India’s Improbable Success

Issue Date April 2008
Volume 19
Issue 2
Page Numbers 170-178
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Read the full essay here.

A review of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha, and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, by Martha C. Nussbaum.

About the Author

Šumit Ganguly is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington, and is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author (with William Thompson) of Ascending India and Its State Capacity (2017).

View all work by Šumit Ganguly

Further Reading

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Discovering the “State-Nation”

A review of Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies by Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav.

Volume 18, Issue 2

India’s Unlikely Democracy: The Rise of Judicial Sovereignty

India's courts have been playing a growing role in the country's political life. Yet even as judicial interventions have become more sweeping, the principles undergirding their legitimacy have become less…

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Elections in India: Behind the Congress Comeback

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