Ashutosh Varshney
Biographic Data
| ID | 385028 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ashutosh Varshney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ashutosh |
| FAMILY NAME | Varshney |
| SIGNATURE | VARSHNEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | John Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0215-9790 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 43 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 527 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva
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.
Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow
This essay draws a parallel between the political and social dynamics of Hindu nationalism in India under Narendra Modi and the policies of racial segregation of the Jim Crow era in the United States (from approximately 1880 to 1965). As with the marginalization of black Americans based on race during Jim Crow, Hindu nationalism aims to marginalize Muslim Indians based on religion. Methods similar to those used in the Jim Crow South—including exc…
The Rich Have Peers, the Poor Have Patrons: Engaging the State in a South Indian City
Research on democracy has shed much light on two kinds of democratic politics: patterns of voting and patterns of associational or movement politics. But there is growing recognition that in order to better understand the quality or depth of democracy, we need to move beyond this dualistic focus to better understand the everyday practices through which citizens can effectively wield their rights; these practices often diverge from the formal equa…
How India's Ruling Party Erodes Democracy
India's democratic backsliding began with the rise to power of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. Five years later, the party won an even bigger parliamentary majority. The BJP now runs not only the central government, but also all but ten of the 28 states, whether on its own or allied with other parties. Though India has not regressed democratically by the criteria of electoral contestation and participatio…
Populism and Hindu Nationalism in India
Populism and Nationalism: An Overview of Similarities and Differences
Modi Consolidates Power: Electoral Vibrancy, Mounting Liberal Deficits
Narendra Modi has returned to power with an enhanced mandate, making him the most powerful Indian politician since Indira Gandhi. His victory in 2019 is based on a record turnout. It also shows a rising consolidation of Hindu votes, something the caste cleavages of Hindu society had earlier made virtually impossible. But this victory has come at a steep price. As Modi and turnouts are rising, India’s liberal freedoms are declining, and the Muslim…
Growth, Inequality, and Nationalism
Of late, Indian democracy has been confronted with a new political economy. Strong economic growth over the last three decades has generated the world's fourth-largest collection of dollar billionaires and the third-largest middle class, both for the first time in Indian history, while still leaving the single largest concentration of the poor behind. In a democracy where the lower-income groups have come to vote as much as, or more than, the hig…
When Large Conflicts Subside: The Ebbs and Flows of Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia
The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary spate of scholarship on the ethno-communal violence that swept through Indonesia following the collapse of the Suharto regime. Yet we know very little about how these large-scale violent conflicts subsided and the patterns of post-conflict violence that have emerged since. We introduce evidence from an original dataset to show that the high violence period lasted till 2003, after which violence decli…
Asian Democracy through an Indian Prism
The essays in this symposium are longing for completion. A heavy Indian shadow hangs over them. Asian democracy is the overall theme of the symposium, but India, Asia's biggest "democratic behemoth," to use Edward Aspinall's phrase, is more or less missing. Why is a discussion of Indian democracy necessary for this symposium? What would it add to the arguments made here and the themes discussed
Beyond Urban Bias
India's Watershed Vote: Hindu Nationalism in Power
How will the BJP’s relationship with India’s Muslims evolve? This is among the most significant questions that the BJP’s stunning election victory poses. Though ideologically the BJP is suspicious of Muslims, the BJP’s rule is unlikely to be a mechanical extension of the party’s core ideology. As before, two constraints will matter: constitutional and political. India’s constitution is not committed to Hindu nationalism. And if the BJP wants its …
Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons
It has often been alleged, most recently in the recommendations of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), that the Indian state promotes, or is complicit in, Hindu-Muslim violence for political or electoral reasons. But the evidence for the claim has historically been sketchy. In StevenWilkinson's work, Votes and Violence, the argument is that the evidence supporting state complicity is systematic.We examine this argument and find it to be fund…
"Discovering the "State-Nation
Discovering the "State-Nation" Ashutosh Varshney (bio) Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. By Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 308 pp. For its conceptual innovation, erudition, and real-world applicability, this book deserves to be widely read. It helps us to reconfigure the debate on the relationship between ethnic diversity and political institutions…
Collective Violence in Indonesia
Since the end of Suharto's so-called New Order (1966-1998) in Indonesia and the eruption of vicious group violence, a number of questions have engaged the minds of scholars and other observers. How widespread is the group violence? What forms—ethnic, religious, economic—has it primarily taken? Have the clashes of the post-Suharto years been significantly more widespread, or worse, than those of the late New Order? The authors of Collective Violen…
Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife. An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India
Creating Datasets in Information-Poor Environments: Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003
Indonesia has witnessed explosive group violence in recent years, but unlike its plentiful economic statistics, the data on conflict are remarkably sketchy. Because the New Order (1966–1998) wanted to give the appearance of order and stability, it did not believe in publishing reports on group conflict, nor did it allow researchers and nongovernmental organizations to probe the patterns and causes of conflict. This article is based on the first m…
Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview
In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner: A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of ... Dutch colonial rule ...; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanes…
China and India: A New Asian Drama
With the economic rise of India and China, a new question has entered the international public sphere: How will the polities of India and China be shaped by their continuing economic march over the next decade or so? More specifically, will politics get in the way of their steady economic rise, or will political liberalization continue as the market forces are embraced ever more vigorously? Will economic liberalization, in short, promote further …
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Rationality
Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-i…
India's House Divided: Understanding Communal Violence
Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond
Scholars have worked either on civil society or on ethnic conflict, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to connect the two. In an attempt to explore the possible links, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First,interethnicandintraethnicnetworks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict. Because they build bridges and manage tensions, interethnic networks are agents of peace. But if communities are organ…
Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion
Research Article| September 01 2000 Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion Ashutosh Varshney Ashutosh Varshney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 718–736. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021173 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissi…
Is India Becoming More Democratic
A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space…
Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond
Scholars have worked either on civil society or on ethnic conflict, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to connect the two. In an attempt to explore the possible links, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First,interethnicandintraethnicnetworks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict. Because they build bridges and manage tensions, interethnic networks are agents of peace. But if communities are organ…
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Rationality
Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-i…
Is India Becoming More Democratic
A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space…
India Defies the Odds: Why Democracy Survives
India Defies the OddsWhy Democracy Survives Ashutosh Varshney (bio) India has long baffled theorists of democracy. Democratic theory holds that poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a deeply hierarchical social structure are inhospitable conditions for the functioning of democracy. 1 Yet except for 18 months in 1975–77, India has maintained its democratic institutions ever since it became independent of Britain in 1947. Over those five decades, the…
How India's Ruling Party Erodes Democracy
India's democratic backsliding began with the rise to power of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. Five years later, the party won an even bigger parliamentary majority. The BJP now runs not only the central government, but also all but ten of the 28 states, whether on its own or allied with other parties. Though India has not regressed democratically by the criteria of electoral contestation and participatio…
Modi Consolidates Power: Electoral Vibrancy, Mounting Liberal Deficits
Narendra Modi has returned to power with an enhanced mandate, making him the most powerful Indian politician since Indira Gandhi. His victory in 2019 is based on a record turnout. It also shows a rising consolidation of Hindu votes, something the caste cleavages of Hindu society had earlier made virtually impossible. But this victory has come at a steep price. As Modi and turnouts are rising, India’s liberal freedoms are declining, and the Muslim…
India's Watershed Vote: Hindu Nationalism in Power
How will the BJP’s relationship with India’s Muslims evolve? This is among the most significant questions that the BJP’s stunning election victory poses. Though ideologically the BJP is suspicious of Muslims, the BJP’s rule is unlikely to be a mechanical extension of the party’s core ideology. As before, two constraints will matter: constitutional and political. India’s constitution is not committed to Hindu nationalism. And if the BJP wants its …
Introduction: Urban Bias in perspective
Under what conditions might urban bias erode? Are those conditions entirely uncommon? Or is it that our customary understanding was wrong in several key respects? These are the questions underlying this volume. To express our vantage point clearly, the papers focus on the conditions under which the countryside is not 'squeezed'. Four critiques of the urban bias theory emerge, three of which are new. First, the urban bias theory neglects political…
Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife. An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Postmodernism, Civic Engagement, and Ethnic Conflict: A Passage to India
By far newest development in study of ethnic conflict and nationalism is rise of postmodern approaches.' What distinguishes postmodernism from mainstream social sciences is, minimally, a twofold claim that power relations are deeply implicated in formation of and that much of what passes for objective or in human sciences is basically a narrative constructed by elites and promoted by institutions of power.2 Alternative forms of were suppressed in…
Creating Datasets in Information-Poor Environments: Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003
Indonesia has witnessed explosive group violence in recent years, but unlike its plentiful economic statistics, the data on conflict are remarkably sketchy. Because the New Order (1966–1998) wanted to give the appearance of order and stability, it did not believe in publishing reports on group conflict, nor did it allow researchers and nongovernmental organizations to probe the patterns and causes of conflict. This article is based on the first m…
When Large Conflicts Subside: The Ebbs and Flows of Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia
The last decade has witnessed an extraordinary spate of scholarship on the ethno-communal violence that swept through Indonesia following the collapse of the Suharto regime. Yet we know very little about how these large-scale violent conflicts subsided and the patterns of post-conflict violence that have emerged since. We introduce evidence from an original dataset to show that the high violence period lasted till 2003, after which violence decli…
India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism
Research Article| November 01 1991 India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism Ashutosh Varshney Ashutosh Varshney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1991) 31 (11): 997–1019. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645304 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Se…
Ideas, interest and institutions in policy change: Transformation of India's agricultural strategy in the mid-1960s
Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow
This essay draws a parallel between the political and social dynamics of Hindu nationalism in India under Narendra Modi and the policies of racial segregation of the Jim Crow era in the United States (from approximately 1880 to 1965). As with the marginalization of black Americans based on race during Jim Crow, Hindu nationalism aims to marginalize Muslim Indians based on religion. Methods similar to those used in the Jim Crow South—including exc…
Populism and Hindu Nationalism in India
Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons
It has often been alleged, most recently in the recommendations of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), that the Indian state promotes, or is complicit in, Hindu-Muslim violence for political or electoral reasons. But the evidence for the claim has historically been sketchy. In StevenWilkinson's work, Votes and Violence, the argument is that the evidence supporting state complicity is systematic.We examine this argument and find it to be fund…
The Rich Have Peers, the Poor Have Patrons: Engaging the State in a South Indian City
Research on democracy has shed much light on two kinds of democratic politics: patterns of voting and patterns of associational or movement politics. But there is growing recognition that in order to better understand the quality or depth of democracy, we need to move beyond this dualistic focus to better understand the everyday practices through which citizens can effectively wield their rights; these practices often diverge from the formal equa…
Populism and Nationalism: An Overview of Similarities and Differences
Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion
Research Article| September 01 2000 Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion Ashutosh Varshney Ashutosh Varshney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 718–736. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021173 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissi…
Growth, Inequality, and Nationalism
Of late, Indian democracy has been confronted with a new political economy. Strong economic growth over the last three decades has generated the world's fourth-largest collection of dollar billionaires and the third-largest middle class, both for the first time in Indian history, while still leaving the single largest concentration of the poor behind. In a democracy where the lower-income groups have come to vote as much as, or more than, the hig…
Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview
In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner: A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of ... Dutch colonial rule ...; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanes…
"Discovering the "State-Nation
Discovering the "State-Nation" Ashutosh Varshney (bio) Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. By Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 308 pp. For its conceptual innovation, erudition, and real-world applicability, this book deserves to be widely read. It helps us to reconfigure the debate on the relationship between ethnic diversity and political institutions…
Political Economy of Western Aid to the Third World: A Structural Reinterpretation
The problem of economic aid requires a comprehensive reassessment. Apart from the shortcomings of the existing studies, a few other developments, having their origins in the seventies, have made this imperative. Firstly, consequent upon the intensified theme of transfer of resources under the demand for a new international economic order and the increasing vulnerability of the international credit structure, the issue of aid has reentered the cor…
Political Economy of Western Aid to the Third World: A Structural Reinterpretation
The problem of economic aid requires a comprehensive reassessment. Apart from the shortcomings of the existing studies, a few other developments, having their origins in the seventies, have made this imperative. Firstly, consequent upon the intensified theme of transfer of resources under the demand for a new international economic order and the increasing vulnerability of the international credit structure, the issue of aid has reentered the cor…
India's political economy: Issues, non‐issues and puzzles
(1988). India's political economy: Issues, non‐issues and puzzles. The Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics: Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 234-245
Ideas, interest and institutions in policy change: Transformation of India's agricultural strategy in the mid-1960s
India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism
Research Article| November 01 1991 India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism Ashutosh Varshney Ashutosh Varshney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1991) 31 (11): 997–1019. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645304 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Se…
The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics
PART ONE: NATION BUILDING AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS The Indian Paradox Violent Social Conflict and Democratic Politics India's Minorities Who Are They? What do they Want? Institution Building in India PART TWO: CHANGING PUBLIC POLICIES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Well-Being The Political Economy of Industrial Growth Political Consequences of Preferential Policies India in Comparative Perspective PART THREE: ELECTORAL …
Award Recipients
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button
India: Liberalism Vs. Nationalism
India:Liberalism Vs. Nationalism Ashutosh Varshney (bio) Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability by Atul Kohli. Cambridge University Press, 1991. 420 pp. The Politics of India Since Independence by Paul Brass. Cambridge University Press, 1990. 357 pp. With the recent worldwide upsurge in nationalism, students of democracy must pay particular attention to the difficulties posed by religious and ethnic conflict. This is es…
Self‐limited empowerment: Democracy, economic development and rural India
This study deals with two questions: (i) what accounts for the rise of the countryside in India's polity? and (ii) how has rural power in the polity affected economic policy and economic outcomes for the peasantry? The rural sector is typically weak in the early stages of development. A powerful countryside, therefore, is a counter‐historical occurrence. Universal franchise and a competitive democracy in a primarily agrarian India have led to the…
Introduction: Urban Bias in perspective
Under what conditions might urban bias erode? Are those conditions entirely uncommon? Or is it that our customary understanding was wrong in several key respects? These are the questions underlying this volume. To express our vantage point clearly, the papers focus on the conditions under which the countryside is not 'squeezed'. Four critiques of the urban bias theory emerge, three of which are new. First, the urban bias theory neglects political…
Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India
Several scholars have written about how authoritarian or democratic political systems affect industrialization in the developing countries. There is no literature, however, on whether democracy makes a difference to the power and well-being of the countryside. Using India as a case where the longest-surviving democracy of the developing world exists, this book investigates how the countryside uses the political system to advance its interests. It…
Democracy, development, and the countryside: Urban-rural struggles in India
Several scholars have written about how authoritarian or democratic political systems affect industrialization in the developing countries. There is no literature, however, on whether or not democracy makes a difference to the power and well-being of the countryside. Through the example of India, which enjoys the longest-surviving democracy of the developing world, this book investigates how the countryside uses the political system to advance it…
Postmodernism, Civic Engagement, and Ethnic Conflict: A Passage to India
By far newest development in study of ethnic conflict and nationalism is rise of postmodern approaches.' What distinguishes postmodernism from mainstream social sciences is, minimally, a twofold claim that power relations are deeply implicated in formation of and that much of what passes for objective or in human sciences is basically a narrative constructed by elites and promoted by institutions of power.2 Alternative forms of were suppressed in…
The Politics of New Farmers' Movements
Growth of Rural Power and Indian Democracy
India Defies the Odds: Why Democracy Survives
India Defies the OddsWhy Democracy Survives Ashutosh Varshney (bio) India has long baffled theorists of democracy. Democratic theory holds that poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a deeply hierarchical social structure are inhospitable conditions for the functioning of democracy. 1 Yet except for 18 months in 1975–77, India has maintained its democratic institutions ever since it became independent of Britain in 1947. Over those five decades, the…
Choix rationnels », conflit ethnique et culture
Choix rationnels », conflit ethnique et culture
Varshney Ashutosh, Bouyssou Rachel. « Choix rationnels », conflit ethnique et culture. In: Critique internationale, vol. 5. 1999. Mémoire, justice et réconciliation, sous la direction de Pierre Hassner. pp. 50-58
The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India
Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion
Research Article| September 01 2000 Why Have Poor Democracies Not Eliminated Poverty? A Suggestion Ashutosh Varshney Ashutosh Varshney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (2000) 40 (5): 718–736. https://doi.org/10.2307/3021173 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissi…
Is India Becoming More Democratic
A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space…
Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond
Scholars have worked either on civil society or on ethnic conflict, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to connect the two. In an attempt to explore the possible links, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First,interethnicandintraethnicnetworks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict. Because they build bridges and manage tensions, interethnic networks are agents of peace. But if communities are organ…
India's House Divided: Understanding Communal Violence
Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Rationality
Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-i…
China and India: A New Asian Drama
With the economic rise of India and China, a new question has entered the international public sphere: How will the polities of India and China be shaped by their continuing economic march over the next decade or so? More specifically, will politics get in the way of their steady economic rise, or will political liberalization continue as the market forces are embraced ever more vigorously? Will economic liberalization, in short, promote further …
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India
Political science (38 works) · Law (32 works) · Politics (29 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Political economy (24 works) · Economics (20 works) · Democracy (15 works) · Development economics (14 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (13 works)