Suchergebnisse

This article investigates the claims of backwardness made by two dominant castes, the Lingayats in Karnataka and the Marathas in Maharashtra. It argues that the narratives of OBCization of the Lingayats and the Marathas present an interesting account of how the dominant castes manipulate the state institutional discourse of reservations to seek political legitimacy. The article also attempts to posit the claims of backwardness of these two castes against each other in order to develop a comparative understanding of the state-specific patterns of caste politics. Finally, the article tries to assess whether and how the dominant castes are able to (re)construct their dominance under the changing circumstances and what the implications of this strategy are for the project of hegemony.

Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2011. 324 pages. ₹ 795.

In this article, we use data from the 2019 NES post-poll survey to assess the impact of BJP's welfare schemes on voting behaviour. We demonstrate that compared to earlier elections, voters are more likely to give credit to the central government as opposed to state governments or local politicians for welfare schemes. This centralization is especially the case for some of the BJP's new welfare programmes such as Ujjwala and the Jan Dhan Yojana. However, even earlier Congress-era schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and the Awas Yojana are now more associated with the central government. Schemes such as the Public Distribution System (PDS) and Old Age Pensions are still more likely to be associated with state governments. At the all-India level, we find some evidence that voters who received benefits under Ujjwala, Jan Dhan Yojana or Awas Yojana schemes were more likely to vote for the BJP, whereas recipients of pensions or MGNREGA were less likely to support the BJP.

This article examines the role of India's states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India's federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push toward rights-based social provision. Yet, it is India's states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. Drawing on a comparative research program across pairs of Indian states, three critical factors explaining how state-level political environments shape social policy are identified: the role of policy legacies in shaping policy frames; the role of social coalitions underpinning political party competition; and the role of political leaders in strengthening state capacity to achieve program goals.