India’s Multiple Revolutions

• October 21, 2011

India Since 1980 considers the remarkable transformations that have taken place in India in the last 31 years, a period that began with the assassination of the formidable Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Her death, and that of her son Rajiv seven years later, marked the end of the Nehru-Gandhi era. Although the country remains one of the few democracies in the developing world, many of the policies instigated by these earlier regimes have been swept away to make room for dramatic alterations in the political, economic and social landscape. Sumit Ganguly and Rahul Mukherji, two leading political scientists of South Asia, chart these developments with particular reference to social and political mobilization, the rise of the BJP and its challenge to Nehruvian secularism and the changes to foreign policy that, in combination with its meteoric economic development, have ensured India a significant place on the world stage.

Sumit Ganguly holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations and is a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has been a Fellow and a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research and writing, focused primarily on South Asia, has been supported by grants from the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. He serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Strategic Studies and Security Studies. He is the founding editor of both the India Review and Asian Security, two refereed journals published by Taylor and Francis, London. Professor Ganguly is the author, editor or co-editor of a dozen books on South Asia. His most recent books are Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan Under the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (co-authored with Devin Hagerty) jointly published by Oxford University Press (New Delhi) and the University of Washington Press (Seattle), More Than Words: U.S.-India Strategic Cooperation Into the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Brian Shoup and Andrew Scobell) published by Routledge, London, and an edited work (with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner), The State of India’s Democracy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.