scholarly journals The Political Asceticism of Mamata Banerjee: Female Populist Leadership in Contemporary India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Proma Ray Chaudhury

Abstract Operating within the androcentric premises that support idealized models of populist leadership, self-representations cultivated by female populist leaders often involve precarious balancing acts, compelling them to appropriate contextualized traditionalist discourses and modes of power to qualify for conventional leadership models. This article engages with the stylistic performance of populist leadership by Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress in the state of West Bengal, India, focusing on her adoption of the discursive mode of political asceticism, nativist rhetoric, and religious iconography. Through an interpretive analysis of selected party documents, autobiography, and semistructured interviews with Banerjee's followers and critics, the article delineates Banerjee's populist self-fashioning as a political ascetic and explores perceptions of her leadership. The article argues that while the self-makings of female populist leaders remain fraught and contested, they contribute substantially toward redrawing the boundaries of both conventional leadership models and the broader political landscapes they inhabit.

Author(s):  
MUKULIKA BANERJEE

This chapter discusses the electoral ethnography of a campaign in the state of West Bengal. It presents a thick ethnographic description of the campaigning process and traces the numerous techniques used. The political messages and organisational hierarchies at every level of the state's population help in answering why incumbent governments suffer repeated electoral defeats.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-585
Author(s):  
Sinja Graf

This essay theorizes how the enforcement of universal norms contributes to the solidification of sovereign rule. It does so by analyzing John Locke’s argument for the founding of the commonwealth as it emerges from his notion of universal crime in the Second Treatise of Government. Previous studies of punishment in the state of nature have not accounted for Locke’s notion of universal crime which pivots on the role of mankind as the subject of natural law. I argue that the dilemmas specific to enforcing the natural law against “trespasses against the whole species” drive the founding of sovereign government. Reconstructing Locke’s argument on private property in light of universal criminality, the essay shows how the introduction of money in the state of nature destabilizes the normative relationship between the self and humanity. Accordingly, the failures of enforcing the natural law require the partitioning of mankind into separate peoples under distinct sovereign governments. This analysis theorizes the creation of sovereign rule as part of the political productivity of Locke’s notion of universal crime and reflects on an explicitly political, rather than normative, theory of “humanity.”


2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Dudley Knowles

Hegel's account of freedom is complex and difficult. It integrates a doctrine of free agency, a theory of social freedom, and a self-determining theodicy of Spirit. To achieve full understanding, if full understanding is possible, the student must both disentangle and articulate the components, and then fit together the separate pieces into an intelligible whole. And what is true of the whole is true of the parts; each element is in turn complex and controversial.In this paper, I want to investigate one very small aspect of this picture — the political phenomenology of the citizen of Hegel's rational state. Whether we are delineating the contours of free agency or re-telling Hegel's story about the modes of freedom constitutive of the institutions of the modern state, sooner or later we shall have to interpret Hegel's description of the self-consciousness of the typical citizen. We shall have to give some account of what citizens take to be their political standing, and show how both this standing and the citizens' understanding of it contribute to freedom.This should not be a controversial claim. To paraphrase portions of the famous statement at PR §260: The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. Members of families integrated into civil society knowingly and willingly acknowledge their citizenship and actively pursue the ends of the state. They do not live as private persons merely; in understanding, endorsing and acting out their ethical status as citizens they achieve such subjective fulfilment as isnecessaryfor them to be truly free.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Rajeev Kadambi

This article advances Ambedkar’s recasting of pure politics and the political within an ethical framework. It explores Ambedkar’s ethos of radical action grounded in the limitation of the state, law and institutional structures to transform society. In foregrounding Ambedkar’s idea of transformation and change through practices of the self, the essay locates self-transformation as going beyond a critique of existing social and economic frameworks. In furtherance, this view captures an ethics of internal transformation resulting from the change in moral conduct achieved through voluntary conversion. Dhamma was based on techniques of self-restraint that stressed on an unremitting duty owed to the other including an adversary and stranger. It inaugurated an inclusive and ecological notion of kinship based on empathy and friendship whose aim was to break down all barriers and create a compassionate society. Ambedkar furnishes us with an original formulation to think through a notion of compassionate justice from the moral lexicon of the broken men.


Author(s):  
Rudy B. Andeweg ◽  
Robert Elgie ◽  
Ludger Helms ◽  
Juliet Kaarbo ◽  
Ferdinand Müller-Rommel

Recent developments across political landscapes have contributed to a re-empowerment of the political executive. The authority of political executives was once largely autonomous and unchecked, but diminished with the development of constitutional and democratic constraints and further curtailed by more pressures on and more competitors to the state. The drivers behind the re-empowerment of political executives are also diverse, stemming from both domestic and international sources. The study of political executives has also experienced a revival; political executives are being rediscovered by students and scholars of politics. This is partly due to the re-empowerment trend, but it is also connected to developments within the research program on political executives. Although the term ‘political executives’ will be understood by scholars and non-scholars alike, there is considerable room for different notions of the exact position and functions of political executives in different types of political regimes. This introductory chapter also discusses the borderlines between the political executive and other actors within the executive: the bureaucracy and the head of state.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
Shibashis Chatterjee ◽  
Surya Sankar Sen ◽  
Mayuri Banerjee

Borders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at the local level. Constituted of processes of identification and networks of interdependences, localized construals of the borderland and subsequently positioned engagements, comes to shape notions of accessibility and restriction as well as perceptions of the “other”. These engagements are not always reflective of statist positions on the border which are often uniform in the conceptualization of its capacity to contain. They subsequently come to reflect the variations of divergent historical and locational realities. There is a need to further extend the analysis of borderlands beyond statist framings as passive recipients of policy as well as recognize the critical positioning of local adaptive processes as antithetical to state demarcations of territoriality and sovereign authority. Based on a survey of three districts in the state of West Bengal, India, this study posits an analysis of the multiple perceptions both within and outside of statist framings of borderland identity and territoriality, which color its inhabitants’ understanding of the border and perceptions surrounding and interactions with the communities that lie beyond it.


Author(s):  
Joan RIDAO MARTÍN

LABURPENA: Kataluniako autogobernu-erakunde burujabeei Espainiako Konstituzioaren 155. artikulua aplikatu zaie modu aitzindarian. Artikulu horrek, hain zuzen, estatuaren hertsadura-mekanismoa xedatzen du, eta erabaki horrek, atzean dagoen gatazka politikoan eduki duen eraginaz harago, transzedentzia handia izan du konstituzio mailan. Horrenbestez, eta Estatuaren legezkotasuna eskualdeko gobernuen aurrean babesteko Konstituzioak dituen baliabideen legitimitatea zalantzan jarri gabe (estatu konposatu gehienen konstituzio-ordenamenduek ezartzen dituzte horrelakoak), orain arte ezagutu ez den Espainiako praxiaren berritasunak, horren inguruan zabaldu den eztabaidarekin batera, Konstituzioaren bidezkotasuna aztertzera bultzatzen gaitu: bai premisei, bai ezohiko baliabide horren babespean hartutako neurriei dagokienez. Azterketa hori eginda, gainera, zenbait akats antzeman daitezke; eta akats horiek, ziurrenik, konstituzio-kontrakotasuna azaleratzen dute. RESUMEN: La pionera aplicación del mecanismo de coerción estatal del artículo 155 de la Constitución Española a las instituciones de autogobierno de Cataluña ha tenido una evidente trascendencia constitucional, más allá de las repercusiones sobre el conflicto político que subyace en su fundamento. Así, sin poner en duda la legitimidad de los instrumentos constitucionales de protección de la legalidad estatal frente a la actuación de los gobiernos regionales, presentes en la mayoría de ordenamientos constitucionales de los Estados compuestos, la novedad que presenta la hasta ahora inédita praxis española, y la litigiosidad desatada al respecto, nos invita a realizar un examen de la justeza constitucional tanto de los presupuestos como de las medidas adoptadas al amparo de ese extraordinario recurso, con el resultado de que de ese escrutinio se derivan diversos vicios que determinan su más que probable inconstitucionalidad. ABSTRACT: The pioneering enforcement of the state coercion mechanism of article 155 of the Spanish Constitution to the self-government institutions of Catalonia has had an evident constitutional transcendence, beyond the implications on the political conflict that underlies its basis. Thus, without questioning the legitimacy of the constitutional instruments for the protection of State legality against the actions by regional governments, present in most of the constitutional systems of the composite States, the novelty presented by the hitherto unprecedented Spanish praxis, and litigation unleashed in this regard, invites us to scrutinize the constitutional fairness of both the principles and the measures adopted under this extraordinary measure, with the result that this scrutiny leads to various flaws that determine its more than likely unconstitutionality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Rakesh Ankit

This article presents four episodes from the political period 1969 to 1976 in India, focusing on the views and actions of P. N. Haksar, Principal Secretary and Advisor to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1967–1973). Unlike the ‘national/international politics’ hitherto under focus from then, that is, the Congress split (1969), birth of Bangladesh (1971) and the JP Movement/Emergency (1974–1975), the aspects under consideration in this article are of subterranean existence. First of these aspects is the provincial reverberations of the Congress split, the case considered here being that of the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee. Second is the attitude of the Congress Party towards left opposition, the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI [M]) in West Bengal, as revealed through the anxieties of Governor Shanti Dhavan. The third aspect under consideration is a glimpse of centre–states relations, as shown through New Delhi’s interactions with the EMS Namboodiripad-led and CPI (M)-dominated United Front Government of Kerala. Finally, the article looks at Haksar’s attempts at planning and development for the state of Bihar. Each of these four themes was among the ‘wider range of functions’ that Mrs Gandhi wished to be performed by her Secretariat and to allow us to test how successful each of it was. Each of these provides a context for contemporary issues.


Lex Russica ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 9-22
Author(s):  
I. A. Isaev

The paper analyzes the main processes that gave rise to such a phenomenon as “public law”. The problem of public law is one of the fundamental problems of jurisprudence. A classical dichotomy of public and private law will never lose its significance, and the search for their harmonious interaction only heightens the interest of thinkers around the world in this issue. We should agree that addressing such issues is always secondto-none, as it gives grounds for the development of the best legal regulation acceptable for a particular society. The very notion of “publicness” has gone a long way to finally gaining a foothold in the political and legal lexicon. In the Digestas of Justinian, the famous Roman jurist Ulpian writes: “Public law, which (refers) to the position of the Roman state, private law, which (refers) to the benefit of individuals; there is the useful for the society and the useful for a private individual. Public law includes the sacreds (sacra), the ministry of priests, the position of magistrates” (D.1.1.1.2). Thus, from the ancient Roman forum through medieval corporations to the political parties of modern times, the public space was certainly controlled by the state in some way or another. It was the intervention of the state in the private sphere that determined the nature of “public” in general and public law in particular. These processes have defined both modern political landscapes and the system of public legal institutions. Although, to a large extent, the motivations that affected the formation of public law were dogmatic, formal and virtual, or imaginary in nature, their influence adopted quite real features and led to practical political and legal consequences.


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