Summary
Contents
Subject index
Maoism, democracy and globalization are three distinct but inseparable currents marking Indian politics today. They are distinct in terms of their goals, direction, and modalities of forging social, political, economic and even cultural change, while mutually influencing each other in the emergent political process. This book is an attempt to precisely map processes that are internal to each of these currents while exploring and identifying the moments of mutual influence, areas of conflict and mutually exclusive pulls they bring to the contemporary politics in India.
Middle Classes: Urban Activism and Anna Hazare's Soap Opera
Middle Classes: Urban Activism and Anna Hazare's Soap Opera
The developmental state during the Nehruvian era was dominated by three proprietary classes that included the industrial bourgeois, the rich farmer and the professionals (Bardhan 1984). The middle class that had already accumulated educational and cultural capital during the colonial period ‘came to play an inordinately large and influential role given the functional requirements of extended state management (both in terms of state-directed industrialisation and social reform) and the heightened political–ideological tasks of securing legitimacy in a socially diverse and fragmented liberal electoral democracy’ (Fernandes and Heller 2008: 150). The middle class since the time of independence claimed to represent ‘national interests’, which was carried out in the ...
- Loading...