Re-Forming India

India's social and political landscape has, in recent times, witnessed many significant transformations. This book offers a wide-ranging review of how India has, over the last few years, fared on the most critical dimensions of our collective life-politics, economy, governance, development, culture and society. The project of change entailed processes of both reform and re-formation: if reform was about correcting or improving what was considered unsatisfactory, re-formation was a...
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India's social and political landscape has, in recent times, witnessed many significant transformations. This book offers a wide-ranging review of how India has, over the last few years, fared on the most critical dimensions of our collective life-politics, economy, governance, development, culture and society. The project of change entailed processes of both reform and re-formation: if reform was about correcting or improving what was considered unsatisfactory, re-formation was a bolder project that aimed to construct anew, anchored in a fundamental re-visioning of India in social, cultural and even moral terms. In many ways, the programme of re-forming India may have outpaced that of reforming India and even exceeded its own expectations. This volume provides an overview of the prevailing political imaginary of nationalism and of the current trends of public discourse in Indian democracy; it seeks to identify and interpret the transformations in state institutions and the public sphere and evaluate their implications for the future. Re-Forming India brings together reflections, from leading commentators in their fields, on some of these transformations-from the promise of economic revival and demonetization to the impact on gender relations, higher education and the media. Has the country been transformed in ways that were promised? Or indeed in other ways that had not been anticipated? With essays from Smita Gupta, Ashok K. Lahiri, C. Rammanohar Reddy, Indira Rajaraman, Radhicka Kapoor, Prem Shankar Jha, Harish Damodaran, A. K. Bhattacharya, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Yamini Aiyar, Yogendra Yadav, Diane Coffey, Anirudh Krishna, Navroz K. Dubash, Shibani Ghosh, Madhav Khosla, Ramachandra Guha, Srinath Raghavan, Ashutosh Varshney, Suhas Palshikar, Anand Teltumbde, Pratiksha Baxi, Amitabh Behar, Sanjay Srivastava, Surinder S. Jodhka, Ravindra Karnena, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Gautam Bhatia (lawyer), Ravish Kumar, Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Neera Chandhoke, Apoorvanand, Gautam Bhatia (architect), Siddhartha Chatterjee and Chandrika Grover Ralleigh.