The Congress Party in Rajasthan: Political Integration and Institution Building in an Indian State

1973 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 620
Author(s):  
E. C. Moulton ◽  
Richard Sisson
Keyword(s):  
Political Integration ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Congress Party ◽  
Indian State

scholarly journals State-building and the Management of Diversity in India (Thirteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 425-447
Author(s):  
Corinne Lefèvre
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Institutional Diversity ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Institutional Perspective ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Solid Substratum ◽  
Ideological Dimension

How has political diversity—and, first of all, administrative and institutional diversity—been handled within the succeeding polities that prevailed in the Indian subcontinent from 1200 to 1700? In order to provide the non-specialist reader with a first insight into this complex question, the present article opens with a presentation of the sources available for reconstructing the administrative organisation and functioning of medieval and early modern Indian polities. Despite the fragmentary and biased nature of the information they provide, these sources (mainly epigraphic materials and narrative texts) have often been elevated to the rank of a solid substratum that allowed for the development of highly sophisticated yet antagonistic analyses of both the nature and the working of the Indian state in pre-British times. Besides a strong focus on the question of centralisation, most of these analyses have also long been marred by an implicit but ever-present Western point of comparison. From the middle of the 1980s, however, a number of voices have argued in favour of an alternative approach that would value both the processual character of state- and institution-building and its ideological dimension while stressing at the same time the need to take into account the diversity of the forms assumed by this process in the various regions that came to constitute a given polity and to pay more attention to the wide range of actors involved in state-formation and to the latter’s political cultures. Taking its cue from these non-aligned or revisionist studies, as they are often termed, the last part of the essay shifts from the purely institutional perspective presiding over the first and largely historiographical section and proposes to examine instead the politics of diversity that were theorised and implemented by pre-colonial South Asian dynasties as well as the way these politics were perceived and handled by those who bore their brunt most directly, that is to say the subordinate functional elites.

The Scholars' Rebellion: Educational Interests and Agitational Politics in Gujarat

1977 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn E. Jones ◽  
Rodney W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Political ◽  
Food Scarcity ◽  
Congress Party ◽  
Chief Minister ◽  
Political Agitation ◽  
Indian State ◽  
National Emergency

Severe urban rioting, the accompaniment of an organized political agitation known as the Nav Nirman (Reconstruction) movement, gripped the Indian state of Gujarat in early 1974, bringing to a violent climax social and political discontents from beneath a surface tranquility. Costly in lives and property and damaging to the political fabric of Gujarat, the ten-week-long agitation subsided only after winning two political objectives: first, the expulsion of the Chief Minister and imposition of President's Rule; and second, dissolution of the Gujarat legislative assembly. Resisted by the central government, the overthrow in Gujarat was an embarrassment to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and was a factor leading to the declaration of national emergency in June 1975. Gujarat's recent troubles have a background in the 1969 national split of the Congress party, but the immediate issues of Nav Nirman were food scarcity, rising prices, corruption in governing circles, and grievances in the educational system. These issues were seized upon by college students, who sparked the riots and who thereafter provided the most visible leadership of the movement.

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