Sudhir Kakar and the Socio‐Psychological Explanation of Hindu‐Muslim Communal Riots in India

Concentrated principally in four of twenty‐eight Indian states, there have been more than 33,000 Hindu‐Muslim riots since 1947. Scholars have differently explained communal violence. Some have argued that there are innate qualities in Indian society which encourage what Donald Horowitz calls “deadly ethnic riot”. Psychoanalysts have wondered if proneness to violence is ingrained in India's religion‐based culture. After assessing several existing explanatory paradigms, I examine the legitimacy of psychoanalysis and some selected aspects of other explanations, arguing that both the rational and psychological theories help explain Hindu‐Muslim conflict. I submit that Sudhir Kakar, who worked with Erik Erikson at Harvard and trained at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, unduly follows the elitist French social psychologist, Gustave Le Bon (1895), to present violent communities as undifferentiated masses. Specifically, Kakar's contention that Hindu males are psychologically socialized by confrontational religious values deserves close scrutiny. Methodologically, drawing on the postmodern thesis of the de‐centered subject and minimizing the significance of the master narrative, I conclude that primordial ancient hatred is not programmed in India, arguing that Kakar's insights do not speak to religion's truth, but do help us understand its manifestation and political psychology.     

Democracy and corruption: a complex relationship

We argue that an ‘electoral democracy’ is not sufficient to reduce corruption. Our contention is that the institutions associated with mature democracy are crucial to successfully deterring corrupt behaviour. At the core of our argument is the idea that with well-functioning institutions, the probability of detection and punishment is sufficiently high to deter most decision makers from choosing to act corruptly. The empirical evidence we present supports this idea. The nonlinearity of democracy variables is tested to confirm that an advanced stage of democracy is crucial for combating corruption.     

Enhancing Excellence: Socially Motivated Private Schools of Nepal

Social motivation can promote efficiency of public service delivery though its role in providing schooling is little understood. We provide both theoretical and empirical insights as to why not-for-profit private schools could enhance excellence in schooling, using Nepal as a case study. Results suggest that socially motivated trust schools outperform all other types of schools irrespective of whether we consider standardised test scores, absolute or relative to school expenditure per student. Results are robust and highlight that trust school’s social objective, coupled with private financing, ownership, and management that minimises its agency costs, is key to their value for money.     

Learning from the ethnic conflict and the internal displacement in Tripura in Northeast India

Conclusion The ethnic conflict between tribals and non-tribals compounded by the insurgency has disturbed the peace in the state for more than 20 years and also resulted in the internal displacement of thousands of people. In order to restore peace and to prevent future internal displacement it would be necessary to give to the tribals their due share in governance.     

An empirical approach to the optimal size of the civil service

This article attempts a purely empirical approach to the issue of optimal civil service size by looking for a systematic relationship between observed size and underlying explanators. The residuals from such a fitted relationship then serve as a first approximation to whether the government in question is overstaffed or not. The data are from Indian subnational states, which as members of a single federation, follow the same definitional conventions with respect to the civil service. The contribution of the article is methodological, and addresses an issue of central importance, since staff downsizing conditionalities attached to externally funded structural adjustment programmes are not analytically underpinned. The article also explores issues surrounding the composition of the civil service. There is no evidence that overstaffing, as determined from the residuals of the estimated specification, is the joint outcome along with staff composition, as proxied by mean salary, of job creation pressures at the lower salary scales. This suggests that correction of overstaffing might be possible without political opposition, while at the same time leaving unexplained the variation in staff composition across states. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.