Maoism, Democracy and Globalisation: Cross-currents in Indian Politics - Hardcover

This lucid book offers a sobering reminder of the defciencies of India’s political regime and highlights the limits of poor people’s opposition to the state power. Through critically interrogating the nature and extent of subaltern agency in India, Gudavarthy offers a provocative set of arguments about India’s ‘violent democracy’.

We possess a large body of literature on the triumphs of Indian democracy, on the success story of globalisation and on violence, whether episodic or organised. Yet studies of these three concepts tend to wend their own analytical way with little prospect of intersection. This book comes as a breath of fresh air because it brings out the intricate relationship between democracy, globalisation and Maoism in fine detail. Congratulations to the author for this remarkable achievement.

Maoism, democracy and globalization are three distinct but inseparable currents marking Indian politics today. They are distinct in terms of their goals, direction, and modalities of forging social, political, economic and even cultural change, while mutually influencing each other in the emergent political process. This book is an attempt to precisely map processes that are internal to each of these currents while exploring and identifying the moments of mutual influence, areas of conflict and mutually exclusive pulls they bring to the contemporary politics in India.