For a leader who was ready to retire from active politics and leave Delhi, PV Narasimha Rao ended up being one of India’s most transformative prime ministers. In this excellent biography, political scientist Vinay Sitapati, who gained access to Rao’s private papers, chronicles the Rao years.
Distance lends objectivity and creates room for candour. Published 25 years after the 1991 reforms, this edited collection brings together practitioners and thinkers, policymakers and academic economists to trace the roots of India’s landmark economic reforms and their impact.
The end of the Cold War, and the 1991 reforms, triggered an intense debate within the Indian strategic community about India’s foreign policy direction. The political leadership took wise decisions, deepening ties with the US, looking east, reaching out to Israel, and slowly, but perhaps too slowly, overcoming the dogmas of the past. In this pathbreaking work, strategic analyst C Raja Mohan captured the changes.
Coalitions became the norm in 1990s, but while they were often dismissed as unprincipled, loose, leader- and ego-driven fragile enterprises with little political value, Sanjay Ruparelia’s work shows the importance of these political coalitions, in preventing executive abuses, restoring a degree of autonomy to independent institutions and deepening democracy.
The biggest shift in Indian politics has been the enhanced participation and then assertion of backward communities and Dalits. This has changed representation patterns, state policy, and social relations. In a significant book, political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot traced this process of democratisation and empowerment.
