This annual review of major events, issues, and trends in Indian affairs presents an authoritative and insightful assessment of India in 1986. Interpretive essays illuminate the causes and consequences of a tumultuous year, as leading specialists discuss Indian politics, economy, society, culture, and foreign relations. The contributors examine such important developments as the breakdown of the Punjab accord, the resurgence of militant communalism, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's faltering leadership, the dramatic heightening of Indo-Pakistan tensions, the growing resistance to economic reforms, and the impact of the video revolution on Indian culture. Filling an important gap in the literature on contemporary Indian affairs, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars of South Asia as well as for journalists, policymakers, businesspeople, and serious travelers who wish to understand current and future developments in India.

This book aims to bring to readers an understanding of important developments in Indian affairs in 1990. It analyzes the role of resurgent Hinduism in India's political and social order and looks at the economy, foreign relations, law and poverty.

In the mid-1990s, India established an economic reform programme, initiated and sustained by a skilled yet quiet political leadership. This text provides an analysis of India's recent foreign policy, especially towards the United States.

Presents the contemporary religious crisis in India, providing historical perspective and focusing on the crises in Punjab, Kashmir, and Ayodhya.

This compact, incisive study by a senior scholar explores two sources of violent conflict in India: religion and nationalism. Showing how the political aspects of religion and the ideological character of nationalism have led inexorably to struggle, Ainslie T. Embree argues that the tension between competing visions of the just society has determined the social and political life of India. In India, as elsewhere in the world at the end of the twentieth century, religions legitimized violence as people struggled for what they regarded as their legitimate claims upon the future. As examples of the tension between religious and nationalist visions of the good society, Embree examines two explosive cases—one involving Muslim-Hindu communal encounters, the other, the separatist movement of the Sikhs. Thought-provoking and searching, Utopias in Conflict should interest anyone concerned about fundamentalism, the problems of national integration, and politics and religion in the Third World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

As collective violence erupts in many regions throughout the world, we often hear media reports that link the outbreaks to age-old ethnic or religious hostilities, thereby freeing the state, its agents, and its political elites from responsibility. Paul Brass encourages us to look more closely at the issues of violence, ethnicity, and the state by focusing on specific instances of violence in their local contexts and questioning the prevailing interpretations of them. Through five case studies of both rural and urban public violence, including police-public confrontations and Hindu-Muslim riots, Brass shows how, out of many possible interpretations applicable to these incidents, government and the media select those that support existing relations of power in state and society. Adopting different modes--narrator, detective, and social scientist--Brass treats incidents of collective violence arising initially out of common occurrences such as a drunken brawl, the rape of a girl, and the theft of an idol, and demonstrates how some incidents remain localized while others are fit into broader frameworks of meaning, thereby becoming useful for upholders of dominant ideologies. Incessant talk about violence and its implications in these circumstances contributes to its persistence rather than its reduction. Such treatment serves in fact to mask the causes of violence, displace the victims from the center of attention, and divert society's gaze from those responsible for its endemic character. Brass explains how this process ultimately implicates everyone in the perpetuation of systems of violence.