Democracy and Dictatorship in South Asia

Description: Democracy and Dictatorship in South Asia Please note: this item is printed on demand and will take extra time before it can be dispatched to you (up to 20 working days). Dominant Classes and Political Outcomes in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh Author(s): Robert W. Stern Format: Hardback Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, United States Imprint: Praeger Publishers Inc ISBN-13: 9780275970413, 978-0275970413 Synopsis In reaction to British imperialism during the 19th and 20th centuries, Indian Muslims and Hindus imagined and invented their separate and distinct religious communities and communal nationalisms. These were institutionalized in the subcontinent's political systems by the British government in collaboration with Indian politicians. Stern argues that this production of communalism has been crucial in structuring the composition and organization of South Asia's politically dominant classes, and that they, in turn, have been crucial in determining parliamentary democracy's growth or atrophy on the subcontinent. In what became India, the overwhelmingly Hindu National Congress formed a coalition of professionals and landed peasants, later joined by industrialists, that was friendly to the development of parliamentary democracy. In its western provinces, Pakistan's legacy from British government was a ruling coalition of landlords and civilian and military bureaucrats that has continued to impede the development of parliamentary democracy. Until 1971, this coalition equated parliamentary democracy with the loss of their dominance to Pakistan's Bengali majority. Only among them, in Pakistan's eastern province, now Bangladesh, was there a politically dominant coalition of classes that was friendly to the development of parliamentary democracy. It had the ironic effect in Pakistan of entrenching the west's anti-democratic coalition. Dogged by the legacies of twenty-four years as Pakistan's subordinate province, disorganization among its dominant classes and a vanished rural base, the development of parliamentary democracy in Bangladesh has been slow and uneven.

Price: 57.47 GBP

Location: Aldershot

End Time: 2024-10-24T11:12:10.000Z

Shipping Cost: 36.97 GBP