Nehruvian Model Research Articles

Modernity, violence and ‘environmentalism of the poor’: the visuality of inauspicious in Orijit Sen’s River of Stories

ABSTRACT Modern and material development in the name of progress has always hindered and displaced a few specific communities like tribal, Adivasis, or indigenous people in India. In a developing country like India, most modern projects are implemented following the Nehruvian model of development, often criticised as ‘flawed.’ Once constructed, while much fuss and hype are made about such ‘Modern’ projects, the sufferings and plight of the surrounding local communities are often neglected, and their voice remains unheard. Analysing Orijit Sen’s graphic narrative River of Stories (1994, 2022), this article focuses on the ‘visuality of inauspicious’ in the form of constructing the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the country. The Dam displaced several Adivasis, and their society also ‘dislodged from its ideal state’ (Sen 2018, 110) and caused environmental degradation in the surrounding areas. This article underscores how the usurping of the villager’s land in the name of modernity, development, and national progress evokes the process of colonisation and its associated violence. The article also explores the environmental movement in the form of ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ that rose against this project, and while analysing the movement, I discuss in detail how the villagers adopted an eco-conscious and Gandhian non-violent approach.

Operationalizing Right to Health in India: A Constitutional Essence

Food, Shelter and Clothing are the three basic needs of every individual existing in this world. Without meeting these three needs we can think or go for any other needs. These three needs sustain human life. Among these three basic needs, Food has been placed at the first spot because of its importance in human life. Even a destitute will first search for food. When we connect all these three basic needs, it streamlines towards Health of an Individual. A sound health results in a sound mind and then a sound individual. Health is the foremost important indicator of human development. This particular human development leads to achievement of economic and social development. In India, recognition of the right to health care and protection got prominence from the early times. Our first Prime Minister Hon’ble Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru had adopted the best possible socialist model targeting Socio Economic development of India. This Socialist Model of Nehru ji commonly known as the Nehruvian Model gave a lot of emphasis on the Health care access to all the citizens of India. Therefore following Nehru ji’s socialist principles - Independent India approached the public as the first right holder and the state as the duty-bound primary provider of health for its citizen. All other subsequent governments only followed the Nehru led Congress government Health care model. The current BJP government’s National Health Policy 2017 is only a reflection of Nehru’s socialist vision for Health care system. Our nation is one of the founding member of United Nations Organisation (UNO). India has been instrumental in adhering to most of the International norms of the UN. India has ratified numerous international conventions pertaining to health care guarantee which promise to secure health care right of individuals. In domestic law, The Constitution of India does not expressively recognize health as a fundamental right. Fundamental right to Health and health care access is only shaped by various judicial pronouncements. Through judicial interventions, Right to health got a place in Article 21 of the Constitution of India that guarantees a fundamental right to life & personal liberty. All the Judicial pronouncements implies that the expression ‘life in this article means a life with human dignity & not mere survival or animal existence’. This has a broader scope to enforce Right to Health as a statutory right by including right to livelihood, better standard of life, hygienic condition in workplace & leisure. To understand Right to health in a better way through constitutional perspective we must read Article 21 with Articles 38, 42, 43, & 47 for understanding the nature of the obligation of the state in order to ensure the effective realization of this right. Indian Judiciary at time has taken step to merge Right to Health as a fundamental right along with the other fundamental rights. Development of the nation is bestowed upon its population and a population having adequate access to Health care services is utmost important. The state comes with duty to provide an effective mechanism for the welfare of the public at large. The right to healthcare is recognised as a claim to an entitlement. It is a positive Right but can’t be called as a protective fence. The right to health in its every form and level consist of an interrelated and essential elements of availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of healthcare services. Universal access to good quality healthcare equitably is the heart to understand the concept of right to health and healthcare. “Health care for all” can be reality by making healthcare a fundamental right in the constitution apart from constitutional measures by enacting a social legislation to ensure minimum standards in the private medical sector and through budgetary allocation doubling the public budgetary allocations for health and initiating a scheme for a village-based healthcare. In the International arena, Right to Health has been well recognized as a basic Human right. The World Health Organization has defined health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru in Lok Sabha during the Budget session of 1956 while referring to the definition said: “If you achieve that object, I am sure you would have solved the whole problem in the world, because if we can achieve that, every problem disappears from the world.”

Observing Developmental Intervention in Mineral-rich Adivasi Subsistence Economy: An Ethnographic Account from West Singhbhum (Jharkhand)

The shift of the political economy of development from the Nehruvian model to the Neoliberal market model has relocated the discourses and practices of development. A state becomes a facilitator, protector and advocator of the capitalist market economy and the praxis of development become a kind of governmentality that often privileges the specific class interest. In this neoliberalized era, cultural politics of the developmental intervention (DI) needs immediate attention because the state DI has a huge impact on the pre-capitalist mode of social formation. This article covers Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum to study the DI on local indigenous population who have sacral and subsistence kind of societal formation. This article tries to show why there is need to understand development and its nature in mineral-rich Adivasi regions. The main focus of this article is on exploring the pattern of state development intervention in the region of pre-capitalist social formation and what outcomes it has carried for commons. Through case studies collected from field areas, we try to show that the contemporary development process and practices are based on the premises of modernization and neoliberalization and it has been widely criticized for being exclusionary and biased in the mineral-rich pre-capitalist society. At the same time, we also try to demarcate these state developmental issues at epistemological level which helps to understand the nature of development intervention in Adivasi resource-rich regions.

Mapping the Gendered Contexts of the ‘Glocal’ Nation: A Critical Rereading of Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: Via Bypass

The announcement of the new economic policy in 1991 pushed India into hitherto unchartered domains of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. Many literary writings by Indian women published in the 1990s and 2000s reflect the rupture of Nehruvian model of development as India entered and settled itself in the brave new world of globalisation. Reading Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: Via Bypass (1998), this article attempts to explore how women writers in the post-1991 era negotiated the category of nation and its concomitant identity politics when it was impinged on by the looming spectre of liberalisation and globalisation. When we place women’s writing at the interstices of gender, caste and class inequalities alongside the syndicated structures of nation and globalisation, we find how deeply it engages with the fundamental asymmetry of power relations in society. Kali-katha: Via Bypass attempts to trace the kind of changes that have been taking place since the onset of the 1990s, proposing a rethinking of the very terms in which the woman’s question has been framed in the post-independence years. Thereby, this text calls for revising the way we have been constructing our knowledge of the nation, especially its gendered contexts. Such an epistemological revision, however, would not preclude looking at the past, suggests the text.

‘Modi'fications in Indian Foreign Policy

Indian foreign policy is ideologically dominated by Nehruvian model that emphasises on non-alignment. But the emergence of Mr. Narendra Modi in India's political horizon has been significantly transforming the emphasis and style of Indian foreign policy. Projecting his own uniqueness is the characteristic of Mr. Modi, which clearly reflected when he invited SAARC leaders in his swearing-in ceremony. His fast track diplomatic visits of neighbouring countries and meetings with the leaders of most of the major countries alongwith US President Barack Obama in less than a year have obviously given him a lead over his predecessors. Modi's new initiatives like, ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’, etc showcase his departure from the tradition. Though, former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was also no different, but he was careful to dress his policies like a continuum of the legacy of Nehruvian model. But Modi's emphasis is to project all his initiatives as departures. Hence, there are unprecedented expectations that the Modivian era has now been started in India's foreign policy to meet the demands of new geopolitical realities those were not emphasised earlier. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore and investigate those modifications which came into the Indian foreign policy since Mr. Modi became prime minister of India. It examines the strategic initiatives and endeavours of new government, and discusses how the style and substances of Modi's foreign policies are different from his predecessors? This paper also makes an effort to analyse––to what extent will Modi's foreign policy be effective in accelerating the pace of India's rise as a global power? In particular, the paper exclusively focuses on India's foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Communal Harmony as Governmentality: Reciprocity, peace-keeping, state legitimacy, and citizenship in contemporary India

AbstractDebates about secularism in post-independence India have often revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. A sharp distinction is drawn between them by those who argue that the Gandhian model (or, what in common parlance and state discourses is called communal harmony) stems from Indian cultural and religious values, and lies beyond the realm of the state. The Nehruvian model, however, is a state project through and through. This article transcends this dichotomy to show that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these models does not necessarily mean that secularism and communal harmony faithfully reflect their ideas and, despite the differences in their aims and methods, both models are united in the discourses and practices of the state as strategies of ‘governmentality’. After redefining the core of communal harmony as reciprocity (rather than tolerance), I show how it is performed, how it supplements the state's efforts to keep the peace in a religiously plural society by the force of law, and shores up the state's legitimacy deficit. However, the state's simultaneous involvement in Nehruvian and Gandhian projects is not an innocuous fact because it undermines the state's constitutional and secular obligations to non-discriminatory citizenship in the Indian nation. The argument is that the state's endorsement ofdargah-centred Islamic piety as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’ the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.

Contextualising Nehruvian Model of Development

Contextualising Nehruvian Model of Development

Nehruvian Vision of Global Order and its Relevance in the Twenty-first Century

Rejecting the various ‘World Order Models’ being projected as a panacea for a lasting peace, Nehru visualised ‘World Union’ based on democratic principles to create an egalitarian social and economic order across the globe and to eliminate the recurring phenomena of conflict and tension which produce wars at regular intervals. The perceived ‘World Government’ could provide a platform to manage and eliminate the modern forms of warfare: ethnic conflicts, proxy wars, militancy, terrorism, etc., while accommodating and redressing the grievances and resentments of specific people across as well as within the borders of national units. A global legislature can provide the community of nations a uniform, codified and effective international legal order. The Nehruvian model which sought to create an egalitarian, ‘planned’ and ‘socialised’ world economic order by eliminating imperialism and colonialism in all forms and manifestations could be relevant to manage the global economic crisis and also for the development of underdeveloped world. A World Union based on democracy and freedom may protect individual and group rights against ethnic cleansings and genocides and may help to universalise the institution of democracy. A strong world government, suggested by Nehru, can control nuclear proliferation and save mankind from the scourge of nuclear war.

Nehru’s Model of Economic Growth and Globalisation of the Indian Economy

After almost three decades of economic reforms, the tasks Nehru outlined on the eve of India’s independence should be invoked for examining how far these reforms constitute a departure from the Nehruvian model. Putting an end to poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality of opportunities were the key goals Nehru outlined on the eve of India’s independence. Nehru valued these objectives not merely for their instrumental value to economic growth, but for their own sake. However, at the height of India’s drive for liberalisation, the welfare state came to be perceived as a hindrance to the country’s global march. With higher economic growth becoming the ultimate end, the Nehruvian logic of looking at economic development as essential for human welfare was largely abandoned. Economic reforms therefore constituted a departure from the Nehruvian model of economic development. The role of the state for regulating economies is now widely recognised at the global level. This necessitates a re-look at Nehru’s model of economic development.

Contemporary Relevance of Nehru

The subject contemporary relevance of Nehru is unfolded into five sections. First section introduces the subject by contextualising Nehru’s ideas in the contemporary scenario. Nehruvian ideological system and its utility in the age of globalisation constitute the body of this article. His nationalism, socialism and world view are located and discussed in the second, third and fourth sections, respectively. Nehru’s idea of composite culture, contested by cultural nationalism from the one end and ethno-nationalism from the other end of spectrum comprises the second section. The third section discusses the conception, consolidation, retreat and revival of Nehruvian model of economic development in the light of Washington Consensus and Post-Washington Consensus. His idea of socialism and the mixed economy are debated in liberal, neoliberal and post-neoliberal scenario. His world view faced rough weather during the second and third phase of India’s foreign policy. The former was set in motion after his death, whereas the latter started taking shape in the Post-Soviet world, which has acquired the hegemonic overtones. Contemporary significance of Nehru’s world view in the hegemonic world is probed in the fourth section. The last section sums up the discussion in the form of concluding observations.

VGKK and Karuna Trust: Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development

800 million of the 1200 million people in India have been classified as being poor. About 500 million are “below the poverty line” – a euphemism for per capita income of less than US$ 2 per day. Over 80% of these are the rural poor – living in conditions that cannot be described. These are the people “at the bottom of the pyramid” in the words of C K Prahalad. The country’s impressive economic growth in the last two decades is shadowed by the failure to lift this large mass of people out of poverty and degradation.Traditional models – whether one wants to look at the Nehruvian model of socialism in which the public sector had a pre-eminent role to play or the half-hearted market economy model of the present Government – have failed to deliver. The Westminster model inherited from the British has created a new class – the politician bureaucrat nexus – that has systematically deprived the ever growing population of the fruits of development (L C Jain et al; Grass without Roots; Sage Publications; 1986). No less than three successive Prime Ministers have admitted that of every Indian Rupee spent on development; only 10% reaches the target group. In contrast, of every Indian Rupee spent through not-for-profit entities, 90% reaches the target group.The case is about one of the most inspiring examples of Social Entrepreneurship in the last three decades. Dr Sudarshan graduated in medicine in 1973. He served as a doctor with the Ramakrishna Mission and in that capacity travelled to different places – the Himalayas in the north to a very backward village in the Southern Indian State of Karnataka. Appalled by the living conditions of the Soliga Tribe of B R Hills in Karnataka, and inspired by the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda and Albert Schweitzer, he decided to devote his life to improving the conditions of the tribe. Thus was born the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (VGKK), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to transforming the Soliga Tribe in 1980 and Karuna Trust, a not-for-profit organization for the eradication of leprosy, tuberculosis and other diseases in 1986.This case outlines the unconventional approach taken by Dr Sudarshan in delivering health care, providing education and vocational training, and most importantly, facilitating the transformation of the tribes into micro-producers without ever having to give up their culture and traditions. Extracts from the medicinal plants grown by the tribe are being exported to the developed countries. Handicrafts and artefacts made by the tribe are being marketed through cooperatives. In other words, the Soliga Tribe are now an integral part of the growth story of India. Recognizing the pioneering work of Dr Sudarshan, the Government of Karnataka invited him to be a part of a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to manage the Primary Health Centres in Karnataka. As a result, the Karuna Trust today manages a PHC in every district of Karnataka. Other states have followed suit and the Trust manages PHCs in Arunachal Pradesh (North India) and Orissa (Eastern India). Requests are pouring in to manage PHCs in other states as well. Dr Sudarshan has demonstrated that selfless social entrepreneurship can do wonders to the process of development. He has provided an alternate model for inclusive growth and economic development of local communities while retaining the rich culture and traditions that have stood the test of time.The uniqueness of the model is its simplicity, scalability and repeatability. India is a diverse country with very different cultures. If the model could be implemented with equal felicity in Karnataka, Arunachal Pradesh and Orissa, there is no reason why it cannot be implemented anywhere in the world. In that sense, Dr Sudarshan has given humanity hope for a better tomorrow.

Postcolonial politics of the possible: City and nation in the fiction of Salman Rushdie

This article focuses on the relationship between the city and the nation in the early novels of Salman Rushdie and argues that Rushdie's invocation of the city of Bombay is the crucial means by which he seeks to critique narrow nationalist politics. It begins by unravelling the interdependence of two seemingly contrary visionary models of the post‐independence Indian nation backed by Gandhi and Nehru: the rural and the urban, respectively. The discussion draws out the ambiguity underlying the Nehruvian model that, even as it aligns itself with urbanization as the way forward for the new nation, continues to believe in an authentic national soul and spirit that inheres in its villages. Similar dualisms appear in contemporary cinema and this paper examines Rushdie's challenge to them in his inventive redeployment and transformation of popular cinematic tropes in Midnight's Children. Finally, the paper traces the disillusion, voiced in The Moor's Last Sigh, with the Bombay of the 1990s that attempts to cleanse itself of “outsiders”, in the shift from the trajectory of return, as found in Rushdie's earlier novels, to that of flight in his later ones – to American cities that seem to offer an alternative to parochial neo‐nationalist politics.

India in 1992: Search for Safety

Research Article| February 01 1993 India in 1992: Search for Safety Ramashray Roy Ramashray Roy Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1993) 33 (2): 119–128. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645320 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 Search Site Citation Ramashray Roy; India in 1992: Search for Safety. Asian Survey 1 February 1993; 33 (2): 119–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2645320 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1993 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.