Indian Debates on the International Left

Indian Debates on the International Left
Author: Rai, Shirin M.
Publisher: SAGE Publishing India
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 935479212X

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This book traces the Indian Left's engagement with the international communist debates of the 1960s and 1970s, shedding new light on the fault lines within the Left as well as on its international solidarities. Lajpat Rai argued for rethinking established leftist positions, seeking inspiration in experiment and developing creative approaches for the sustainability of socialist ideas and ideals. The contemporary relevance of these debates is significant as the Left remains without a sharp response to the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing populism in India, and a failure of the Left to recognize the challenges emanating from a strongly integrated and organized finance capital on the one hand and the increasingly self-aware identity politics on the other. Democratic opposition rather than a bureaucratic thinking needs to be the backbone of any meaningful Left struggle. Lajpat Rai's passionate writing gives expression to the spirit and intensity of political debates at the time and the role of the Left intelligentsia in comprehending, from a committed socialist angle, the shifting paradigms of an unstable world to help bring about progressive change.

No Free Left

No Free Left
Author: Vijay Prashad
Publisher: Leftword Books
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2020
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9789380118277

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Do the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 signal the end of the road for the Left? Over the past twenty years, the Indian political climate has shifted decidedly to the Right - with the BJP and the Congress dragging India into a growth trajectory that squanders the hopes of working people. The old consensus on Indian socialism is threadbare, and socialist parties in disarray.//The future of Indian communism is rooted in the popular hopes for a better tomorrow and in the popular discontent with the bitter present. No Free Left is a critical examination of the past of Indian Communism and an assessment of its future.//Most literature on Indian communism feels claustrophobic. It assumes that the communist movement lives on a detached landscape - its programme and political judgments are adjudged against a divine standard. A history of communism cannot be written, Gramsci said, without writing a "general history of a country." Vijay Prashad does exactly that.//No Free Left stays alive to the details of the present while drawing out the long term dynamic, combining a rich historical survey with acute political analysis of the present. It is a compelling work for students of Indian politics. For activists of the Left, it is indispensable reading. Above all, it is a live work, an invitation to debate and discussion.

A Foreign Policy for the Left

A Foreign Policy for the Left
Author: Michael Walzer
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300231180

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Something that has been needed for decades: a leftist foreign policy with a clear moral basis Foreign policy, for leftists, used to be relatively simple. They were for the breakdown of capitalism and its replacement with a centrally planned economy. They were for the workers against the moneyed interests and for colonized peoples against imperial (Western) powers. But these easy substitutes for thought are becoming increasingly difficult. Neo-liberal capitalism is triumphant, and the workers’ movement is in radical decline. National liberation movements have produced new oppressions. A reflexive anti-imperialist politics can turn leftists into apologists for morally abhorrent groups. In Michael Walzer’s view, the left can no longer (in fact, could never) take automatic positions but must proceed from clearly articulated moral principles. In this book, adapted from essays published in Dissent, Walzer asks how leftists should think about the international scene—about humanitarian intervention and world government, about global inequality and religious extremism—in light of a coherent set of underlying political values.

Left Transnationalism

Left Transnationalism
Author: Oleksa Drachewych
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2020-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773559949

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In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).

India Unbound

India Unbound
Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2002-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0385720742

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India today is a vibrant free-market democracy, a nation well on its way to overcoming decades of widespread poverty. The nation’s rise is one of the great international stories of the late twentieth century, and in India Unbound the acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a sweeping economic history of India from independence to the new millennium. Das shows how India’s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through today. As the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, Das offers a unique insider’s perspective and he deftly interweaves memoir with history, creating a book that is at once vigorously analytical and vividly written. Impassioned, erudite, and eminently readable, India Unbound is a must for anyone interested in the global economy and its future.

India’s Grand Strategy

India’s Grand Strategy
Author: Kanti Bajpai
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2014-08-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317559614

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As India prepares to take its place in shaping the course of an ‘Asian century’, there are increasing debates about its ‘grand strategy’ and its role in a future world order. This timely and topical book presents a range of historical and contemporary interpretations and case studies on the theme. Drawing upon rich and diverse narratives that have informed India’s strategic discourse, security and foreign policy, it charts a new agenda for strategic thinking on postcolonial India from a non-Western perspective. Comprehensive and insightful, the work will prove indispensable to those in defence and strategic studies, foreign policy, political science, and modern Indian history. It will also interest policy-makers, think-tanks and diplomats.

India's Nuclear Debate

India's Nuclear Debate
Author: Priyanjali Malik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 131780984X

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Making the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party’s nuclear tests in 1998 its starting point, this book examines how opinion amongst India’s ‘attentive’ public shifted from supporting nuclear abstinence to accepting — and even feeling a need for — a more assertive policy, by examining the complexities of the debate in India on nuclear policy in the 1990s. The study seeks to account for the shift in opinion by looking at the parallel processes of how nuclear policy became an important part of the public discourse in India, and what it came to symbolise for the country’s intelligentsia during this decade. It argues that the pressure on New Delhi in the early 1990s to fall in line with the non-proliferation regime, magnified by India’s declining global influence at the time, caused the issue to cease being one of defence, making it a focus of nationalist pride instead. The country’s nuclear programme thus emerged as a test of its ability to withstand external compulsions, guaranteeing not so much the sanctity of its borders as a certain political idea of it — that of a modern, scientific and, most importantly, ‘sovereign’ state able to defend its policies and set its goals.

The Third World in the Global 1960s

The Third World in the Global 1960s
Author: Samantha Christiansen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2012-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857455745

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Decades after the massive student protest movements that consumed much of the world, the 1960s remain a significant subject of scholarly inquiry. While important work has been done regarding radical activism in the United States and Western Europe, events in what is today known as the Global South—Asia, Africa, and Latin America—have yet to receive the attention they deserve. This volume inserts the Third World into the study of the 1960s by examining the local and international articulations of youth protest in various geographical, social, and cultural arenas. Rejecting the notion that the Third World existed on the periphery, it situates the events of the 1960s in a more inclusive context, building a richer, more nuanced understanding of the era that better reflects the dynamism of the period.

When Crime Pays

When Crime Pays
Author: Milan Vaishnav
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300216203

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The first thorough study of the co-existence of crime and democratic processes in Indian politics In India, the world's largest democracy, the symbiotic relationship between crime and politics raises complex questions. For instance, how can free and fair democratic processes exist alongside rampant criminality? Why do political parties recruit candidates with reputations for wrongdoing? Why are one-third of state and national legislators elected--and often re-elected--in spite of criminal charges pending against them? In this eye-opening study, political scientist Milan Vaishnav mines a rich array of sources, including fieldwork on political campaigns and interviews with candidates, party workers, and voters, large surveys, and an original database on politicians' backgrounds to offer the first comprehensive study of an issue that has implications for the study of democracy both within and beyond India's borders.