How India's COVID-19 lockdown is creating an unprecedented humanitarian disaster With the advent of COVID-19, India’s rulers imposed the world’s most stringent lockdown on an already depressed economy, dealing a body blow to the majority of India’s billion-plus population. Yet the Indian government’s spending to cushion the lockdown’s economic impact ranked among the world’s lowest in GDP terms, resulting in unprecedented unemployment and hardship. Crisis and Predation shows how this tight-fistedness stems from the fact that global financial interests oppose any sizable expansion of public spending by India, and that Indian rulers readily adhere to their guidance. The authors reveal that global investors and a handful of top Indian corporate groups actually benefit from the resulting demand depression: armed with funds, they are picking up valuable assets at distress prices. Meanwhile, under the banner of reviving private investment, India’s rulers have planned giant privatizations, and drastically revised laws concerning industrial labor, the peasantry, and the environment—in favor of large capital. And yet, this book contends, India could defy the pressures of global finance in order to address the basic needs of its people. But this would require shedding reliance on foreign capital flows, and taking a course of democratic national development. This, then, is a pursuit, not for India’s ruling classes, but a course of struggle for India's people.

Offers a fresh and challenging interpretation of India's relationship with the United States over six decades, revealing the complex and distinctive manner in which New Delhi has pursued its interests.

The earliest accounts of the Sino-Indian boundary dispute cast India as the victim of Chinese betrayal and expansionism, but a more favorable image of China vis-a-vis India has appeared since the 1970s. Since then, China has been portrayed as the victim of India's self-righteous intransigence, with the 1962 India-China war occurring because China was provoked into practicing a justifiable form of realpolitik. These two seemingly irreconcilable academic schools of thought still exist. In this case study of India's decision-making between the years of 1959 and 1963, the critical first years of its border conflict with China, Steven A. Hoffmann takes an important step in reconciling the conflicting views of the crisis and of the ascribed reasons for the war that ensued in 1962. Drawing on interviews with Indian officials, military officers, and political leaders and on memoirs and other sources gathered during concentrated research in India, England, and North America between 1983 and 1986, the author provides previously unknown material on the perceptions and realities of Indian decision making. A model for international crisis behavior, as proposed by Michael Brecher, is used to help establish a balanced treatment of information and offer insights into such questions as why India and China both failed to understand one another's frontier psychologies and strategies, and why the Nehru government did not succeed in managing the conflict. This richly detailed and carefully researched approach is invaluable in this time when India and China are once again exploring ways to establish a solid relationship. 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.

In this timely, nuanced collection, twenty leading cultural theorists assess the contradictory ideals, policies, and practices of secularism in India.

Water: The Looming Crisis in India analyzes the key issues in developing national freshwater policies for the mainland countries of the South Asian sub-continent. Ray suggests that freshwater policy must cover all aspects of physical environment and human life, by noting that food and drought management are parts of freshwater policy and acknowledging that water is a scarce natural resource and has economic value. He calls for the development of basin-wide policies to minimize conflicts within riparian countries, as well as a freshwater policy baseline to minimize internal conflicts on water sharing arrangements. By pointing out the need for full participation of all stakeholders in developing a baseline policy including people displaced by the construction of large dams, Ray suggests a new system in which riparian countries are guaranteed that no water-related project proceeds without a transparently developed environmental impact assessment and evaluation of alternative options.

'India and the Global Financial Crisis' offers a collection of key speeches delivered by Reddy during his tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and provides insights into the challenges facing the management of India's calibrated integration within the global economy.