Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India

This volume explores the transition from colonial to constitutional rule in India, and the various configurations of power and legitimacies that emerged from it. It focuses on the developmental structures and paradigms that provided the circumstances for this transition, and the establishment of the post-colonial state. Different articles interrogate the idea of liberal constitutionalism, the spaces it provides for rights and claims, the assumptions it makes about citizenship and its attendant duties, and the assumptions it further makes about what it can, or has to, become in the particular situation of India. The book locates these questions in the reconfiguration of society, power, and the economy since the shift in the identity of the state after Independence, and deals with issues of constitution-making in a historical and political setting and its outcomes, especially the centrality of law and legalisms, in shaping civil society. With a companion volume on the transition to a constitutional form of governance and the consequent moulding of the citizens, this book emphasises continuity and change in the context of the movement from the colonial to the constitutional order. It will be of interest to those in politics, history, South Asian studies, policy studies, and sociology.

Ranabir Samaddar is Director, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata. Suhit K. Sen is Senior Researcher, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata.

Acknowledgements. Introduction Part I. The Juridical-Political Route to Norms of Governance 1. Two Constitutional Tasks: Setting up the Indian State and the Indian Government Ranabir Samaddar 2. The 'Nehruvian' State, Developmental Imagination, Nationalism and the Government Benjamin Zachariah 3. The Political Constitution of India: Party and Government, 1946-57 Suhit K. Sen Part II. Paradigms of Inequality, Pathways to Entitlement 4. Imaginations and Manifestos of the Political Parties on Ideals of Developmental Governance Ashutosh Kumar 5. Who will be Able to Access the Provisions of Liberty? Ability, Disability, and the Interrogation of Norms Kalpana Kannabiran 6. Whose Security, Whose Development? Lessons from Campaigns against Female Infanticide in Tamil Nadu Swarna Rajagopalan 7. Rules of Governance in Developing Rural India Ratan Khasnabis. Bibliography. About the Editors. Notes on Contributors. Index