With the Manmohan Singh Cabinet giving up on its planned ordinance binge, a constitutional heist has been avoided. Six ordinances, reports indicate, were under consideration. Some of these were anti-graft measures intended to shore up Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s electoral prospects. Others, including the Disabilities Bill and the ST/SC (Prevention of Atrocities) Bill, were perhaps intended to shore up the social-democratic sheen of a moribund cabinet.
Ambassador Jayant Prasad was a CASI Spring 2014 Visiting Scholar and 2014-15 Non-Resident Scholar.
Born in 1952, Ambassador Prasad joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1976. He obtained B.A. (Hons) in history from Delhi University in 1972 and M.A. in modern Indian history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1974, after which he lectured on Indian history for two years at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
Anuradha Raman is a Senior Associate Editor with the Political Bureau of Outlook magazine, New Delhi. She has written several articles on the media and the social sector with special emphasis on education and caste in India. She has also assisted in a study paper on Mapping Digitization in India in 2012 by the Open Society Foundations, which maps changes affecting the democratic service delivery of news on political, economic, and social affairs.
Dr. Idesbald Goddeeris is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Leuven. For many years, he has worked on the Cold War and published, inter alia, Solidarity with Solidarity: Western European Trade Unions and the Polish Crisis, 1980-1982 (Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series) (Lexington Books, 2010). He is now embarking on a new project examining Communist state governments in India (West-Bengal, Kerala, Tripura). Dr.
Barring a last minute political turnaround, Telangana will become India’s 29th state in early 2014, which may bring to an end a story whose beginnings had kick-started the first phase of state reorganization in independent India. Telangana will be carved out of the state of Andhra Pradesh, which had been created in 1953 by combining the Telegu-speaking areas of the erstwhile states of Hyderabad and Madras; Telangana corresponds to the area formerly in Hyderabad State.