Category Insights

Insights, a blog published by IMPRI.

UGC Draft Regulation and Federalism: Revisiting the Role of Governors in Appointing VCs

Indian federalism, multilevel in its functioning, is based normatively on the principle of subsidiarity, which essentially means that the authority needs to be invested at the lowest possible level of institutional hierarchy. The subsidiarity principle seeks decentralisation and asserts, to deepen democracy, that the local levels, in relation to the central governments, must be ensured with some degree of functional independence and agency. The architecture of power distribution in the Indian Constitution indicates, more in spirit than in letter, that power must travel from Rajpath (the ruler’s site) to Janpath (where common people tread), down to gram sabhas, which is the real repository of people’s power.

Urban Development: Impact of National Schemes on Marginalised Communities

Since 2014, under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s socio-political discourse has shifted to the right, driven by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS’s) ideology. The unprecedented moves like the triple talaq ban, Article 370 revocation, Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) legislation, and the Ram Janmabhoomi project reflect this shift, enabled by capturing institutions, media, judiciary, and public imagination.

Moving beyond its established role as a socio-political-cultural ideology with core philosophy of othering of those not belonging to the wider Hindu fold, Hindutva’s new phase is now possibly shaping cities and the urban lived environment, as a site for demonstrating ideology – socially, culturally and spatially. The targeted demolition of homes of Muslims as an act of collective punishment, and the recent cases of staged violence including at Sambhal mosque are only facets of a broader, emerging urban manifestation of the Hindutva ideology.

President Trump’s ‘Golden Era’: A Period of Promise and Peril

President Donald Trump proclaiming that the ‘Golden age of USA’ begins now as he dismantled many of the orders and schemes and policy choices of the Biden Administration. He did not spare the previous administration recounting their failures and wrong foreign and domestic policy choices terming them as ‘Catalogue of Catastrophe‘ in front of squirming Presidents Biden ,Clinton and Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

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