Rethinking Federalism: Changing Power Relations Between the Center and the States

India's federalism during the last 50 years had two phases:three decades of centralized federalism followed by cooperativeand competitive federalism. Unitary features of India's Constitutionand planned development led to strong central dominance in thefirst phase, with the states in a subordinate position. Themomentum of impressive initial growth did not last. The late1970s saw a weakened Congress party, the emergence of coalitionpolitics, and a shift in the Center-states power balance. Growthfollowed liberalization and moves toward decentralization, butthis was accompanied by an accentuation of regional disparitiesand fiscal imbalances. A major factor in the negative resultshas been weaknesses in the intergovernmental transfer system.Desirable reforms, which maintain moves toward decentralizationand greater states' autonomy, are explored here.     

Political citizenship in Britain and Germany

A return to the theoretical wots of the concept of political citizenship justifies extending our attention to institutions outside the strictly political sphere. Social institutions in countries with corporatist histories, like Germany, remain important not only to the attainment of social citizenship but also to the exercise of political voice. Because the means of voice in Germany and Britain, or political citizenship, are the products of unique historical trajectories, the challenge of European integration is conceptually distinct for each. Thus, path dependent processes of democratisation may affect not just the likelihood but the normative significance of future choices.     

The political morality of convergence in contract

One of the most interesting recent developments in contract law has been an academic and political effort to integrate private law. The proposed Common European Sales Law was ultimately withdrawn, and a series of setbacks, including the British referendum to exit the EU, has recast the politics of convergence. But it remains an objective for many European scholars. This essay considers the wisdom of convergence on a single law of transactions from the perspective of philosophical contract theory. The essay proceeds by disaggregating the rights at stake in contract law. It characterises the formal right to contract and describes its moral impetus as one that should underwrite contract law in all states, especially liberal states. But the essay argues that the legitimate contours of the formal right are contingent on tenets of political culture that vary across Member States. Similarly, substantive regulation of contract is morally compulsory and serves universal interests; the essay takes regulation of permissible work and remuneration for work as examples. But the rules and standards that best advance those moral interests depend on economic facts specific to individual political communities. The essay concludes by arguing that contract law is a poor tool by which to accelerate political and economic convergence.     

Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

Comparing Brokers in India: Informal Networks and Access to Public Services in Bihar and Gujarat

ABSTRACT

Faced with unresponsive and intimidating state institutions, citizens often need to rely on brokers to obtain state benefits. This article compares the ways in which brokers help people gain access to public services in two Indian states. Using ethnographic fieldwork in both states, we compare Bihar and Gujarat to argue that the evolution of the informal networks through which citizens gain access to public services constitutes an important dimension of democratisation processes. In both Gujarat and Bihar such brokerage networks have fragmented considerably over the last 40 years, while also becoming less marked by social hierarchies. This change has taken place despite a differing role and strength of political parties in the two states. The fragmentation and levelling of brokerage networks have enabled citizens to put more pressure on state institutions and power holders. This process of “informal democratisation” suggests that the comparative study of brokerage networks constitutes a promising and largely unexplored avenue to interpret the challenges facing governance and local democracy in India.     

Pramit Chaudhuri: A personal account

As an economist who had absorbed the best of the Keynesian revolution, macro‐economic balances remained the grid on which Pramit Chaudhuri laid out his building. But his passion as a social scientist analysing an economy with perhaps the largest burden of poverty in the world came out in the fierce Brechtian quote which he used as an epigraph for his book, The Indian Economy ‐ ‘Those who have eaten their fill speak to the hungry of the wonderful times to come’.