Articles by Aditya Nigam

The left decided to go it alone in the elections to the Bihar Legislative Assembly, ignoring the perils of such a stand-alone strategy. It ignored the fact that a fragmented secular vote had worked to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s advantage in the parliamentary elections in 2014. This article dissects the vote shares of parties and alliances in the parliamentary and Bihar elections and finds that though the left’s strategy resulted in an increase in its vote share, it also benefi ted the BJP.

Workers, Unions and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India by Rohini Hensman (New York: Columbia University Press; published in India by Tulika Books, New Delhi), 2011; pp xx + 416, Rs 825.

In the prevalent world view, the ecology is perceived as a subset of the economy where intense state interventions and ideological scaffoldings are needed to sustain this rule of capital. However, this order of things seems to be changing where the economy is now, increasingly, being perceived as a subset of the ecology. This is akin to a "New Copernican Revolution" in the way we look at human relations with nature and with each other. Recent instances, like Vedanta's Niyamgiri rejection, indicate that entrenched ideas are changing in India too.

Is democracy in India a sham, as the Maoists and indeed many other leftists claim? If so, how do we understand the experience of many oppressed groups who have found this democracy enabling in many ways? A possible way out of this endless debate is to see democracy not as a fully-formed end product of liberalconstitutionalism but as its untamed other - the mass politics which escapes and exceeds the Law and the injustices of Order. It is from here that the greatest challenges to capitalism and the State arise. The Maoist strategy, by merely trying to mimic the State, is actually inimical to this democratic upsurge and therefore needs to be resisted.

Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is more than a political text. It is an ontological drama staged by Gandhi, reflected in his treatises against "modern civilisation", and his critique of "modernity".