Articles by Niraja Gopal Jayal

Communal Identity: A Constructionist View Communal Identity in India: Its Construction and Articulation in the Twentieth Century (Debates in Indian History and Society Series) edited by Bidyut Chakrabarty; Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2003;

The movement for Uttarakhand was forged on a unity of interests between people of the 'pahar' region. However, statehood has widened the 'pahar-maidan' conflict and has also thrown into abeyance the long history of participatory movements the region has seen as well as any moves towards sustainable development.

Ethnicity and Nationality Niraja Gopal Jayal Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity; Reconciling Competing Identities by T K Oommen; Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, THIS important new book from a distinguished Indian sociologist seeks to grapple with questions of ethnicity and nationality through a detailed exercise of conceptual clarification. An impressively vast historical and comparative canvas forms the background and basis of this attempt at sweeping away the dusty cobwebs of historical and sociological scholarship, and disentangling the often confused discourse around these concepts. Though the title describes its concern as the competing identities of citzenship, nationality and ethnicity, in that order, the substance of the book suggests that the order of importance is actually the reverse. As such, ethnicity and processes of 'ethnification' are problematised, while citizenship in plural societies is offered as a solution.

Democracy and development must be seen as intimately related functioning under similar constraints, and equally subject to political negotiation. Thus for instance, social inequality in India both retards balanced development and distorts the logic of democracy. It is precisely this distorting logic of democracy in an unequal society that necessitates state welfare for the protection of the vulnerable, for the concerns of distributive justice cannot be fulfilled by governance alone. The answer therefore is not to look towards the state but at different ways of approaching and defining democracy and development.