Lokniti’s new research initiative on Comparative State Politics in India
Lokniti has initiated a new research programme on comparative state politics in India, as a part of the institutional grant of the ICSSR for the years 2011-2014. The programme mainly consists of three annual workshops aimed at internal training and capacity building of scholars on doing comparative studies on politics in Indian states. Each year, the workshop will be woven around a thematic scheme and will involve participation of established and upcoming scholars from India and abroad. The first workshop of the series was held in Pune in December 2011 in association with the Department of Politics and Public Admn, University of Pune. The workshop discussed issues related to ‘Identity, Representation and Social Justice’ in order to help compare changing social configurations and their implications for state level politics (click here for the report of the workshop). Along with the workshops, the programme has developed into a collaboration with the King’s India Institute, King’s College, London on Comparative state politics and public policy in India where studies related to politics policy interface across states will be taken up by a team of scholars.
TOver the past couple of decades, the Lokniti programme at CSDS and the extended Lokniti network of political scientists have been engaged in developing theoretically grounded and empirically sound contextual understandings of Indian democracy. The group has also developed extensive commentaries on electoral politics in Indian states (Shastri, Suri, Yadav: 2009, OUP)) and on emergence of states as the principal arena of political contestations in more recent times (Yadav-Palshikar:2003, Journal of Indian School of Political Economy and 2008 in Seminar, 591 ). At one level, these studies have underlined the need to view state politics as a tool to understand and explain national level or ‘all-India’ politics. At another level, they have opened up possibilities to move away from state particularisms as the central concerns of studying states and have highlighted the need to situate state level in a multi-layered context. Taking a cue from these insights, the workshop series is an attempt on part of the Lokniti group to move beyond the states without losing the handle over state politics.
We hope that cross state comparisons will have a lot to contribute in terms of understanding Indian politics; will strengthen the discipline of comparative politics in Indian universities and will also help us push the discipline of Indian political science to expand its analytical horizons beyond electoral and party competition to issues of political economy and the interface between domination and people’s resistance.