Democracy and Globalization in India: Post-Cold War Discourse

Abstract

The post-Cold War project of globalization is changing the established notion of liberal democracy and local governance. The political autonomy of the liberal state is being increasingly compromised in favor of market forces and local governance more and more exposed to direct penetration by global and corporate power structures. This change has far-reaching implications for the future of democracy, particularly in the Third World. Aware of this challenge, new social movements in India, active at the grass roots of politics, are resisting global penetration of local communities, using new political spaces opened up by the retreat of the state from socioeconomic arenas. Through an inventive politics of struggle over issues concerning local communities and their empowerment, they articulate a vision of democracy as a creative political process, operative primarily at the local level. Their politics are addressed to establishing direct access and control of people over their immediate environment—economic, social, and cultural. To ensure that, they seek to transcend old dichotomies between state and society, global and local, political and social—and open up new possibilities for democracy in India.

Economic Globalization and Democracy: An Empirical Analysis

“…Thomas (1999) 5. Globalization pushes the Self (1993), Sheth (1995), authoritarian states to decentralize Roberts (1996) power.…”

Ethno‐Religious Identity and Sectarian Civil Society: A Case from India

“…With this decline of the 'Congress system' or 'Congress Raj', and along with it, what Kothari has called, the 'moderate state' (see Kothari 2001) 10 not only did Indian politics experience a severe metamorphosis but also the secular credentials of the of Congress Party were in question. It also resulted in a 'crisis of representation' in Indian society (Sheth 1991). 11 As a result, several lower caste/ethnic-based regional parties emerged in different parts of the country that led to a strong lower caste movement in north India (Varshney 2000;Chandra 2003;Jaffrelot 2003).…”

“…With a population of more than one billion, India has nearly 4,693 separate communities 1 and eight major religious faiths of the world (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism). There are twenty‐two official languages recognised by the Constitution and ‘over 1600 mother tongues listed in the 1971 Census of India, of which 33 were spoken by people numbering upward of 100,000 for each’ (Sheth 1995:25). According to the scholars of secular nationalist historiography, the British colonial rule, especially its ‘divide and rule’ policy, was responsible for Hindu–Muslim conflict and the breakdown of communal harmony in India 2 .…”

Social Movement, Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

“…In London, where quotas have proved more controversial (Milne, 1997; Squires, 1996), their entry into the local state happened at a time when local government had come under hostile scrutiny and pressure from national politicians. From the literature published, and confirmed in our empirical investigation, we know that this occurred in India (Kumari, 1993, p. 6; Singh et al , 1993, p. 100) and England (Brueghal and Kean, 1995, p. 150; Coote and Campbell, 1987, p. 258), with similar action , or movement , taking place in many other countries around the world (Basu, 1995, p. 15) in order to effect change from within the so‐called establishment — thereby linking awareness of gender inequality and disadvantage across time and space and rendering them translocal (Sheth, 1995; see also Ali et al , 2000, pp. 3–4).…”