Articles by Rajni Kothari

This article attempts to examine the larger and rapidly spreading communalisation of the Indian polity as a whole and relating it to the extent possible, to similar trends elsewhere in the world, identifying those individuals and groups responsible for spreading this culture of violence within and across regions. It attempts to develop a broader understanding of the rarity of the threat posed by what is happening in Gujarat.

Elections without Party System Rajni Kothari POLITICAL debate in the country seems to have got hung on the idea of a 'hung parliament' and the coming era of coalition government at the centre that it thai will necessitate. To me this appears to be a highly oversimplified reading of the situation which does not tell us much about the real shifts, that are likely to inform the political system in the coming years, starting with the 1986 election. It overlooks the specific condition in which the Indian polity finds itself in general and the peculiarly specific situation obtaining before the 1996 election in respect of the political, socio-economic and moral dimensions of the polity which has led to a virtual collapse of both the party system and the political system of which, for close to half a century, it provided the operating dynamic. The 'collapse' that I have in mind here is not just of the Congress as the ruling party at the centre and until not long ago in a majority of the slates but rather of the entire party system that I had more than 30 years ago characterised as the 'Congress system'. The so-called 'hung parliament' is not just a matter of no single party getting a majority but rather of no party or a clear alliance of parties being in a position to govern. A system that hinged so much on a functioning and in many ways unique party system is suddenly being rendered impotent with the collapse of that party system and the considerable national consensus that it had for so long represented (certainly for the first 20 to 25 years after independence but even after that when the Congress continued, whether in government or in opposition, to be the key player and setting the tone for the overall functioning of the system).

With the advent of globalisation, the changes taking place at the bottom tiers of nations have received tittle attention. Yet shifts in power relations, allegiances and consciousness at various levels of civil societies are changing the world as much, if not more, than the macro changes wrought by international capital technology and the mass media. To what extent will these new cultural assertions of identity enable the peoples of various regions to face the new capitalist order, remains to be seen.

The Yawning Vacuum A World without Alternatives Rajni Kothari In assessing the current historical situation, the most fundamental change is that we may be entering, or may have already entered, a period in which there is going to be little scope for alternatives. Underlying this most unsettling discontinuity in the modern era is not just pervasive globalisation and its various concomitants, such as consumerism and commercialisation of diverse human endeavours through their marketisation, but a basic crisis of vision, a decline of engagement with Utopias, an end of 'alternatives9 in the real and comprehensive sense of the term Not just the erosion of alternative centres of power and systems of 'development' and governance (the collapse of both the socialist and the third world poles) but, though partly related to that, erosion of ideological perspectives, frameworks of knowledge and modes of consciousness.

Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today Gyanendra Pandey The dominant nationalist historiography that insists on the totalising standpoint of a seamless nationalism needs to be challenged not only because of its interested use of categories such as 'national' and 'secular' but also because of its privileging of the so-called 'general' over the particular, the larger over the smaller, the 'mainstream' over the 'marginal