party, the Communist Party of India (CPI) decided to abandon its revolutionary line and decided to participate in the forthcoming general elections. This paper unravels this process of transformation of the communist movement in India from a revolutionary to a constitutional movement operating within the perimeters of mass electoral politics.

Ever since its beginning, organized dalit politics under the leadership of

Dr B. R. Ambedkar had been consistently moving away from the Indian National

Congress and the Gandhian politics of integration. It was drifting towards

an assertion of separate political identity of its own, which in the end was

enshrined formally in the new constitution of the All India Scheduled Caste

Federation, established in 1942. A textual discursive representation of

this sense of alienation may be found in Ambedkar's book, What Congress and

Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, published in 1945. Yet, within two

years, in July 1947, we find Ambedkar accepting Congress nomination for a

seat in the Constituent Assembly. A few months later he was inducted into

the first Nehru Cabinet of free India, ostensibly on the basis of a

recommendation from Gandhi himself. In January 1950, speaking at a general

public meeting in Bombay, organized by the All India Scheduled Castes

Federation, he advised the dalits to co-operate with the Congress and to

think of their country first, before considering their sectarian

interests. But then within a few months again, this alliance broke

down over his differences with Congress stalwarts, who, among other

things, refused to support him on the Hindu Code Bill. He resigned from

the Cabinet in 1951 and in the subsequent general election in 1952, he was

defeated in the Bombay parliamentary constituency by a political nonentity,

whose only advantage was that he contested on a Congress ticket. Ambedkar's

chief election agent, Kamalakant Chitre described this electoral debacle as

nothing but a 'crisis'.