The Impact of Affirmative Action in India: More Political than Socioeconomic
by Christophe Jaffrelot

Reverse discrimination measures in favor of the untouchable castes were taken in India as far back as the colonial period, especially in the form of hiring quotas in the public service. They were made even more systematic by the leaders of newly independent India without provoking any debate, since the Untouchables are situated so low on the social ladder that they do not threaten the elite's privileges. The problem begins with the castes just above: difficulties of definition but even more difficulties of implementation when the castes between the Untouchables and the "twice born" make up the majority of the population, and the upper castes, feeling threatened by any measure in favour of these lower castes, put up resistance. After a long standstill, positive discrimination policies were implemented in favour of these mow castes in 1990, triggering off an upper caste mobilisation. This led the lower castes to mobilize to and to form political parties to advocate their case. The great paradox of this episode lays in the fact that while the socio-economic impact of affirmative action programmes remained very limited, the political impact was very substantial because at this point the law of numbers works in favor of the lower castes.

Memories of Tibet: Transnationalism, Transculturation and the Production of Cultural Identity in Northern Pakistan
by Kenneth Iain MacDonald

Emerging place-based cultural identity movements often claim to be responding to threats of nationalism or globalization. In responding to these threats, however, they exercise a form of cultural essentialism, in which culture becomes instrumental to achieving economic and political goals. The resources that support these goals are far from local and tracing the resources that support these movements reveals the ways in which transnational processes are invoked in the contemporary production of locality. This paper analyzes the case of an emerging cultural identity movement in northern Pakistan to demonstrate how one such movement, which purports to defend a 'localized' model of culture and place, in practice relies on symbolic and material resources channeled through historical and contemporary transnational pathways. Specifically, the paper examines the role of political opportunity structures in mobilizing these symbolic and material resources and discusses how localized strategies of cultural production exist as manifestations of transnational articulations.

Risk and the City: Bombay, Mumbai and Other Theoretical Departures,
by Vyjayanthi Rao

This article is a review of recent writings on Bombay including texts in social science, journalism and media criticism. Taking the notion of risk as a central thematic in understanding globalization, the article explores the emergence of the city and of Bombay in particular as a subject of research in the contemporary moment. The review uses the recently published book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by journalist Suketu Mehta, as a point of departure. The article argues that the notion of risk circulating through representations of the city in various media and through the action of residents marks a significant departure from the nation to the city as the canonical subject of representation and for a critical understanding of the project of modernity in the era of globalization.

Identity, Institutions, and War: A New Look at South Asian Rivalry
by Milind Thakur

This essay examines the interaction of identity, institutions and war in the South Asian rivalry. It does so by examining four books: Stephen P. Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan, Husain Haqqani's Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty's Fearful Symmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons, and Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V.Paul's India in the World Order. In three sections it establishes the centrality of Pakistan's identity in understanding the conflict, the anomaly of absence of major war over the last two decades, and future prospects for the two states in light of India’s pursuit of great power status.