Edited by Manas Ray (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: New. The precarity of democratic order in contemporary times needs no underlining. Crisis of Liberal Deliberation addresses this issue from a novel perspective. Through what magic, queries this volume, the Indian democratic state is even surviving as a political formation. For how long will democratic order remain durable despite its myriad loopholes, glaring fault-lines, and thousand histories of disappointment? Curiously, as more democratic states come under the sway of violence, the demand for democracy has become more intense among people. Unveiling this apparent paradox from their respective fields of specialization, the contributors of this volume analyse a vast range of facets of contemporary Indian democracy. The result is a glasnost of ideas, views and debates relating to the urgency of this deliberation. Forging these threads in the Introduction, Manas Ray engages with the theoretical underpinnings of the crisis of democratic deliberation. A large spread of topics follows, clubbed under several rubrics including historical legacy, disturbing trends, economic development since liberalization, biopolitcal dimensions such as demography and processes of living and finally, the contesting visions of democracy in the regions.

Hardcover. Condition: New. Collections on Indian democracy are plentiful. Yet rarely do they question the impact of the on-going democratic mobilizations on the mundane, everyday lives of ordinary citizens and the world they see around them. Borrowing insights from new research in cultural studies, contemporary literary theory, visual politics, bio-politics, meteorology, to cite a few, State of Democracy in India covers the ground cast aside by existing narratives and analyses of Indian democracy. Pivoted on the experiences of the people and not necessarily the institutions of governance, this collection examines a vast array of markers of democracy under the rubrics of populism, disaster migration, caste contestations, new developments in feminism, and the act of culture. Towards the end of the volume, a meditation on the meaning of writing in COVID-19 induced precarity reflects on the individual and social experiences of living through the pandemic. The guiding principle of the contributions in this volume is that democracy is not merely a psephological number game of vote sharing and swings but encompasses worldviews, touching every department of life, collective and individual. This innovative collection reconfigures our vision of democracy as a force-field of interests and new imaginations, full of possibilities and yet fraught with deep fissures and contestations of views and practices.