Power and Contestation: India since 1989 (Global History of the Present) - Softcover

Menon, Nivedita; Nigam, Aditya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842778153 ISBN 13: 9781842778159

Publisher: Zed Books, 2007

Synopsis

This book is the ideal introduction to India's complex internal histories and external power relations since 1989, a date which marks the unraveling of India's post-independence "Nehruvian Consensus" around the idea of a self-reliant modern, secular state. While global economic integration has led to conflict between the state and dispossessed people, it has also enabled new spaces for political assertion, such as around sexuality. Older challenges to the state continue in Kashmir and the North-East, while Maoist insurgency has deepened its bases. In a world of American Empire, India as a nuclear power has abandoned non-alignment, a shift that is contested by voices within. Power and Contestation shows that the turbulence and turmoil of this period are signs of India's continued vibrancy and democracy.

About this title

About the Author:

Nivedita Menon is Reader in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi. Aditya Nigam is currently a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.

Review:

"This is a sophisticated yet accessible survey of contemporary Indian politics and society. It will be an excellent textbook and a handy reference work to a complex field of study." -- Faisal Devji, New School University

"This book approaches the daunting task of analyzing the contradictory, diverse, and divergent history of India since 1989 with uncommon intelligence. To its great merit, Power and Contestation addresses the multiple trends in Indian politics while also offering a coherent and sustained argument about the principal driving forces. To manage to accomplish all this while maintaining a perspective at once local and global is no mean feat." -- Gyan Prakash, Princeton University

"Menon and Nigam provide us a much-needed, readily accessible, deeply informed, and critically sophisticated insiders’ analysis of political reality in India during its rapid rise to global stardom as a neo-liberal icon of economic success." --- David Ludden, New York University

About this edition

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1842778153
• ISBN 13: 9781842778159
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 219