Dr B. R. Ambedkar noted that any freedom struggle or political change needs a base of cultural renaissance, reforms—both social and religious. Our retaliation against colonialists began from the very ...moment they tried to colonise India. Beginning with the Battle of Colachel that took place in 1741, there were uprisings from tribes in North East, Bengal and central India. Kuka Sikhs were the first to promote swadeshi, with the insistence on wearing hand woven clothes.
This freedom struggle had many streams—earlier battles all over Bharat, revolutionary actions, organised arm struggle like Azad Hind Fauj (INA) and many streams of political thought that worked under the larger umbrella of the Indian National Congress while some worked independently. We had Home Rule League, Hindu Mahasabha, Swaraj Party and Congress Socialist Party (CSP). It was a long drawn struggle that was built on dharmic renaissance and cultural nationalism sparked by Swami Dayanand Saraswati.
After working with revolutionaries and Congress party and studying history, Dr K. B. Hedgewar identified the problem of Bharat as a fractious Hindu society and the collective amnesia inculcated by the British. He decided to create a non-political organisation by first preparing battle-worthy citizens and founded the RSS. Contrary to critics’ claims, RSS too contributed to freedom struggle. Most important was its role on the eve of Independence in protecting Hindu-Sikh brethren from mindless violence and rehabilitating them when the leaders were busy celebrating the country’s independence on 15 August in 1947.
Scholarship on the varieties of capitalism in emerging economies underlines the critical role states play in the political economy of development. This research suggests that "state capitalism" or ..."state-permeated capitalism" is the most common economic development model among large emerging economies. One of the distinguishing features of these emerging economies is that informal state-business ties are the backbone of their development models. However, more needs to be known about the type, nature and evolution of state-business relations that guide emerging economic development trajectories and their implications for varieties of capitalism within state- permeated market economies. This article situates Turkey within the state capitalism debate by examining the historical legacy of "mutually dependent" state-business ties that have characterised the Turkish political economy and how these ties took a different form under the domination of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - AKP) since 2002. Related, the article investigates the emergence and evolution of two ideologically distant business groups MÜSİAD and TÜSİAD in the context of changing political economy dynamics, their relations with political authorities and the conflicting positions they have taken for vital economic policies and political reforms during the AKP rule.
The shifting ideological centre of gravity from what has been termed "democratic cosmopolitanism" to "religious nationalism" in Indonesia and its impacts on diverse areas of policymaking has been a ...subject of scholarly debate. This article investigates how these ideological developments affect gender policy reforms in post-Reformasi Indonesia. To do so, it develops a framework to examine ideological contestation by centring the role of Pancasila and gender politics in its analysis. By employing this framework, the article examines three attempts at gender policy reform: the 2008 Pornography Law, and two most recent bills on the elimination of sexual violence (RUU Penghapusan Kekerasan Seksual) and family resilience (RUU Ketahanan Keluarga). It is argued that the battle over the interpretation of Pancasila has ideologically shaped gender policy reforms through which political actors contest their ideal gender order and relations. This article concludes by reflecting on broader issues around gender, democracy, and ideology in post-Reformasi Indonesia.
The humans of modern society are enjoying the luxuries and comforts today but future generations will be facing a more polluted environment and scarcity of natural resources. So the effects of global ...warming and climatic changes are a major policy concern nowadays around the world. The majority of the literature treats the Carbon Dioxide emissions as an indicator of environmental deterioration but this paper considers the environmental performance index as an indicator of environment. This paper addresses the role of institutional reforms for environmental performance that is hardly discussed in the earlier literature. It is argued that a novel approach of institutional reforms can provide some useful insights for environmental performance in developing countries. There is wide agreement that institutional quality is crucial for economic sustainability but rarely focused to explore the impacts of institutional reforms on environmental performance. The institutional reforms are generally divided into two categories; economic and political reforms. This paper investigated the impact of each category of institutional reforms for environmental performance by using panel data of 122 developing economies for a period of 1996–2020. Difference in differences technique is applied to determine the impact of each category of reforms on the environment. It is found that economic and political reforms significantly contribute to protecting the environment in developing countries, and it will be a good policy option to reform the economic and political institutions to preserve the environment in these countries along with sustainable development.
•This study employed the concepts of critical juncture and path dependence to explore greenbelt and New town policies’ change in Seoul since 1971.•In critical junctures there was a clear political ...motive for the Korean president to drastically change the greenbelts or the New Town programs.•Thereafter critical junctures the policies reinforced trends through path dependence despite the regime changes.•The reviewed history explains why the Korean government built New Towns in the SMA greenbelt in contrast to sustainable development.•The third critical juncture demonstrates that the housing supply program dominated the greenbelts, and recent Korean government’s policy.•Developing countries that need solutions for housing shortages that accompany rapid urbanization could learn from Seoul’s experiences.
This study reviews greenbelt and New Town policy in Korea’s Seoul Metropolitan Area as a case study by developing the step-wise critical juncture and path dependence repetition model originating in the historical institutionalism. The country is considered to be in a developmental state with significant power, and the capital region has been regarded as politically crucial, so the theory is more appropriately applied to the two policies’ changes rather than a gradual institutional developmental model. The results found that decisions on the two policies at the presidential level at critical junctures during times of political change were sustained and reinforced until the next juncture, following the path-dependent tendency across regimes and their political orientation. Because the New Town policy has dominated greenbelt policy since the most recent (third) critical juncture in 1997, the latter is vulnerable despite important environmental issues and a reversal is not expected to occur in the near future.
Between 2010 and 2015, as Myanmar transitioned from authoritarian rule to a more liberal and democratic state, its Muslim population increasingly faced hate speech and violence. This article goes ...beyond analyses that regard the growing anti-Muslim sentiment as a consequence of a liberalized media environment, enabling people to voice long-standing grievances and prejudice. Rather, the notion of a "Muslim threat" to Myanmar's Buddhist population is approached as the outcome of a dynamic process of securitization in which an alliance of political and religious elites was forged whose discourse changed the rules of the political field, forcing the reform-oriented opposition into strategic silence. It is argued that in the early period of liberalization, anti-Muslim frames were normalized and thus shaped the securitization of Muslims.
Londongrad is at once a place, a process and a paradox. As a place, it refers to the manifold ways in which London has acquired a reputation for being a safe harbour for dirty money largely on ...account of a secure system of property rights, a cluster of professional enablers and a neoliberal politics that actively cultivated it. As a process, it illustrates the premier role that London plays in the global system of secrecy jurisdictions. As a paradox it signals the bizarre alignment of two nominally opposed systems, authoritarian state capitalism in Russia and neoliberal capitalism in the UK. Before the war in Ukraine, it was tacitly assumed that Londongrad was impervious to reform because no single political jurisdiction had the reach or the remit to confront this baroque system. Dismantling Londongrad is therefore a belated attempt to regulate the dark geography of dirty money.
In this article, we trace Germany's recent reform (and its precursors) seeking to remedy precarious working conditions in the meat sector. Focusing on an extreme case of labour exploitation, and ...asking how unique it is, allows us to uncover which institutional features of EU Member States condition the liberalization effects of negative integration. We thereby contribute to the literature on Europeanization, which has mainly emphasized weak industrial relations to account for the German meat industry's reliance on cheap migrant labour. Complicated enforcement structures, demanding requirements of administrative cooperation, and the complexities of an evolving case law, we argue, further contributed to the precarious conditions of migrant workers in Germany. Major COVID outbreaks in slaughterhouses created the political momentum for reform which specifically addresses this administrative side of labour protection, but remains limited to the meat sector – despite similar patterns of labour exploitation elsewhere.
PDF
