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Articles by Zoya HasanSubscribe to Zoya Hasan

Post Ayodhya: Normalising the Politics of Hate and Hostility

Vol. 52, Issue No. 48, 02 Dec, 2017
Zoya Hasan

Majoritarian notions of democracy have acquired new acceptability in recent years and notions of majority rule have been pushed to achieve a restructuring of the Indian polity and a stronger authoritarian system politically. India remains a vibrant democracy in most respects but there are strong elements of authoritarianism creeping in like narrow nationalism to deactivate opponents, and increasing measures to intimidate and control the free press and impose curbs on dissent.

Does the Congress Have a Future?

Vol. 52, Issue No. 18, 06 May, 2017
Zoya Hasan

Political parties with a rich and storied history do not perish easily. A political revival of the Congress is diffi cult but not impossible. It needs to go back to the basics and identify a core strategy to reverse the current tide towards the right. It has to rework its strategies and win back its core voters. Basically, it needs support among a cross-section of the voters to counter the formidable Hindu social coalition engineered by the power-obsessed Modi–Amit Shah duo which has underpinned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh–Bharatiya Janata Party’s quest for a “Congress-mukt Bharat.”

Statement of Social Scientists

Vol. 50, Issue No. 44, 31 Oct, 2015
Achin Vanaik, C Lakshmanan, Gayatri Menon, Johannes Manjrekar, Kalpana Kannabiran, Lakshmi Subramanian, Meena Radhakrishna, Mritiunjoy Mohanty, Others, R Nagaraj, Ravinder Kaur, Sasheej Hegde, T N Madan, Valerian Rodrigues, Virginius Xaxa, Zoya Hasan

We, as social scientists, scholars, teachers and concerned citizens, feel extremely concerned about the lynching at Dadri, and the murders of scholars and thinkers like M M Kalaburgi, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and others, and wish to register our strong protest.

The Enduring Challenge of Building a Just Society

Vol. 44, Issue No. 22, 30 May, 2009
Zoya Hasan

The Enduring Challenge of Building a Just Society Zoya Hasan The essays in Explaining Indian Democracy: A Fifty-Year Perspective, 1956-2006 spanning over five decades of Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph

Transfer of Power? Politics of Mass Mobilisation in UP

Vol. 36, Issue No. 46-47, 24 Nov, 2001
Zoya Hasan

The recent electoral history of UP that has witnessed the growth of parties representing the lower and middle castes speaks of a politics of more competition and democracy. But as this paper argues, though peasant and caste mobilisation may have challenged upper caste/ class domination, this has not necessarily promoted policies of public expenditure for services benefiting the poor, nor has there been implementation of developmental programmes that address their vital concerns.

UCC and Women s Movement

Vol. 33, Issue No. 9, 28 Feb, 1998
Amrita Chhachhi, Farida Khan, Gautam Navlakha, Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Ritu Menon, Tanika Sarkar, Uma Chakravarti, Urvashi Butalia, Zoya Hasan

Amrita Chhachhi, Farida Khan, Gautam Navlakha, Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Ritu Menon, Tanika Sarkar, Uma Chakravarti, Urvashi Butalia, Zoya Hasan THE Anveshi article (Anveshi Law Committee, is Gender Justice Only a Legal Issue? Political Stakes in the UCC Debate', 8, 1997) criticises tendencies within the 'Indian women's movement' that, in its opinion, have focused very narrowly and exclusively upon legal reform. The main thrust of such reforms, moreover, is described as a monolithicising intention that would like to erase all plurality of caste and community, custom and practice in the name of abstract, universal gender justice, thus denying women as well as a range of marginalised communities the right to autonomy. The universalising tendency of this version of gender justice betrays a biological essentialism that fails to take on board other aspects of women's social existence. Such tendencies are most evident among feminists who, according to Anveshi, are termed as 'upper caste, Hindu and urban' in other words, they share some social characteristics of the hindutva politics that they otherwise criticise. However, presumably because of shared social space, they 'unwittingly' lapse into some of the language and agendas of their political adversaries: the demand for a uniform or gender just civil code would be one such instance, the campaign against obscenity would be another. As examples of such immature and politically naive feminist thinking, Anveshi has singled out Forum against Oppression of Women from Bombay and Working Group on Women's Rights from Delhi.

Khurja Riots 1990-91-Understanding the Conjuncture

Vol. 27, Issue No. 18, 02 May, 1992
Kumkum Sangari, Pradip Dutta, Prem Chowdhury, Tanika Sarkar, Uma Chakravarti, Zoya Hasan

Khurja Riots 1990-91 Understanding the Conjuncture Uma Chakravarti, Prem Chowdhury, Pradip Dutta, Zoya Hasan, Kumkum Sangari, Tanika Sarkar Elections have become an increasingly central element in the conjunctures which have produced communal riots. In Khurja in 1990-91 tension and violence mattered much more to Hindu communal parties than to other national political parties who have also been responsible for using them for electoral gain. Given the long-term strategy of the BJP to capture power at the centre, the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign alone was insufficient: though it could demonstrate that Hindu sentiments had not been 'respected' by the state, it could not establish that Hindus were physically endangered. Therefore while the campaign organised Hindu consciousness and 'ideological' needs around a central symbol and a projected act of violence, the accompanying riots tried to orchestrate the need for 'protecting' and 'preserving' Hindu interests against the projected threat from Muslims.

Self-Serving Guardians Formation and Strategy of the Bhartiya Kisan Union

Vol. 24, Issue No. 48, 02 Dec, 1989
Zoya Hasan

The character of kisan movements since the late 1970s has been a matter of considerable debate. This paper, focusing on the social and political context of the farmer's movement in general and on the orientation, strategy and class base of BKU in particular, attempts to offer a corrective to the commonly held-view that such movements reflect new levels of politicisation among the middle peasantry and to the impression created by BKU's ideological strategy that it is capable of transcending rural class distinctions.

Minority Identity, Muslim Women Bill Campaign and the Political Process

Vol. 24, Issue No. 1, 07 Jan, 1989
Zoya Hasan

The focus of this paper is on the movement of 1985-86 against the momentous Supreme Court verdict on the grant of maintenance to Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman. Who were the chief campaigners, and what ideological spectrum did they represent? Why did their campaign evoke such powerful responses from a wide spectrum of Muslim society? How did Muslim women in general respond to the controversy generated by the Supreme Court judgment and the Muslim Women Bill? And, finally, why did the government introduce an amendment which curtailed the rights of Muslim women?

Deadly Politics of the State and Its Apologists

Vol. 22, Issue No. 46, 14 Nov, 1987
Imrana Qadeer, Zoya Hasan

was able to impose the American will. However, the relative American economic decline and particularly its recent conversion into a debtor have eroded this American capacity. Black Monday and American paralysis in the face of it threaten to erode it even more. Yet the United States is becoming increasingly unilateralist, not to mention protectionist, and threatens international economic agreements for which its trading partners already have less than total enthusiasm even among themselves. Americans have been exporting the costs of their own economic irresponsibility. How can the Japanese and west Europeans be expected to expose their economies to the ravages that a real deflation of the American (or indeed their own) bubble will impose 6n them

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