Articles by M S S Pandian

Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party have given a new lease of life to the very humble Gandhi cap.

Tamil Nadu has a long tradition of implementing reservations on a preferential basis for different groups. The Arunthathiyar Special Reservation Act (2009) allots the Arunthathiyars 3 percentage points out of the 18% reservation for the scheduled castes. While having benefi ted the Arunthathiyars, the Act continues to be contested by other scheduled castes.

Representations have been made by some of the political parties of Tamil Nadu to have a particular chapter in an NCERT Class IX textbook removed; the chapter is being attacked for discussing the past of the infl uential Nadars as "untouchables" and for highlighting the role played by 19th century Christian missionaries in the community's subsequent upward mobility. The present clamour for a censored caste history has a right-wing Hindu character to it. If memories of degradation are an enabling resource in producing alliances against continuing forms of oppression, in this instance erasure of such memories is what is being sought by an upwardly mobile caste.

To me, the more fundamental issue is the and capitalism are separate entities, though thought is how to defend and deepen derelationship between revolution and dein countries with bourgeois hegemony they mocracy and fight for justice, and at the mocracy. Rebellions are not aimed at demowork in harmony. Most revolutions in hissame time, resist the State and capitalism. cracy; they are aimed at the State, a state tory in their fight against state and capital that has usurped power and has become have thrown away democracy as well. The Sanjeeb Mukherjee (cusanjeeb@gmail.com) fundamentally unjust. The State, democracy challenge before the people and radical teaches politics in the University of Calcutta.

Given the impossibility of the nation-form as an enabling political arrangement of our times - after all, we have experimented with it for over two centuries - the work of imagination and the work of politics need to seek newer, pluralistic and enabling forms of politics beyond the nation-form. The thought of Tagore and Periyar offers us at least two premises to re-imagine politics beyond the nation-form. First, politics has to be a perennial contestation of different forms of power by acknowledging and addressing difference as the fundamental reality of the social. Second, a politics beyond the nation has to be based on a de-territorialised imagination that surpasses the territorial parochialism of the nation-form and embraces the world as a terrain of possibilities, alliances, and constraints.