Modi’s party will be relaxed about upcoming polls

Significance Each of these states except Punjab has a government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Punjab is one of just three states with a chief minister that belongs to India’s main opposition Congress party. Impacts A poor showing by Congress would further reduce its leverage with other opposition parties in talks over forming a broad anti-Modi alliance. Victory in UP would enhance Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s national profile. Election campaigning will likely lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases.

Islamists may reap some benefits from Sudan’s coup

Significance The Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) coalition of civilian and rebel groups have rejected the deal, but Hamdok has justified it on the grounds that (among other things) it will prevent the return of the former ruling National Congress Party (NCP), apparently responding to ongoing speculation over whether NCP-era Islamists influenced Burhan’s October 25 coup. Impacts Burhan will probably limit the work of the Empowerment Removal Committee, which aims to dismantle NCP-era power structures. Any empowerment of Islamists will likely be selective, to avoid alienating regional powers or FFC figures who might be open to cooperation. A marked turn towards Islamism would undermine the chances of a peace deal with holdout rebel groups who seek a secular state.

Unification of Powers: When Effective Lawmakers Sponsor Presidential Proposals in Congress

While scholars have long noted presidential powers over congressional lawmaking arising through persuasion, veto bargaining, and public appeals, we argue that an important tool is missing from this list. Specifically, presidents who are strategic in their choices of early coalition partners in Congress – such as effective sponsors of administration bills – significantly enhance their chance of legislative success. We identify more than 1,400 executive branch proposals appearing as bills in Congress between 1989 and 2006. We examine which members of Congress sponsor these bills, finding strong evidence of disproportionate sponsorship by effective champions, such as majority-party members, committee and subcommittee chairs, lawmakers with proven effectiveness in the previous Congress, party leaders, and senior lawmakers, all else equal. Analyzing the fate of these proposals, we find that much of the success of the president’s agenda in Congress depends on these critical and strategic partnerships with effective congressional proponents.

Punjab move does little for India’s Congress party

Headline INDIA: Punjab move does little for Congress party

Religion and Party Politics in India and Pakistan

Until the 1990s, religious influence on party politics in India and Pakistan was primarily through street protests and pressure on mainstream nonreligious parties rather than by religious parties winning power directly. In India, such influence was constrained by the secular constitutional structure and the dominant role of the Congress Party. In Pakistan, however, politically deinstitutionalized parties, weakened by military interference, have never been strong enough to take on the clerics. Instead, party leaders and military regimes have increasingly tried to co-opt or accommodate Islamist parties and pressure groups to strengthen their own positions. Civilian and military governments in the 1970s and 1980s institutionalized much of the Islamist agenda within the state in a way that now seems impossible to reverse. Ironically, the very fact that much of the Islamist agenda is now institutionalized, makes it difficult for Islamist parties to expand much beyond the 10–20% of the votes they now receive. India’s secular consensus, which many observers saw as its greatest achievement, has been profoundly disrupted by the decline of the Congress Party over the past three decades and the rise of the BJP, headed by the dominant figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has deep roots in the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its Hindu nationalist family (Sangh Parivar) of organizations. Modi, especially in his second term (2019–), has used his majority in parliament to try to radically remake India along Hindu nationalist lines, even though that was not central to his campaign platform, nor the reason why most development- and governance-minded voters elected him to office.

Mrs Gandhi’s Personalisation of Power, 1966–1975

This chapter focuses on the internal factors that led to the declaration of the Emergency. It primarily explores Mrs Gandhi’s authoritarian personality and the deinstitutionalisation of the Congress Party. The power structure within the Congress, especially after Mrs Gandhi split the party in 1969, meant that checks and balances ceased to exist. This factionalism enabled her to impose her authoritarian tendencies on the government as safeguards were dismantled. The chapter further explores the relation between authoritarianism and populism. It uses the political situation in India from the late 1960s to the early 1970s as an illustration. Mrs Gandhi, like other populist leaders, was convinced that she was the people of India. This idea was epitomised by D. K. Barooah’s slogan: ‘Indira is India and India is Indira.’

Outlook for upcoming polls is mixed for Modi’s party

Significance Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governs in Assam with the support of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners, while another NDA party rules in Tamil Nadu. In Puducherry, a governing coalition led by India’s main opposition Congress party recently collapsed. Impacts Congress infighting over leadership will intensify, weakening the party further. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act will again stir debate nationally, having somewhat disappeared from public consciousness amid the pandemic. Modi’s recent liberal market reforms, which have prompted protests in some parts of India, are unlikely to be much of a factor in the polls.

Mecca between China and India

Through the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the Nationalist–Communist War (1946–9), several Chinese Islamic pilgrimage delegations set out on their journeys across the Indian Ocean. Mecca was more than a simple endpoint destination. These travels encompassed transits and sojourns in cities in between Nanjing/Shanghai and Mecca, offering the pilgrim-cum-delegates venues of encounters with foreign dignitaries and diaspora populations. This chapter examines the published records and private diaries of members of the Chinese Islamic Goodwill Mission to the Near East (1937–9) who had been aligned with the Republican Nationalist Party, with a focus on their actions and rhetoric in Calcutta, Bombay, Karachi, and Lahore. Claims to anti-imperial Islamic solidarity and routes of the pilgrimage provided accessible channels for the Chinese Muslim delegates to conduct meetings with leaders of both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress Party, while simultaneously attempting to garner support from Cantonese/Shandong diaspora populations and Turki refugees from the war-stricken Xinjiang Province. The practices and networks of informal diplomacy that consolidated in wartime would outlast the Second Sino-Japanese War itself.

India–West Asia Relations Under the ‘Nationalist’ Modi Government

India’s West Asia policy discourse has traditionally revolved around its energy dependency, security and the welfare of the 7 million Indians living in the region. In recent years, particularly since the coming of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014, the issues of counterterrorism, security, defence cooperation and non-oil trade have gained in importance. This qualitative shift is partially guided and supported by both pragmatism and the ideological differences that the BJP and its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), had been maintaining against the West Asia policy of the earlier governments led by the Congress party. Through explaining the ideological perspectives of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the BJP, this article argues that the changing global and West Asian landscape, the consolidation of Chinese influence in and around India’s land and maritime boundaries, the instability in the energy market and the insecurity of the Arab uprising–hit West Asian monarchies have provided the BJP government an opportune time to rethink and reorient India’s relations with West Asia. While ideological determinants dominate the public discourse, as the BJP’s top leadership elaborates in the public domain, the policy choices made are not always in tune with these. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often preferred the pragmatic to the ideological, and this he has done over the expectations of his party and supporters.