Tanzeem Ahmed

What is the right thing to do? This subject of normative inquiry seems to have pervaded into all echelons of theoretical academic circles. While debating a life time about what moral stands we ought to pursue and what beliefs to proscribe, we seem to have forgotten to question the genesis of the concept of morality itself. What is "the good"? And, thus, subsequently, what is "the bad"? This paper attempts to understand the notion of morality by analysing incest, as a practice of master morality. By applying a Nietzschean lens, this paper seeks to understand how morality has changed in the course of time and what it has meant in different epochs that have passed by. More importantly, incest is simply an entry point here to a larger discussion on the meta-ethics of it all. While engaging in a genealogy of morality, we must stop and raise questions about how are we to govern ourselves: by standards of morality prescribed by the times or by a larger understanding of morality as a concept. In the last analysis, through the subject of incest, the paper seeks to bring out the dilemma involved in the politics of choice that reigns this world supreme. We must decide what encompasses taboo and what does not.

With the nationwide discontent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019), which allows citizenship on the basis of religion to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and coupled with the exercise of National Register of Citizens (NRC) that has been allegedly said to be an exercise in targeted exclusionary politics against the Muslim population in Assam and as well as the pan-Indian Muslim populace, the Indian government today seems to stand on thin ice when it comes to justifying their stance on grounds of secularism. The expectation of the government withdrawing the CAA is absolutely futile. Rather, the government has made up its mind to decisively push through this crisis, by using all of state apparatuses to establish the state's sovereign right to govern its population. By and large, India as a pillar of global democracy is facing an exigency of its own. The objective of this piece is to observe a novel trend of nationalism as a concept subsuming democracy in itself slowly and subtly in the age of neo-liberal democratic paradigm. In particular, India's modern nexus with democracy and nationalism is explored while glancing back in history in order to understand the origins of Indian nationalism.

The treaties and hordes of other legal documents legitimized India’s freedom in 1947 but the over-looming social problems were still far from being resolved or addressed. The renegade leaders of India’s struggle movement were right. Political freedom must go hand in hand, concomitantly, with social revolution. Bhagat Singh and BR Ambedkar were amongst many others propagating the said path for India. India may untangle itself from the colonial ties of the British, but its ailments lie in ‘the social’.
this paper aspires to investigate if the hard-earned moments of liberation after the stupendous struggles for the independence in 1947 and other liberation feats such as affirmative action for the Dalits are a mirage; that if such feats were merely void in essence, their significance considered to be unworthy, deemed fit only to be relegated to the garbage bin of historical advances. At first glance, such claims would be appalling to most people. However, one might find substance in the said statements if one takes a keener look.

What is the right thing to do? This subject of normative inquiry seems to have pervaded into all echelons of theoretical academic circles. While debating a life time about what moral stands we ought to pursue and what beliefs to proscribe, we seem to have forgotten to question the genesis of the concept of morality itself. What is "the good"? And, thus, subsequently, what is "the bad"? This paper attempts to understand the notion of morality by analysing incest, as a practice of master morality. By applying a Nietzschean lens, this paper seeks to understand how morality has changed in the course of time and what it has meant in different epochs that have passed by. More importantly, incest is simply an entry point here to a larger discussion on the meta-ethics of it all. While engaging in a genealogy of morality, we must stop and raise questions about how are we to govern ourselves: by standards of morality prescribed by the times or by a larger understanding of ...

With the nationwide discontent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019), which allows citizenship on the basis of religion to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and coupled with the exercise of National Register of Citizens (NRC) that has been allegedly said to be an exercise in targeted exclusionary politics against the Muslim population in Assam and as well as the pan-Indian Muslim populace, the Indian government today seems to stand on thin ice when it comes to justifying their stance on grounds of secularism. The expectation of the government withdrawing the CAA is absolutely futile. Rather, the government has made up its mind to decisively push through this crisis, by using all of state apparatuses to establish the state’s sovereign right to govern its population. By and large, India as a pillar of global democracy is facing an exigency of its own. The objective of this piece is to observe a novel trend of nationalism as a concept sub...

With the nationwide discontent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019), which allows citizenship on the basis of religion to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and coupled with the exercise of National Register of Citizens (NRC) that has been allegedly said to be an exercise in targeted exclusionary politics against the Muslim population in Assam and as well as the pan-Indian Muslim populace, the Indian government today seems to stand on thin ice when it comes to justifying their stance on grounds of secularism. The expectation of the government withdrawing the CAA is absolutely futile. Rather, the government has made up its mind to decisively push through this crisis, by using all of state apparatuses to establish the state’s sovereign right to govern its population. By and large, India as a pillar of global democracy is facing an exigency of its own. The objective of this piece is to observe a novel trend of nationalism as a concept sub...

With the nationwide discontent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019), which allows citizenship on the basis of religion to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and coupled with the exercise of National Register of Citizens (NRC) that has been allegedly said to be an exercise in targeted exclusionary politics against the Muslim population in Assam and as well as the pan-Indian Muslim populace, the Indian government today seems to stand on thin ice when it comes to justifying their stance on grounds of secularism. The expectation of the government withdrawing the CAA is absolutely futile. Rather, the government has made up its mind to decisively push through this crisis, by using all of state apparatuses to establish the state’s sovereign right to govern its population. By and large, India as a pillar of global democracy is facing an exigency of its own. The objective of this piece is to observe a novel trend of nationalism as a concept sub...

The outbreak of the novel corona virus, namely COVID-19, and its ensuing haunting is not simply pushing us towards a world with lesser population but towards a world with renewed ideologies, novel population management apparatuses and reinvigorated enemy lenses. In other words, COVID-19 is not merely claiming lives; its emergence is reshaping the lives of the ones that it has spared and when the war against it shall end, in its wake, humanity could very well be markedly more divorced and disassociated from one another from prior to its
outbreak.
Panic has gripped most of the world as countries have shut down their nations and borders. In the absence of a vaccine and any guaranteed treatment, the world has easily warmed up to the idea of abandoning most of the cherished societal (or liberal) values - such as those of liberty or free movement and the like – in order to uphold just the value of ‘survival’.

Taking cues from recent trends, both in India as well as in the global milieu, there appears to be a disconnect between democracy and nationalism. States across the globe can be seen pursuing nationalistic visions while compromising democratic ideals and elements in their respective political discourses. This paper attempts to analyse if the concepts of nationalism and democracy can be complementary to each other in these contemporary times. The disconnect owes mainly to the fact that common understanding of a nation and nationalism is based on a homogenous identity. Such a conceptualization, however, is based on the exclusion of the other and therefore, is not in harmony with democratic ideals. This paper discusses, in particular, the Indian context and the controversies surrounding the infamous Citizen Amendment Act (CAA) which was introduced and eventually passed by the Indian Parliament in December, 2019 following which there were widespread protests across different parts of India. Moreover, solidarity to these protests has been shown by Indians residing outside India. The analysis here will attempt to put in perspective the inherent fault lines in the design of the CAA and its dialogue with Indian Nationalism. In addition, the paper also probes into the contemporary occurrence of nationalism co-opting democracy within its fold, thereby engulfing democratic functioning on the ground under the larger aegis of nationalism. Essentially, the paper delves into the recent development of the change in India's national culture and calls for the need of a democratic manifesto at the hour.

The postcolonial discourse in India has attempted to appropriate Tagore within its fold. But
he cannot be appropriated by a single discourse, let alone by postcolonialism. His works,
when keenly examined, transcend postcolonial thinking. The re-examination of Tagore’s
views and ideas, on the other hand, hold immense value for the current political discourse of
nationalism and democracy in India.

It is now well acknowledged by scholars and policy-makers alike that there exists an inverse relationship between urbanisation and equality in cities with regards to contemporary urban discourse: increase in the former has contributed to increased inequalities amongst urban residents in modern cities, especially in terms of access, rights to the city, wealth distribution and even segregated housing practices. However, the most novel trend in urban discourses appears to be the emergence of new towns, or more popularly referred to as “satellite towns”, which are spatially carved zones (popularly in the form of SEZs, industrial townships, industrial corridors etc.) adjacent to existing metropolitan cities and also which are in turn, allegedly more metropolitan than their extant neighbouring metropolitans. These uber-metropolitan spaces, such as the development of Gurgaon next to Delhi, Navi Mumbai to Mumbai or the Electronic City at the periphery of Bengaluru, appear to be an endeavour in development and improvement of the standards of living but such emergence of new towns is more of a story about changes of coveted forms of labour in city-spaces and peripheral urban areas.
Mostly established, and sustained, with the support of the tertiary sector and the IT industry, these ‘new towns’ are essentially advertised as city-spaces for a particular class of citizens, predominantly with the element of gated communities and valorisation of white-collar workers. Even though a considerable size of informal labour force may exist in new towns, the presence of the informal labour is seen as something ‘dirty’ that ought to be rendered invisible. These emergent new towns also have convenient labour and municipal laws that restrict the presence of the informal sector in the streets. These aspects altogether add to the precarity of the informal labour population in new towns and are pushed even further towards the margins of legality in such spaces. As such, this paper aims to interrogate the nuances in labour forms that surfaces in such satellite cities, capture the linkages (or any form of correlation) between the emergence of new towns in the peripheries of metropolitan cities and the informal labour residing in them.

Structures of urban governance in contemporary times seem to have evolved with multitudes of nuanced privatised mechanisms. An increasing tendency of governments in India can be observed to establish regions with privatised administration or inaugurate nodal agencies of essential services through parastatal agencies. The establishment of a space with privatised governance lays foundations for unique ‘spatial’ features that entail ‘special’ consequences for the labour workforce of all classes. The most prominent examples of these privatised zones come in the forms of smart cities, special economic zones (SEZs), industrial corridors or industrial townships that aim to boost urban provisions through an amalgamation of technology and infusion of capital. The most striking consequence of installing privatised governance institutions is the lack of accountability that public institutions are subjected to. Considering the legal discourse embedded within such developments, the consequences for labour dimensions in these spaces can be significant.
This paper aims to locate the labour dimension in Electronics City Industrial Township in Karnataka where all the essential services and decision-making regarding the essential services are provided through a privatised administration. The Electronics City Industrial Township is a part of the turn towards smart cities in contemporary urban governance discourse that stresses on solutions, services and provision of infrastructure via digital technologies. The core element of this technology-driven urban governance is to emphasise high-tech sectors as engines for urban economies, concomitantly exhibiting a proclivity to reinterpret urban challenges as technological problems to be solved by technological solutions. Aided by AI-based mechanism, the Electronics City Industrial Township Authority (ELCITA) hosts, governs and monitors a vast number of tech companies that provide a mix of IT and manufacturing services, with minimal involvement of any government entities.

Amidst the various sections of society that have had to face the brunt of the pandemic in their own respective spheres of operation, the crisis of migrant lives and their inaccessibility to dignified lives shed light on one of the darker realities of the Indian society. In truth, the lives of migrant labourers have always been somewhat a case in point as a ‘silent emergency’. However, the crisis of the migrant labourers in India only seemed to have suddenly sprung to visibility in the wake of post announcement of the 21 day national lockdown of India on the 24th of March 2020. The visuals of the ‘long march of the migrants’ along the vehicle-less roads forced everyone in India from the non-migrant population to acknowledge their plight and how both the state and the society had failed them. The migrant crisis has forced many to consider whether the migrant worker population has been condensed to mere bodies, or reduced simply to their mere physical condition. It does beg the question if the migrant labourer is a measly biological body with no human value, as some instances seem to indicate that we, as a society, undoubtedly place or accord higher value in the lives of who have been already socially and economically uplifted. This paper explores how the migrant worker is relegated to the peripheries of legality and stripped of visibility in public discourse, despite contributing substantially to the backbone of the Indian economy, through a biopolitical lens. Besides probing the use of biopower with reference to the state and the realm of the political, the paper also attempts to explore the flow of biopower in the economic sphere as well, in order to understand capital’s hold over labour more intrinsically.

In the particular discourse of Northeast India, gender gaps and marginalisation of women in India’s Northeast has been mostly considered to be deficient. High participation of women in the voting process, higher visibility of women in the public sphere or the matrilineal society of Meghalaya are usually cited in order to show how women are more empowered in the Northeast. However, these instances are not absolute truths, but rather only partial, or relative, as one hardly experiences women’s visibility in the political realm or in some powerful echelons of decision-making. There still exists a societal apprehension in placing actual decision-making powers in the hands of women. As such, the purpose of this paper will be to understand androgenic undertones in the contemporary gendered society of Northeast India – socially, culturally as well as politically.