Indrajit Roy
Biographic Data
| ID | 203064 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Indrajit Roy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Indrajit |
| FAMILY NAME | Roy |
| SIGNATURE | ROY I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1583-6244 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 57 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Asserting southern agency: The moralistic realism of multiplexity
This article investigates the moralistic realism of the emerging multiplex world order. It does so by examining the recent expansion of the BRICS alongside the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Drawing on a critical analysis of official documents complemented by media reportage and secondary assessments by regional experts, synthesized alongside secondary data on key political and economic trends, the article illustrates the w…
Multiplexity 2.0: Power and pluralism in the post-liberal age
This article, and the special section in International Affairs it introduces, ask: how can we best read the post-liberal era of world politics? The resurgence of hard power has led many to turn to realism, even as a liberal lens reveals key features of the world we inherited. Meanwhile, diverse state and non-state actors around the globe are (re)asserting their voices in international affairs. This introduction to the special section builds on Am…
India: The making and resisting of an ethnocracy
India today exemplifies the making of an "ethnocracy," a polity in which the dominant ethnic group obtains political control and deploys the state apparatus to ethnicize territory and society.I illustrate the making of India's ethnocracy by documenting key political and policy practices of Narendra Modi's rule.I do this by offering evidence of this process by documenting: (1). the contest between the dominant Hindus and minority Muslims over terr…
The Rule of Law in an Ethnocracy: India's Citizenship Amendment Act and the Will of the Hindu Ethnos
What is the fate of the rule of law in India that is transitioning to an ethnocracy? Drawing on a ‘thin’ conception of the rule of law, this article argues that the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act responds to the emergence of a political ideal that constructs the Hindu ethnos as central to the Indian nation. Drawing on a variety of sources that include pronouncements by leaders of the RSS, the ideological fount of India's ruling BJP, anal…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Re-Inventing Citizenship Amidst Democratic Backsliding
Negotiating power: Disputes over electrification in rural India
How are infrastructures socially appropriated? This article uses my fortuitous presence in a rural locality in eastern India as its residents discussed proposals for its complete electrification, allowing me to reflect on social negotiations around infrastructure prior to its installation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of electrification in a West Bengal village, I illustrate the nuanced ways in which people inflect infrastructural projects w…
Southern Multilateralism: India's engagement with Africa and the emergence of a multiplex world order
This paper delineates the characteristics of an emerging Southern multilateralism to argue against pessimistic narratives of anarchy and disorder as well as optimistic narratives that celebrate the resilience of the Liberal International Order (LIO). It does this by staging a conversation between a top‐down International Relations literature that explores the contours of global order and a bottom‐up international development literature that inves…
How welfare wins: Discursive institutionalism, the politics of the poor, and the expansion of social welfare in India during the early 21st century
The worldwide explosion of social welfare has been described as the “quiet revolution” of our time. This paper analyses the expansion of social welfare in India during the early part of the 2000s. What explains this expansion of encompassing social welfare in India, following a history of disparate and fragmented social policies? The answer, I argue, lies in recognizing the importance of the “politics of the poor,” the ensemble of negotiations th…
Beyond clients and citizens: Making claims in rural India
Rural Indians cannot rely on official procedures to obtain social welfare entitlements. • The rural poor make claims on local politicians to access welfare. • Claims-making by poor people in rural India combine elements of 'clientelism', 'citizenship' and 'political society'. • An agonistic account of claims-making recognises its heterogeniety while appreciating the importance of both consent and contestation
Southern multilateralism: Complementary competition vis-à-vis the Liberal International Order
A growing literature documents the emergence of a “new multilateralism” in the postpandemic context (Telo 2020; Kaul 2020) and prior to it (IMF 2018; Hampson and Heinbecker 2011) to address challenges of inclusion and sustainability in global governance (Singh and Woolcock 2022, this special collection). Situated in the broader context of the changing global order, different strands of the literature debate the challenges offered by the “new mult…
Feeling like a citizen: Hope amid social exclusion in São Paulo during the Covid-19 pandemics
This paper harnesses the strengths of the recent affective turn in citizenship studies. It makes three contributions to the literature. First, against proponents and critics of neoliberalism who neglect the reinventions of citizenship under ‘neoliberalism’, it emphasises the politics of hope advanced by socially excluded people. Second, while sympathetic to the affective turn in citizenship it addresses what it believes to be its key limitations:…
Class Coalitions and Social Protection: The Labouring Classes and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Eastern India
Dramatic differences in the quality of human life are a prominent feature of today’s world. Poverty and inequality mutilate the life chances of millions around the globe, notwithstanding otherwise impressive economic achievements. To offset the challenges posed by the persistence and production of poverty and inequality, many governments and international development agencies have begun to formulate and implement agendas for social protection. Ne…
Dignified development: Democratic deepening in an Indian state
Beyond questions of transition to and backsliding from democracy, scholars are beginning to debate the contours of democratic deepening. This paper develops an account of ‘dignified development’ to elaborate understandings of democratic deepening through an interpretive synthesis of the secondary literature on Bihar between 1990 and 2005 when the much-maligned Lalu Prasad Yadav controlled the State’s governance.At a time when democracy is under t…
Reimagining Citizenship in India Today
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India
Stolen citizenship, stolen freedoms: Locating the rights of India’s circular labour migrants
With the rise of capitalism in post-colonial India, initially as a subsidiary part of a mixed economy with the state occupying its ‘commanding heights’, and later, especially after 1991, in the context of a new hegemony of globalised neoliberal capital, it was widely assumed that unfree labour, especially feudal forms of slavery in debt bondage, would vanish into history. This, however, has not happened. Inter-generational bondage to a single hou…
Class Politics and Social Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Local Governments in India
Dramatic differences in the quality of human life are a prominent feature of today’s world. In response, many governments and international development agencies have begun to formulate and implement agendas for social protection. Nevertheless, the outcomes of such initiatives remain vastly varied. What explains such variations? In this article, I direct attention to the role of class politics in shaping the implementation of social protection by …
Disjunctions of Democracy and Liberalism: Agonistic Imaginations of Dignity in Bihar
In this paper, I make a case for appreciating the ‘agonistics of democracy’ by reflecting on political changes in the state of Bihar in eastern India since 1990. These changes compel us to appreciate the substantive deepening of democracy in Bihar despite the absence of values commonly associated with liberalism. I first highlight the emergence of ‘Backward Caste’ assertion in the state, which sought to construct the broadest possible alliance ag…
Equality against hierarchy: Imagining modernity in subaltern India
How do subalterns imagine their membership in India's political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India's political-economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political-economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life. Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political-economic sphere of the state cannot …
Emancipation as social equality
The ethnographies presented in this article point to the ways in which members of oppressed communities imagine emancipation. Instead of analyzing emancipation as stemming from statist precepts of citizenship, I want to direct attention-along with other articles in this special section-to the "arcadian" spaces in which exploited, marginalized, and discriminated populations forge membership in the political community in contentious engagement with…
A Consensus Unravels: NREGA and the Paradox of Rules-Based Welfare in India
Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar
The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains t…
Reserve labor, unreserved politics: Dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act
The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in forc…
Contesting Consensus. Disputing Inequality: Agonistic Subjectivities in Rural Bihar
The literature on the politics of the ‘poor’ has pointed to the manner in which the disputes they are embroiled in are about access to and control over resources, or defending what little they have from encroachments and infringements by the rich and the powerful. Other strands in the literature have drawn attention to their incorporation into ‘identity’ politics, mediated through categories of caste, religion and community. While the analytic sa…
Development as Dignity: Dissensus, Equality and Contentious Politics in Bihar, India
This paper makes an analytical case for the understanding of development as a process that enables people to reclaim their dignity and interrogate inegalitarian social relations. It is motivated by the ongoing debate within development studies between those who propound a teleological view of development and those who adopt the opposing view that the process must not obliterate historical and cultural difference. The former view is informed by an…
Reserve labor, unreserved politics: Dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act
The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in forc…
Development as Dignity: Dissensus, Equality and Contentious Politics in Bihar, India
This paper makes an analytical case for the understanding of development as a process that enables people to reclaim their dignity and interrogate inegalitarian social relations. It is motivated by the ongoing debate within development studies between those who propound a teleological view of development and those who adopt the opposing view that the process must not obliterate historical and cultural difference. The former view is informed by an…
Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar
The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains t…
Emancipation as social equality
The ethnographies presented in this article point to the ways in which members of oppressed communities imagine emancipation. Instead of analyzing emancipation as stemming from statist precepts of citizenship, I want to direct attention-along with other articles in this special section-to the "arcadian" spaces in which exploited, marginalized, and discriminated populations forge membership in the political community in contentious engagement with…
Civil Society and Good Governance: (Re-) Conceptualizing the Interface
India: The making and resisting of an ethnocracy
India today exemplifies the making of an "ethnocracy," a polity in which the dominant ethnic group obtains political control and deploys the state apparatus to ethnicize territory and society.I illustrate the making of India's ethnocracy by documenting key political and policy practices of Narendra Modi's rule.I do this by offering evidence of this process by documenting: (1). the contest between the dominant Hindus and minority Muslims over terr…
How welfare wins: Discursive institutionalism, the politics of the poor, and the expansion of social welfare in India during the early 21st century
The worldwide explosion of social welfare has been described as the “quiet revolution” of our time. This paper analyses the expansion of social welfare in India during the early part of the 2000s. What explains this expansion of encompassing social welfare in India, following a history of disparate and fragmented social policies? The answer, I argue, lies in recognizing the importance of the “politics of the poor,” the ensemble of negotiations th…
Dignified development: Democratic deepening in an Indian state
Beyond questions of transition to and backsliding from democracy, scholars are beginning to debate the contours of democratic deepening. This paper develops an account of ‘dignified development’ to elaborate understandings of democratic deepening through an interpretive synthesis of the secondary literature on Bihar between 1990 and 2005 when the much-maligned Lalu Prasad Yadav controlled the State’s governance.At a time when democracy is under t…
Equality against hierarchy: Imagining modernity in subaltern India
How do subalterns imagine their membership in India's political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India's political-economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political-economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life. Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political-economic sphere of the state cannot …
A Consensus Unravels: NREGA and the Paradox of Rules-Based Welfare in India
The Rule of Law in an Ethnocracy: India's Citizenship Amendment Act and the Will of the Hindu Ethnos
What is the fate of the rule of law in India that is transitioning to an ethnocracy? Drawing on a ‘thin’ conception of the rule of law, this article argues that the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act responds to the emergence of a political ideal that constructs the Hindu ethnos as central to the Indian nation. Drawing on a variety of sources that include pronouncements by leaders of the RSS, the ideological fount of India's ruling BJP, anal…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Re-Inventing Citizenship Amidst Democratic Backsliding
Beyond clients and citizens: Making claims in rural India
Rural Indians cannot rely on official procedures to obtain social welfare entitlements. • The rural poor make claims on local politicians to access welfare. • Claims-making by poor people in rural India combine elements of 'clientelism', 'citizenship' and 'political society'. • An agonistic account of claims-making recognises its heterogeniety while appreciating the importance of both consent and contestation
Feeling like a citizen: Hope amid social exclusion in São Paulo during the Covid-19 pandemics
This paper harnesses the strengths of the recent affective turn in citizenship studies. It makes three contributions to the literature. First, against proponents and critics of neoliberalism who neglect the reinventions of citizenship under ‘neoliberalism’, it emphasises the politics of hope advanced by socially excluded people. Second, while sympathetic to the affective turn in citizenship it addresses what it believes to be its key limitations:…
Good governance and the dilemma of development: What Lies Beneath
Ideas unleash human imaginations, as well as hold these imaginations on a leash. However, they are scarcely disarticulated from material realities. Together with these realities, they take on the form of discourses—words, concepts and thoughts that characterize how we live. ‘Good governance’ has come to occupy such a space in the practical and theoretical discussions on development. This paper attempts to put current understanding into perspectiv…
Transfer of Technology Systems in Bangladesh Agriculture
Stagnating Productivity in Crop Agriculture: The Quest for Sources of Growth
Involving People in Agroforestry: The Experience of the Village and Farm Forestry Project in Bangladesh
Foodgrain Production in Bangladesh as Influenced by Trends in Use of Inputs and their Management at the Farm Level
Good governance and the dilemma of development: What Lies Beneath
Ideas unleash human imaginations, as well as hold these imaginations on a leash. However, they are scarcely disarticulated from material realities. Together with these realities, they take on the form of discourses—words, concepts and thoughts that characterize how we live. ‘Good governance’ has come to occupy such a space in the practical and theoretical discussions on development. This paper attempts to put current understanding into perspectiv…
Pluralism and civil society partnerships: Perspectives from Nepal and Uttar Pradesh
Hitherto, South Asian governments have found it convenient to arbitrate between different sections and communities. Increasingly, however, as a multiplicity of demands surface articulating the democratic aspirations of marginalised castes, creeds, tribal peoples and other ethnic groups, governments must work in collaboration with actors in civil society. As monolithically constructed communities are splintered along ‘local’ constituents and devel…
Civil Society and Good Governance: (Re-) Conceptualizing the Interface
Contesting Consensus. Disputing Inequality: Agonistic Subjectivities in Rural Bihar
The literature on the politics of the ‘poor’ has pointed to the manner in which the disputes they are embroiled in are about access to and control over resources, or defending what little they have from encroachments and infringements by the rich and the powerful. Other strands in the literature have drawn attention to their incorporation into ‘identity’ politics, mediated through categories of caste, religion and community. While the analytic sa…
Development as Dignity: Dissensus, Equality and Contentious Politics in Bihar, India
This paper makes an analytical case for the understanding of development as a process that enables people to reclaim their dignity and interrogate inegalitarian social relations. It is motivated by the ongoing debate within development studies between those who propound a teleological view of development and those who adopt the opposing view that the process must not obliterate historical and cultural difference. The former view is informed by an…
Reserve labor, unreserved politics: Dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act
The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in forc…
A Consensus Unravels: NREGA and the Paradox of Rules-Based Welfare in India
Utopia in Crisis? Subaltern Imaginations in Contemporary Bihar
The Subaltern Studies Collective inaugurated an important point of departure in Indian historiography and social sciences by demanding that attention be directed to subalterns (a term adapted from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks) as makers of their own destinies. Their scholarship raises three issues, which are discussed in this article. The first of these relates to the empirical observation about subaltern resistance to elites. The second pertains t…
Equality against hierarchy: Imagining modernity in subaltern India
How do subalterns imagine their membership in India's political community? Many scholars argue that they imbibe the egalitarian ideals in India's political-economic sphere. Others suggest that subalterns identify the modernising impulses of the political-economic sphere as a greater threat to their ways of life. Intervening in this debate, recent research enlivens analysts to the perspective that the political-economic sphere of the state cannot …
Emancipation as social equality
The ethnographies presented in this article point to the ways in which members of oppressed communities imagine emancipation. Instead of analyzing emancipation as stemming from statist precepts of citizenship, I want to direct attention-along with other articles in this special section-to the "arcadian" spaces in which exploited, marginalized, and discriminated populations forge membership in the political community in contentious engagement with…
Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India
Stolen citizenship, stolen freedoms: Locating the rights of India’s circular labour migrants
With the rise of capitalism in post-colonial India, initially as a subsidiary part of a mixed economy with the state occupying its ‘commanding heights’, and later, especially after 1991, in the context of a new hegemony of globalised neoliberal capital, it was widely assumed that unfree labour, especially feudal forms of slavery in debt bondage, would vanish into history. This, however, has not happened. Inter-generational bondage to a single hou…
Class Politics and Social Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Local Governments in India
Dramatic differences in the quality of human life are a prominent feature of today’s world. In response, many governments and international development agencies have begun to formulate and implement agendas for social protection. Nevertheless, the outcomes of such initiatives remain vastly varied. What explains such variations? In this article, I direct attention to the role of class politics in shaping the implementation of social protection by …
Disjunctions of Democracy and Liberalism: Agonistic Imaginations of Dignity in Bihar
In this paper, I make a case for appreciating the ‘agonistics of democracy’ by reflecting on political changes in the state of Bihar in eastern India since 1990. These changes compel us to appreciate the substantive deepening of democracy in Bihar despite the absence of values commonly associated with liberalism. I first highlight the emergence of ‘Backward Caste’ assertion in the state, which sought to construct the broadest possible alliance ag…
Class Coalitions and Social Protection: The Labouring Classes and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Eastern India
Dramatic differences in the quality of human life are a prominent feature of today’s world. Poverty and inequality mutilate the life chances of millions around the globe, notwithstanding otherwise impressive economic achievements. To offset the challenges posed by the persistence and production of poverty and inequality, many governments and international development agencies have begun to formulate and implement agendas for social protection. Ne…
Dignified development: Democratic deepening in an Indian state
Beyond questions of transition to and backsliding from democracy, scholars are beginning to debate the contours of democratic deepening. This paper develops an account of ‘dignified development’ to elaborate understandings of democratic deepening through an interpretive synthesis of the secondary literature on Bihar between 1990 and 2005 when the much-maligned Lalu Prasad Yadav controlled the State’s governance.At a time when democracy is under t…
Reimagining Citizenship in India Today
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Southern multilateralism: Complementary competition vis-à-vis the Liberal International Order
A growing literature documents the emergence of a “new multilateralism” in the postpandemic context (Telo 2020; Kaul 2020) and prior to it (IMF 2018; Hampson and Heinbecker 2011) to address challenges of inclusion and sustainability in global governance (Singh and Woolcock 2022, this special collection). Situated in the broader context of the changing global order, different strands of the literature debate the challenges offered by the “new mult…
Feeling like a citizen: Hope amid social exclusion in São Paulo during the Covid-19 pandemics
This paper harnesses the strengths of the recent affective turn in citizenship studies. It makes three contributions to the literature. First, against proponents and critics of neoliberalism who neglect the reinventions of citizenship under ‘neoliberalism’, it emphasises the politics of hope advanced by socially excluded people. Second, while sympathetic to the affective turn in citizenship it addresses what it believes to be its key limitations:…
Southern Multilateralism: India's engagement with Africa and the emergence of a multiplex world order
This paper delineates the characteristics of an emerging Southern multilateralism to argue against pessimistic narratives of anarchy and disorder as well as optimistic narratives that celebrate the resilience of the Liberal International Order (LIO). It does this by staging a conversation between a top‐down International Relations literature that explores the contours of global order and a bottom‐up international development literature that inves…
How welfare wins: Discursive institutionalism, the politics of the poor, and the expansion of social welfare in India during the early 21st century
The worldwide explosion of social welfare has been described as the “quiet revolution” of our time. This paper analyses the expansion of social welfare in India during the early part of the 2000s. What explains this expansion of encompassing social welfare in India, following a history of disparate and fragmented social policies? The answer, I argue, lies in recognizing the importance of the “politics of the poor,” the ensemble of negotiations th…
Political science (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (24 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (19 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Social and Economic Development in India (13 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Citizenship (7 works)