Political Assertion Research Articles

Political Assertion: Rural Revolutionary Gymnastics

The Danish Grundtvigian spiritual and national revival in the decade around 1900 contained a high degree of enthusiasm and a strong collective feeling, which was demonstrated not least through gymnastics displays where young farm-lads' and girls' teams marched into and out of the arena singing patriotic anthems, led by a gymnast carrying a huge Danish national flag. Through gymnastics rural ideas and values were dramatized and embodied, making gymnastics a dynamic part of the overall transformation of Danish society around 1900. This peculiar Danish bias towards the straightened and enlightened farmer was the result of an independent tradition of a voluntary gymnastics culture practised in the countryside, the equivalent of which cannot be found in other European countries, where the tendency, on the contrary, was towards an undermining of the rural population's position.

Shooting the messenger: the science and politics of ethnicity research

Scientific arguments showing 'how the world is' are fundamentally different from political assertions about 'how the world should be'. Ideologically motivated political attacks can hamper our understanding of mental disorders by preventing academics from pursuing research in contentious areas. Evidence should be countered by better evidence, not by shooting the messenger.

The political economy of bonded labour in the Pakistani Punjab

This article examines economic and social relations in order to understand political assertion and mobilisation among rural bonded labourers in the Pakistan Punjab. Bonded labour, characterised by economic and extra–economic forms of compulsion together with vertical ties of patronage, remains widespread in the region. I propose that the perpetuation of these relations is largely explained by the capture of state institutions by a traditional landlord elite and its monopoly over the means of coercion coupled with a highly seasonal demand for labour. I examine how employment and indebtedness combine to restrict workers’ physical and economic mobility. I argue that labourers have not been able to unite politically as a class and challenge their employers because years of authoritarian rule in Pakistan have entrenched a highly factional style of politics dominated by the landed elites. My article contributes to the literature on agrarian change, class formation and the state in south Asia.

China and the Global Economic Crisis

What to expect from China in the current economic crisis? Will the crisis change China’s role in the international economy? In this Policy Brief, Guy de Jonquieres analyses the main trends in China’s economic policy-making and positioning in the international policy arena. He argues that China still has an uncertain commitment to economic rebalancing, which might lead to frictions with its partners. Despite its new political assertiveness, it remains ambivalent on exerting international leadership. Yet as China’s economic and financial importance continues to expand and world leaders seek global stability, deeper engagement between Beijing and other power centres will remain indispensable.

9. Human Rights: Historical Learning in the Shadow of Violence

AbstractThis paper emphasizes the historical dimension of human rights understood as a social ethic. Rather than timeless principles, human rights and the universality proper to them emerge in a process of suffering, conflict, political assertion, and institutional change. We can understand them as historical yet also universal by seeing that human rights arise in processes of social learning that take place in an increasingly globalized world. Such learning often has advanced in the face of dramatic violence, for example, the bombing of Hiroshima. But the demands on a global social ethic today are not only a matter of responding to threats and acts of dramatic violence in isolation. Attention to the example of Hiroshima suggests that the problem of violence is bound up with other questions about the regulation of emerging technical powers in a context of inequality and social conflict. To what extent can an ethic centered on human rights provide an ethics that can inform effective responses to these problems? To consider the promise of human rights, we look more closely at the kind of social learning they involve and explore in particular the role of social movements in forging new identities and reciprocities along with normative claims proper to a global public sphere (the anti‐apartheid movement provides an example). We go on to see that these political experiences can inform interpretations of historical experience that can inform a widened sense of historical possibilities, both those missed in the past and those that confront us today. While this argument may thicken our sense of the promise of a human rights ethic, it remains speculative, not least because of the limited effectiveness of these norms in practice today. We close with the suggestion that nonetheless a coherent ethical response is possible, one that in the wealthy parts of the globe might take the form of an ethic of democratic responsibility. This would both represent a distinctive kind of learning and perhaps contribute to a wider advance of human rights.

Re-inventing Dalit women's identity? Dynamics of social activism and electoral politics in rural north India

Dalit or ex-untouchable women's voices and perspectives have been marginalized not only in Dalit movements but also in predominantly upper-caste Hindu-led women's movements. This paper aims at exploring the unheard voices and perspectives of Dalit women in the context of Dalit assertion in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. Scholarly writing examines the different facets of Dalit political assertion led by the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. Few scholars, however, examine the ways in which individual and organizational actors engage with women of Dalit castes through social activism in the state. This paper is an attempt to do so. Specifically, it examines, with special reference to issues of culture and identity, the engagement of a grassroots women's non-governmental organization with rural Dalit women in southern Uttar Pradesh. The paper begins with an enquiry into why engagement with issues of culture and identity is necessary for social activism with Dalit women, and how it is carried out. It then examines whether social activism and electoral politics with Dalit women cross-cut each other, and also what implications this or its lack has for the women. Finally, the paper asks how far activism and politics can go towards re-inventing Dalit (women's) identity.

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 336. Cloth $49.95. Most commentators agree that the shift rightward in U.S. politics began in the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon's silent majority reacted against radical antiwar protesters, militant Black Power advocates, and urban violence and abandoned the Democratic Party. Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, and his resounding defeat of George McGovern in 1972, signaled a Republican takeover of national politics that remained virtually undisturbed for thirty years. During that time Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections, and conservatives shaped domestic social and political issues from abortion rights and affirmative action to law and order policies. Why this shift from the New Deal liberal consensus to conservatism occurred has become a subject of growing interest for social and political historians. In 1996 Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis challenged the liberal consensus paradigm for the postwar period with a close examination of how Detroit's simmering politics of race constantly undermined and threatened to destroy the Democrats' tenuous interracial alliances. If Sugrue's thesis was borne out by research in other northern cities, then historians would have to confront the possibility that a liberal consensus was, in the words of historian Gary Gerstle, never anything more than a comforting mirage. James Wolfinger's engrossing social history of early 20th-century Philadelphia politics confirms of Sugrue's claims. Philadelphia's Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African American populations are the book's main characters; but much of the book's drama centers on the conflicts and tensions that surrounded African Americans' increasing political clout in the new, New Deal-inspired Democratic Party, which increased African Americans' demands for increased access to housing and jobs. Wolfinger's study revamps the picture of liberalism transcendent and challenges conceptions of the state as a vehicle for positive social change. Adherents to the Congress of Industrial Organization's interracial industrial unionism, leftists who embraced the Communist Party's ethos of workers' interracial solidarity, black activists in the National Negro Congress and the NAACP, and progressive whites from various Jewish and Christian (including Quaker) groups did indeed champion an egalitarian approach to politics and democratic principles. But this occurred for only a brief moment such as during the fabled New Deal coalition that peaked with the presidential election of 1936, or in rare instances when black political assertions did not interfere with whites' lives, such as when African Americans advocated for federal funds to build public housing in predominantly black neighborhoods. Wolfinger argues that ordinary whites in the urban North imposed fundamental limitations on liberalism from below, and rather than being part of a liberal consensus that was later spoiled by events of the late 1960s, many white working-class Democrats made it clear from the start that certain liberal policies were off-limits. Organized into three sections, Philadelphia Divided chronicles how white racism frayed the seams of the Democrats' tenuously woven interracial alliances and the ways in which Republicans capitalized on racism's power to divide working-class whites and African Americans. …

Processos, condicionantes e bases sociais da especialização política no Rio Grande do Sul e no Maranhão: Rio Grande do Sul et Maranhão

No artigo são examinados os processos de especialização política, as carreiras e os perfis de deputados federais (1945-2006) em dois estados brasileiros (Rio Grande do Sul e Maranhão), identificando as vinculações entre profissionalização política e hierarquização social. São cotejadas as combinações entre bases sociais, trajetórias e concepções de política que apontam para modalidades diferenciadas de afirmação e reprodução políticas. A partir disto, são comparadas as dinâmicas de diversificação social da "elite política" nos dois estados, os condicionantes para ascensão política, as estratégias de reconversão de bases sociais em bases eleitorais e as redefinições dos mecanismos de legitimação dos papéis políticos ao longo do tempo e em cada configuração regional. As fontes privilegiadas na pesquisa foram repertórios biográficos, memórias, biografias e entrevistas em profundidade.

Functionalism and representationalism in contemporary urban agendas: a Scottish perspective on city-region branding

The turn to city-regionalism in Scotland is a consequence of the policy and political assertion of the importance of cities in the new territorial economy of a devolved state. Moreover, the developmental rationale for city-regions rests on the stronger functional realignment of economic growth, investment, housing and population patterns, and the interaction of diverse flows to realise agglomeration efficiencies. In planning and governance terms, the argument for city-regions involves a layered spatial intervention so as to secure intended institutional efficiencies and sustainable development. In practice, the city-region discourse is dominated by functional linkages and relations in factor markets. This paper questions whether this functional perspective is sufficient in socially reconstructing the city-region identity. Adopting the concepts of functionalism and representationalism from the place-branding literature, this paper considers what may be learned from a communicative logic that is relatively more sensitive to issues of interpretation and identity.

Integrating the Union's Energy Policy into its European Neighbourhood Policy: Added-Value or Emulating Its Deficiencies?

This paper analyses a number of critiques formulated in relation to the burgeoning comprehensive European Energy Policy in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). More specifically, a core critique of the Union's energy policy states that it is insufficiently focused on supply-side energy security, while paying too much attention to the market-governance and environmental aspects of this policy field. This assessment is based on the hypothesis that the attractiveness of the Union's regulatory approach decreases as the third country's importance in energy export increases, and with it so does its political assertiveness. It is argued that in the context of the Union's neighbouring countries this argument holds with regard to Algeria, Libya and Russia, but that for other ENP partner countries such is true only to a limited extent. The three countries this paper pays particular attention to are Egypt and Azerbaijan, because of their central importance as transit and/or producing countries.

Assertive Identities, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Recognition as a Tribe: The Bhutias, the Lepchas and the Limbus of Sikkim

Using the case of the Bhutias, the Lepchas, and the Limbus, who are defined as tribes in contemporary Sikkim, this article discusses the 'politics of identity' and the 'identity politics' of being and becoming tribal in India. The cultural politics transforming a group into a tribe and a 'Scheduled Tribe' reflects its political strength and power to influence the regime of representation in order to appropriate preferential entitlements and resources. Being tribal does not necessarily indicate indigeneity, oppression, or subaltern status; it signifies political assertion and empowerment in Sikkim.

The changing sociopolitical profile of local political elites (mukhias) in Bihar

This article seeks to examine the changing sociopolitical profile of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI) representatives in Bihar. It argues (a) that the political assertion of the upper backward caste-Yadavas, Koeris and Kurmis-in Bihar dates back to the pre-Mandal period; (b) that the OBCs are not a homogeneous sociopolitical community, since they comprise both dominant and deprived castes; and (c) that the upper castes, despite losing political ground at the level of the Vidhan Sabha and Lok Sabha, have been able to retain their foothold at the grassroots level as demonstrated by their substantial representation in the PRI elections of 2001. This has significant implications for political economy in a period of democratic devolution and decentralised development. More importantly, it explains the violence-ridden politics of the state: besides social and economic disparities there is considerable mismatch between political dominance in the upper tiers and at the grassroots levels of Indian society.

Untouchability, Dalit consciousness, and the Ad Dharm movement in Punjab

Recent Dalit assertion in Punjab ought to be traced back to the Ad Dharm movement of the 1920s, which emerged along with several similar movements in a number of regions in India. The movement aimed at carving out a distinct identity for the untouchables, independent of the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. What made this movement particularly important was its purely low-caste character and the vehemence of its struggle against the structures of social domination. The only movement of its kind in the Northwestern region of the country, Ad Dharm aimed at securing a separate and respectable space for the Scheduled Castes through cultural transformation, spiritual regeneration and political assertion, rather than seeking equality within the Hindu fold. Curiously, this movement, which laid the foundations of Dalit consciousness in Punjab, has failed to gain serious scholarly attention, Mark Juergensmeyer’s pioneering work being the only exception.

The Gaze of the Magus: Sexual/Scopic Politics in the Novels of John Fowles

The Gaze of the Magus:Sexual/Scopic Politics in the Novels of John Fowles Alice Ferrebe (bio) John Fowles's fiction conducts a complex interplay between the deconstruction and reinscription of traditional gender roles. This intermittent complicity may be aligned with the "scopic politics" of Fowles's novels; that is, the epistemological structures and power relationships inherent in the act of looking. The way in which the act of looking is both conceived and executed has, it will be asserted, a profound influence upon the narrative structures of Fowles's work—both within its diegesis and on a metafictional level. The central novels of Fowles's oeuvre, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, will be examined to determine the extent to which visual apprehension is questioned as a means of exerting power within gender relationships. The concept of a male gaze, that omniscient, omnipotent, objectifying mode of looking, remains an influential relic from the first swell of Second Wave feminism, most particularly Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Just as the masculine/feminine binary conceals the true multiplicity within gender identity, so, as Kaja Silverman notes, "All binarizations of spectator and spectacle mystify the scopic relation in which we are held" (151). Fowles's fiction will be used to complicate and extend Mulvey's uncompromisingly gendered binary of an active/passive gaze. In the study of voyeurism in film The Cinematic Gaze, Norman K. Denzin nominates Hitchcock and Antonioni as two auteurs who "rejected [End Page 207] the notion of the objective observer and each made the voyeur part of the spectacle that was witnessed" (163). In the relationship between Conchis, didact and director, and Nicholas Urfe, audience and actor, in The Magus1 , the possibility (and desirability) of objective observation is similarly interrogated. Further, it is gendered as quintessentially male; in a long speech preceding his description of the Nazi torture that took place on Phraxos, Conchis identifies what he claims to be "the great distinction between the sexes": Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling that we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death. (378) In the essay "Notes on an Unfinished Novel," a documentary of the creative process written alongside The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles noted that, "If the technical problems hadn't been so great, I should have liked to make Conchis in The Magus a woman" (146). These "technical problems," presumably, involve Conchis's role in the Nazi occupation. Yet despite his tribute to it, Conchis does not demonstrate this purportedly female way of looking within the narrative. Rather, his optical mode is characterized to be utterly without either empathy or desire—as Nicholas notes: "outwardly he seemed to have very little interest in me, yet he watched me; even when he was looking away, he watched me; and he waited. Right from the beginning I had this: he was indifferent to me, yet he watched and he waited" (OV 76). Mulvey's essay has been rigorously recycled and criticised since, but to include a brief summary: it defined the tradition of Hollywood narrative cinema by means of the fact that its gaze (of the camera, and by implication, of the audience) was "male." The male gaze is defined by the fact that it is active, and to achieve this power, the female object in film is routinely styled to connote passivity, to constitute "to-be-looked-at-ness" (19) [End Page 208] rather than an active, looking, subject position. The title of one section, which functions as a good summary of the basic argument, is "Woman as image, Man as bearer of the look" (19). Mulvey's political assertion, then, is that the construction of looking in Hollywood cinema establishes limits on women's agency. The spectator...

A Continuity of Conservatism: The Limitations of Brown v. Board of Education

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life. (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that 'The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation. (2) Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy. It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3) One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference. Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. …

Does British Music Still Matter?

This article examines the present status of British popular music. It illustrates the declining global significance of British rock and pop recordings by considering the Mercury music prize (for the ‘best’ British releases each year) and the US sales charts (in which British records rarely now appear). The continuing political assertion that British musical talent is an important source of export earnings is shown to refer to acts (and often recordings) produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We can conclude that in this, as in other cultural spheres, ‘globalization’ has also meant a new account of ‘local’ production such that, in commercial terms, Britain is no more important than other European countries as a source of internationally successful recordings. ‘Anglo-American rock’ is no longer a useful label.

"The Hierarchy Itself": Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and the Sacrifice of Narrative Authority

The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined stable place. (Arendt 93) There was something about Joe Starks that cowed the town. It was not because of physical fear. He was no fist fighter. His bulk was not even imposing as men go. Neither was it because he was more literate than the rest. Something else made men give way before him. He had a bow-down command in his face, and every step he took made the thing more tangible. (Hurston, Their Eyes 44) ********** As both Hannah Arendt and Zora Neale Hurston recognized, and indeed as most contemporary political scientists and literary critics would agree, authority figures are able to exercise power for reasons that are complex; authority is not a simple matter of physical or intellectual coercion. The social and psychological complexities of power, however, are difficult to articulate. Their Eyes Were Watching God is one extended attempt to articulate these complexities. Even more importantly, Their Eyes offers a critique of more than one model of political authority. Though the novel shows Hurston to be sympathetic to the felt need for African American leadership (about which W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, felt strongly), and even to concede that improved material conditions for African Americans could be bought by adherence to strong leadership, Hurston indicates that the cost of traditional authority is too great. In subscribing to traditional Anglo-American authority patterns, African Americans risk replicating the very means of their oppression, Hurston perceived. Their Eyes, then, represents a troubled search for a way, a method for breaking out from the accommodating and replicating patterns of, respectively, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks. (1) The many recent critics of Their Eyes have frequently read the novel as a celebration of Janie's ability to free herself from the confinement represented by her first two husbands and, after the death of her third husband, Tea Cake Woods, to attain a new form of cultural power, the ability to shape her own story. Henry Louis Gates, for example, claims that Janie discovers her own narrative power when she rhetorically kills her husband Joe (192), and that Joe's methods are supplanted by Janie's development of a communal narration--one that is inclusive rather than exclusive of the voices the listening community--which is also major innovation in this novel (200, 214). Others who have found in Janie a model of political self-assertion include Alice Walker, Susan Willis, Glynis Carr, Sally Ann Ferguson, Wendy J. McCredie, Jerome E. Thornton, and Robert Hemenway. On the other hand, some critics have found that Hurston illustrates with this novel Janie's highly limited potential for political assertion. Robert Stepto raised this issue at a session at the 1979 MLA convention (Washington, Foreword xi) and does so again in his book From Behind the Veil: Hurston's curious insistence on having Janie's tale...told by an omniscient third person, rather than by a first-person narrator, implies that Janie has not really won her voice and self after all (166). Mary Helen Washington concurs in part, agreeing with Stepto that Janie is not empowered but contending that Hurston is intentionally illustrating women's exclusion from power, particularly from the power of oral speech ('I Love' 98). Members of both camps--those who regard Janie, in the end, as empowered or defeated--have noticed that Hurston is critiquing the assumptions traditionally held by writers and readers about the uses of narrative prose. One member of the former camp is Sharon Davie. While conceding that Hurston necessarily speaks from within the culture she is critiquing, Davie admires ability to create for readers a glimpse of a 'force' from ideologies or languages that assume a binary and hierarchical model of reality, even as this force is excluded from [Hurston's] ideology and language (447). …

New social and political movements of dalits: A study of Meerut district

This study, based upon fieldwork in selected villages, examines 'new'forms of dalit asser tion in Meerut district. Despite a long history of dalit assertion, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has not been electorally successful in this region, and has had to compete with the Samajwadi Party. Dalit assertion here has taken different forms, as much socio-cultural as political. Two forms analysed here are the desire for education to compete with upper castes, and attempts to control local politics and resource distribution through the new panchayats. The study shows that the traditional structures of rural dominance based upon land and social status are undergoing change. The traditionally dominant position of the Rajputs, Jats and Gujars has been challenged by the dalits, and to a lesser extent by the 'Most Backward Castes' (MBCs), but identity assertion and desire for upward mobility have also created conflict between the dalits and the MBCs. The article concludes that socio-cultural and political assertion by dalits at the grassroots level is of greater signifi cance and more helpful to the BSP in establishing itself as a party/movement, than are its electoral successes or capture of political power in the state.

La place des musulmans dans le multiculturalisme laïc en Grande-Bretagne

The political assertiveness of Muslims in Britain is creating difficulties for secular multiculturalism. While black and related ethno-racial identities are intrinsic to the rainbow coalition of identity politics, this coalition is deeply unhappy with Muslim consciousness. While for some this rejection is specific to Islam, for many the ostensible reason is that it is a religious identity, and therefore has no place in the public sphere. Yet in this the advocates of difference politics are reverting to a public/private distinction that they have spent two or three decades demolishing. The emergence of Muslim politcal agency has, then, thrown British multiculturalism into theoretical and practical disarray. This is worrying because on any objective reading there cannot be a race relations settlement in Britain without the Muslims, as nearly half of all non-whites are Muslims.

Divide and Rule in Indian Party Politics: The Rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party

From the highly fragmented Parliament produced by India's 12th general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led a heterogeneous coalition of smaller political parties to form a minority government. Gradually but persistently moving out from the wings of Indian politics, the BJP has proven itself capable of sustained competition with the once-dominant Congress Party (INC). The outcome of the 1998 general elections-in which the BJP became the only party to claim more seats than the INC twice in succession-confirms its existence as a major political party in the Indian system. 1 Its rise is significant not only because it definitively signals the end of the Congress system but also because of the Hindu nationalist character of the party itself. While secularism is an ideological hallmark of the Indian state, Hindu nationalism is not a new force in Indian politics: the political assertion of the belief that India is a fundamentally Hindu nation, the central tenet of Hindu nationalism, has its origins in the 19th century. But never before has a party espousing such an ideology matched the BJP's current level of popular support. How and why has the BJP moved from the political fringe into the center? And why are its politics of Hindu nationalism-overtly or insidiously expressed-so salient now? Beyond an exploration of the BJP as a party, the present analysis will examine the impact of the BJP's growth on the Indian party system and Indian