International Relations and Governance Studies

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This chapter explores how the intermediate regime, or the state along with its ideological and functional allies, imposes its own articulation of development on agriculture. It discusses how agriculture as a sector of the economy and a way of life for over a quarter of the population and half the workforce of the world’s largest democracy, is shaped by the power and persistence of a relatively small faction of the population. The chapter explains the evolution of Indian agriculture in three phases of development articulation, and new relationships between the state and agriculture. The governance of agriculture is dictated by the development norms of the intermediate regime. For the regime, agriculture has been fundamental to all development (phase 1), the driver of modernisation for development (phase 2), and is now a game of contending alternatives (phase 3). The persistence of technologies, investment patterns and centralised administration is best illustrated in the state’s understanding of and solutions for rainfed agriculture. © 2016, 2018 selection and editorial matter, Knut A. Jacobsen.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India

Agriculture and the development burden

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a relatively recent entrant in the burgeoning lexicon of contemporary international relations. It was only in 2001 that the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) articulated and developed the idea of R2P. The attempt wasmade consciously to depart from the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and its prior instantiations which had lent it a fairly dubious international reputation. As a follow-up to the 2001 report assembled by Gareth Evans, Mohamed Sahnoun and their team, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan in 2004 inaugurated a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. This latter effort culminated in the Report titled AMore SecureWorld:Our SharedResponsibility.1TheR2Pwas characterised here as an ‘emerging norm’. Subsequently, in 2005 at the UN General Assembly World Summit, the R2P was invoked again in the context of ‘helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out’. There are several important facets pertaining to the evolution of R2P and where we stand currently in relation to both the doctrine and its applicability. First, it is important not to equate R2P with ‘formal international law’. Second, the phraseology of an ‘emerging norm’ implies that it is ‘a norm situated in limbo halfway between existence and non-existence’. Third, in terms of the broader politics surrounding R2P, notwithstanding claims to impartial applicability, I argue that there is sufficient reason to be wary of the ‘fiction of neutrality’. Fourth, it is apparent that there exist unresolved grey areas both in doctrinal and operational terms as far as R2P is concerned and the attendant ‘ambiguity’ undermines its overall reputation. Finally, I concur with the view that R2P has not been able to circumvent in any fashion the more generic ‘paternalism’ of the powerful that has long characterised the dominant framings of contemporary international relations practice. It has been rather unsuccessful in assuaging deeper and well-founded historical suspicions, especially among decolonised states, about the motivations of major Western powers in the international system. Arguably, then, R2P represents ‘old wine in a new bottle’, cosmetic in its effort to remedy both the legacy and perils of humanitarian intervention. © Cambridge University Press 2015.

Theorising the Responsibility to Protect

Colonialism and the responsibility to protect

World University root node

Governing Agricultural Sustainability: Global Lessons from GM Crops

An analysis of the GM crop debate in India

The chapter explores India’s development paradox of economic growth with massive rural poverty and unemployment, using the innovation systems framework as a lens. The innovation systems framework is being promoted in Indian economic decision-making. The framework tells us that innovation happens only when both technological and institutional changes occur. Yet, reconciliation between the narrow S&T-based and broader institutional learning-based approach to innovation has been difficult due to limited appreciation of the stranglehold of institutions over the components of the national innovation system (NIS). This chapter enquires how institutions, the overarching rules or norms that shape economic decisions, were considered in India’s production investments and technological capacities in agriculture and industry, sectors critical to production and consumption opportunities for India’s massive rural population. Norms of surplus extraction from modern technology based agriculture, and of technologically determined linkages between industries govern India’s centralized technological capacities and techno-centric production investments. Based on an understanding of the institutional realities of the economy, India’s NIS should address the aggregate demand constraint and limited opportunities for labour-intensive industrialization, in order to ensure employment and incomes for the rural poor, instead of focusing exclusively on high-tech-based export markets. © Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) 2015.

Emerging Economies: Food and Energy Security, and Technology and Innovation

Technological and institutional change: India’s development trajectory in an innovation systems framework

This dictionary provides a comprehensive and ready guide to the key concepts, issues, persons and technologies related to the nuclear programmes of India and Pakistan and other South Asian states. This will serve as a useful reference especially as the nuclear issue continues to be an important domestic and international policy concern.

Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and concepts

India's Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases

Securing India: Gandhian intuitions

This article critically examines indigenism in the field of International Relations (IR) in India. Indigenism involves a claim that a select corpus of resources from early India—‘indigenous historical knowledge'— is relevant for understanding contemporary India's politics and international relations. It is also projected as a basis for reimagining IR in India. Contesting these claims, the article outlines the ahistorical and politically problematic nature of indigenism. It also argues that the appeal of indigenism reveals a predicament of imaginative capacity that marks the scholarship concerned with reimagining IR in India: despite considerable interest in lessening the dependence on the architecture of IR of the West, there is less clarity about the shape and substance of new scholarly frameworks. The enthusiasm for reimagining IR is not, as yet, matched by very substantive pathways to doing it. This too, inadvertently, encourages indigenism. The article concludes by arguing that closely studying the political modernization of South Asia and its implications for international relations of India and the region can resolve this predicament.

Fulltext

Studies in Indian Politics

Indigenism in contemporary IR discourses in India: A critique

The case of the local people's grievance against the mining of iron ore for the Bhilai steel plant from Rowghat in the reserved forest area of Ch hat ti sga rh, a Fifth Schedule Area, is just one more example of the infringement of constitutional rights and guarantees. It also portends what is to come with the polity poised to take a decisive right-wing turn.

Economic and Political Weekly

Democracy and its inconvenient questions

This text chronicles the 1971 war in South Asia by reconstituting the memories of those on opposing sides of the conflict. The book challenges assumptions about the nature of conflict and exposes the ways in which the 1971 conflict is still playing out in the region. Introduction: Memories in conflict – Call to arms : Bengali nationalist rebellion – Military inaction : power without responsibility – Military action : "Operation Searchlight" in Dhaka – Uncivil war : mobs, mutinies and madness – Village of widows : "securing" the countryside – Hounding of Hindus : the politics of minority persecution – Hit and run : sabotage and retribution – Fratricide : death squads at war's end – Words and numbers : memories and monstrous fables – Appendix 1: Bibliographical note – Appendix 2: List of interviewees.

Islam and Civilisational Renewal

Sarmila Bose , Dead Reckoning : Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War

Its ubiquity notwithstanding, contemporary India's ‘great power' discourse does not appear to reflect the concerns of the Indian multitude. Recognizing this condition and approaching the discourse as a political phenomenon that has real effects, this article makes the following suggestions. First, India's great power discourse comes into existence through a pedagogical project wherein the discourse's core assumptions about India's role and purpose in world affairs appear uncritically emulated from the historical experience of other great powers, primarily the United States. Second, even though the discourse is rooted in a historical experience external to the nation, it would be misleading to term the discourse as a ‘wholly emulated' one. The agential participation of at least some Indian nationals in carrying out the emulation makes it a ‘more emulated and less national' discourse. Third, though it is ‘more emulated and less national,' the project normalizes the discourse by erasing the signs of its emulation; so that it can be passed off as a ‘wholly national' discourse. This allows the discourse to appropriate the entire imaginative space of the Indian nation and, therefore, of India's international relations. Fourth, once aware of these workings of the pedagogical project, we can wonder how a democratic—that is, a ‘more national and less emulated'—idea of India's role and purpose in world affairs could look like.