This new report specifically anticipates risks to and from the major social media platforms in the 2024 elections, continuing CAP’s work to promote election integrity online and ensure free and fair elections globally. The report’s recommendations incorporate learnings from past elections and introduce new ideas to encourage technology platforms to safeguard democratic processes and mitigate election threats. In a world without standardized global social media regulation, ensuring elections are safe, accessible, and protected online and offline will require key actions to be taken ahead of any votes being cast—both in 2024 and beyond.
Topic:
Politics, Science and Technology, Elections, Democracy, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:
Europe, India, Global Focus, and United States of America
Historical considerations of modern South Asia have been marked by a predisposition towards political, material and socio-cultural analyses. Seldom has the remit of ideas as autonomous objects taken centre stage in the historiography of modern South Asia. Shruti Kapila’s new book Violent Fraternityveers off this established trajectory and breaks new ground by looking at ideas as the wellspring of political innovation and fundamental to the republication foundations of the nations of India and Pakistan during what she terms the ‘Indian age’. A work of remarkable scope that defies easy summarisation, the premise of Violent Fraternity is that violence became fraternal in 20th-century India: it was the intimate kin rather than the colonial other that became the object of unprecedented violence. “Violence, fraternity and sovereignty,” Kapila writes, “made up an intimate, deadly and highly consequential triangle of concepts that produced what has been termed here the Indian Age” (p.4)
India’s founding fathers, who as opposed to the conventional figure of the detached scholar-philosopher were also actively straddling echelons of the political world, repeatedly engaged with the question of how to forge life with others in an intimate context rife with hatred and violence. In seeking these answers, they authored a new canon of political thought that defied “fidelity to any given ideology, whether it be liberalism, Marxism or communism”. As Kapila demonstrates, global political thought of the Indian age departed from its western counterpart by reconceptualising the place and potential of violence. In the western canon, the state has been the natural habitus of violence. However, Indian political thinkers like Tilak and Gandhi dissociated violence from the orbit of state, and in a radical rewriting of established political vocabularies, posited violence as an individual capacity, thereby reconceptualising the notion of sovereignty and summoning a subject-centred political horizon.
Dr. Shruti Kapila is an Associate Professor of Indian History and Global Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and presently the Co-Director of the Global Humanities Initiative. Her research centres on modern and contemporary India and on global political thought in the twentieth century. In her recent book Violent Fraternity and in her earlier work on intellectual history of modern India, Dr. Kapila has pushed the boundaries of the field beyond its conventional focus on the West. In our interview, we spoke about modern India’s founding fathers and their intellectual contributions, writing global intellectual histories of the non-west, the future of the field of global intellectual history and Dr. Kapila’s engagements beyond her illustrious academic career.
Topic:
Politics, History, Intellectual History, and Violence
During the first wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala, a state in southern India,
successfully managed to contain the pandemic. As a result, the Kerala model of managing the
COVID-19 pandemic was celebrated as a success across the globe. However, at the time of writing,
it looks like the celebrations were a bit premature and the failure to contain the spurt in COVID19 infections in the state in a second wave also ascertains this fact. While the rest of India recovered
from the second wave of COVID-19 infections, Kerala struggled to bring the pandemic under
control. This paper examines the state capacity in terms of health infrastructure before and during
the pandemic. The paper also investigates the reasons behind the unravelling of the Kerala model
of pandemic management. We analyse the role and impact of clientelism and political hegemony
of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala over COVID-19 mitigation strategies. We also
investigate how Kerala’s effective pandemic response created a sort of performance legitimacy for
the LDF government.
Topic:
Politics, Hegemony, State, Pandemic, COVID-19, and Clientelism
Chandan Jain, Shagun Kashyap, Rahul Lahoti, and Soham Sahoo
Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality,
the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education
qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical
to understand the role of politicians’ education in their performance. We investigate the impact of
electing an educated politician on economic development in the politician’s constituency in India.
We use constituency-level panel data on the intensity of night-time lights to measure economic
activity. Our identification strategy is based on a regression discontinuity design that exploits quasirandom outcomes of close elections between educated and less-educated politicians. We find that
narrowly electing a graduate leader, as compared to a non-graduate leader, in the state assembly
constituency increases the growth rate of night-time lights by about three percentage points in the
constituency. As pathways, we find that graduate leaders improve the provision of roads,
electricity, and power; however, they do not significantly impact the overall provision of public
goods. In comparison with findings from other studies in the literature, our result suggests that
the impact of formal education of the leader is weaker than the leader’s other characteristics, such
as gender or criminality.
Political polarization is a process of simplifying politics by presenting either-or-choices to the public. In many cases, polarization damages democracy by dividing the electorate into two mutually mistrustful camps. Political polarization is mainly used by political elites, including government and party leaders, as a strategy to mobilize their supporters and concentrate their power. Based on the literature of political polarization, EAI Senior Fellow Sook Jong Lee (professor at Sungkyunkwan University) examines four Asian case countries (India, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand). The author notes that characteristics of political polarization differ from country to country, which is evidenced through the division of political ideology during various Thai military coups and the separation between the Hindu and Muslim communities in India. She also warns against the possible aftermaths of political polarization such as the breakdown or erosion of democracy.
Topic:
Politics, Democracy, Polarization, and Democratic Backsliding
Political Geography:
India, Asia, South Korea, Philippines, and Thailand
In the first phase of the Uttar Pradesh elections of 2022, 58 assembly constituencies (ACs) will go to the polls. Polling will take place on 10 February, 2022. In this note, we first analyze and provide social context for the historical electoral trends across these 58 assembly constituencies. Second, in collaboration with Datalok, we provide a detailed analysis of polling booths from the 2017 state election. We show how the consolidation among Hindu voters in the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots drastically shifted electoral outcomes in the region, and we describe how current politics may affect electoral outcomes in the 2022 election.
Department of Political Science, University of the Punjab
Abstract:
When Muslim Leaders of the Subcontinent of India were trying to create a different
independent state for Muslims, the Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah repeatedly used
the phrase “Separate state for the Minorities of India”. He demanded a state where all types
of minorities could live freely according to their religious teachings and norms. These
demands were very pleasing for all types of religious minorities of the Subcontinent, so few
of them supported the idea of Pakistan where anyone could live freely. The Christian
community supported the idea of Pakistan and made efforts to become part of it. There are
different speeches of Quaid-e-Azam that consist of praises of Christian leaders who were
helping the Muslim leadership. Despite the fact that Pakistan’s Objective Resolution and
Constitution of 1956 and 1962 gave equal rights to every citizen and religious liberty to
minorities, the Objective Resolution and Constitution of 1956 and 1962 are the most
condemned document which made Pakistan a theocracy. After liberty and freedom, political
rights are the most important rights for any person. This paper will try to find out the answer
to the question of how objective resolution, Constitution of 1956 and 1962 dealt with the
minority rights and their political rights. For this purpose in-depth study of all three
documents occurred along with different articles, news, research reports and books.
Topic:
Islam, Politics, Minorities, History, Christianity, and Hinduism
The COVID-19 pandemic is a strategic shock, and its almost immediate, damaging effects on the global economy constitute a secondary disruption to global order. Additional secondary strategic shocks (e.g., in the developing world) are looming. Together, these developments pose arguably the greatest threat to the global order since World War II. In the aftermath of that conflict, the United States and its allies established a rules-based international system that has guaranteed freedom, peace, and prosperity for decades. If the United States and its allies do not act effectively, the pandemic could upend this order. This issue brief considers the current state of the pandemic and how it has strained the global rules-based order over the past few months. First, it considers the origins of the novel coronavirus and how it spread around the world. Next, it examines how COVID-19 has exacerbated or created pressure points in the global order, highlights uncertainties ahead, and provides recommendations to the United States and its partners for shaping the post-COVID-19 world.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, NATO, Diplomacy, Politics, European Union, Economy, Business, Coronavirus, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Russia, China, South Asia, Eurasia, India, Taiwan, Asia, North America, Korea, United States of America, and Indo-Pacific
Political polarization is growing in South and Southeast Asia—one part of a troubling global trend. From long-established democracies like India to newer ones like Indonesia, deep-seated sociopolitical divisions have become increasingly inflamed in recent years, fueling democratic erosion and societal discord. New political and economic strains caused by the coronavirus pandemic are only reinforcing this worrisome trend.
This report focuses on six key countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Behind the tremendous diversity of these cases lie illuminating commonalities, alongside revealing differences, in the roots, trajectories, drivers, and consequences of polarization, as well as in the attempted remedies different actors have pursued.
Topic:
Politics, Governance, Culture, Reform, Democracy, Polarization, and Society
Political Geography:
South Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Southeast Asia
This paper provides insights into the relationship between language and politically relevant aspects of culture in India and China which are as follows: attitude toward revolution and tradition, the domination of politics over religion or vice versa, and a concern for the liberty of the individual. The paper introduces a novel approach to the comparative study of civilizations by advancing the political-linguistic explanation. In so doing, it combines Hajime Nakamura’s hypothesis of the strict connection between language and culture (understood as a way of thinking) with Samuel P. Huntington’s emphasis on the impact of cultural differences on the political dimension of society – so that our explanatory model can be expressed as follows: language→culture→politics. As far as language is concerned, the focus is on the basic structure of Sanskrit and Chinese; besides, special attention is given to Indian and Chinese philosophies of language. Culturally, the most relevant schools of Hindu philosophy may be called “ultraconservative” since they tend to ground unchanging meaning firmly in metaphysics and rely on the supreme authority of ancient religious texts. In contrast, the Chinese typically considered language a social mechanism for shaping our behavior (so the relation of language and society is the most crucial); they also expressed clearly divergent views on naming. In short, at least four distinctive perspectives are essential: (1) conservative Confucianism, (2) anti-traditional and highly authoritarian Legalism, (3) egalitarian and linguistically skeptical Laozian Daoism, (4) nonconformist and proto-libertarian Zhuangzian Daoism.
Topic:
Politics, Culture, Philosophy, Language, and Identity
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is now more than seven years old, projecting ever-increasing influence throughout the world while stimulating growing concerns about China’s motives and behavior. This large-scale and multifaceted program benefits China, and not only economically, but in the politico-security sense. In response, India has stuck to its stance of distancing itself from the BRI while Japan has evolved past its initial rejection to selectively engage with the initiative. Tracing Chinese motives and conduct, along with the Indian and Japanese responses, back to the respective countries’ long-existing schools of strategic thought enables us to better decode current affairs and predict future dynamics.
Topic:
Security, Politics, Natural Resources, Infrastructure, Economy, and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
Many political analysts are of the view that the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh is one of the most controversial bifurcations of a State in recent history. After all, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh were bifurcated in the year 2000. There were problems in those States also, but none of the acrimony and bitterness that was seen in Andhra Pradesh. What really went wrong in Andhra Pradesh? Could it have been done differently? Are there any lessons that can be learnt? This paper has been prepared by a civil servant who was directly involved in the process of bifurcation as the Chairperson of the Expert Committee for recommending the bifurcation of the State Public Sector Units. In the process, the Expert Committee members were exposed to aspects of the bifurcation of State Government assets and liabilities as well. The issues have been divided into three categories: political, legislative and administrative.
Topic:
Government, Politics, Legislation, and Nation-State
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations concluded at the ASEAN Summit in Bangkok on November 4, 2019. Fifteen RCEP members, including the ten-ASEAN countries, and Australia, China, Japan, Korea and New Zealand, agreed to commence preparation of the legal text of the agreement for signing in 2020. India was the only member to opt out, citing significant unresolved outstanding issues.
India’s decision was surprising as it actively participated in the negotiations that lasted for 29 rounds and went on for more than six years since beginning in 2013. Domestic pressures forced Prime Minister Modi to withdraw India from RCEP at the last minute. It also points to disengagement becoming the prominent character of India’s trade policy as domestic protectionist interests successfully undermine outward-oriented economic visions.
Topic:
Politics, Treaties and Agreements, Economy, Trade, and ASEAN
Elected three times to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament,
and nominated by the President to Rajya Sabha, the upper house, for a further six
years, Aiyar has served for 21 years in the Indian Parliament, been conferred the
Outstanding Parliamentarian Award (2006), and been a Cabinet Minister for five
years (2004-09). He has authored seven books, including Confession of a Secular
Fundamentalist, and edited the three volumes of Rajiv Gandhi’s India.
Topic:
Politics, Religion, Domestic Politics, and Secularism
Richard Youngs, Gareth Fowler, Arthur Larok, Pawel Marczewski, Vijayan Mj, Ghia Nodia, Natalia Shapoavlova, Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, Marisa Von Bülow, and Özge Zihnioğlu
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
As the domain of civil society burgeoned in the 1990s and early 2000s—a crucial component of the global spread of democracy in the developing and postcommunist worlds—many transnational and domestic actors involved in building and supporting this expanding civil society assumed that the sector was naturally animated by organizations mobilizing for progressive causes. Some organizations focused on the needs of underrepresented groups, such as women’s empowerment, inclusion of minorities, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights; others addressed broader societal issues such as economic justice, social welfare, and antipoverty concerns. In many countries, the term “civil society” came to be associated with a relatively bounded set of organizations associated with a common agenda, one separate from or even actively opposed by conservative political forces.
However, in the past ten years, this assumption and outlook are proving increasingly incorrect. In many countries in the developing and postcommunist worlds, as well as in long-established Western democracies, conservative forms of civic activism have been multiplying and gaining traction. In some cases, new conservative civic movements and groups are closely associated with illiberal political actors and appear to be an integral part of the well-chronicled global pushback against Western liberal democratic norms. In other cases, the political alliances and implications of conservative civil society are less clear. In almost all cases—other than perhaps that of the United States, where the rise of conservative activism has been the subject of considerable study—this rising world of conservative civil society has been little studied and often overlooked.
This report seeks to correct this oversight and to probe more deeply into the rise of conservative civil society around the world. It does so under the rubric of Carnegie’s Civic Research Network project, an initiative that aims to explore new types of civic activism and examine the extent to which these activists and associations are redrawing the contours of global civil society. The emerging role and prominence of conservative activism is one such change to civil society that merits comparative examination. Taken as a whole, the report asks what conservative civic activism portends for global civil society. Its aim is not primarily to pass judgment on whether conservative civil society is a good or bad thing—although the contributing authors obviously have criticisms to make. Rather, it seeks mainly to understand more fully what this trend entails. Much has been written and said about anticapitalist, human rights, and global justice civil society campaigns and protests. Similar analytical depth is required in the study of conservative civil society.
The report redresses the lack of analytical attention paid to the current rise of conservative civil society by offering examples of such movements and the issues that drive them. The authors examine the common traits that conservative groups share and the issues that divide them. They look at the kind of members that these groups attract and the tactics and tools they employ. And they ask how effective the emerging conservative civil society has been in reshaping the political agenda.
Topic:
Civil Society, Politics, Political Activism, and Conservatism
Political Geography:
Uganda, Africa, Europe, South Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, Caucasus, Middle East, India, Poland, Brazil, South America, Georgia, North America, Thailand, Southeast Asia, and United States of America
The United States and India
relationship has changed from offense
to more extensive engagement since 2004. With
mutual interest and potential of both, the US and India relationship has matured into a strategic partnership through mutual atomic cooperation. This paper investigates the cost and advantage of the strategic partnership of India and the US and the effect on the South Asian balance of power in the backdrop of PakUS relationships. It additionally concentrates on the security structure of the neighborhood, and challenges for the US to keep up strategic partnerships with the opponents India and Pakistan
Politics, News Analysis, Forecast, and Political stability
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Mongolia, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Australia, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Laos, Myanmar, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji
Politics, News Analysis, Forecast, and Political stability
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Mongolia, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Australia, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Laos, Myanmar, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji
After 22 years in power, the BJP is feeling the heat this year in Gujarat's election campaign. This paper analyses the reasons for this sudden frustration with the BJP – with a particular focus on caste mobilisation, urban-rural division, and emerging class politics in Gujarat.
Topic:
Politics, Urbanization, Elections, Class, Rural, and Caste
India is the youngest country amongst the BRICS. It is estimated that by 2020 the working age population in India would be about 592 million, second to that of China’s (776 million). Theorised in terms of the ‘youth bulge’ or ‘demographic dividend’, this holds out prospects as well as challenges for a developing country like India. This note approaches the question of youth in contemporary urban India by shedding light on a variety of perspectives: the institutional structure and governance framework for young people in India, the involvement of and interest of young people in politics, employment-unemployment amongst youth, aspirations, and everyday politics of the youth. By considering both formal politics and political representations among youth as also more everyday forms of politics and aspirational dimensions of youth engagement, this note attempts to develop a holistic snapshot of contemporary urban youth.
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Politics, Employment, Youth, Urban, and Unemployment
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Japan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Mongolia, Taiwan, South Korea, North Korea, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Nepal, Australia, Timor-Leste, Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Laos, Myanmar, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji