Summary Through the life and times of Mani Shankar Aiyar (b. 1941), this article shows the centrality of caste in the conduct of Indian diplomacy and the ways in which a commitment to an anaemic secularism diverts our attention from such casteism. Aiyar exemplifies the schizoid character of an Indian diplomatic class wherein a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism, secularism and anti-racism is often accompanied by casteist elitism and disdain for those regarded as less meritorious and cultured than oneself. Diplomatic practice, facility in English and allegiance to a narrow definition of secularism are critical components in the production and sustenance of inequality, distinction and status within India. By focusing on Aiyar’s memoirs, public pronouncements and political life, this study critically engages the study of diplomacy and international relations in post-independence India.

Through the life and times of Mani Shankar Aiyar (b. 1941), this article shows the centrality of caste in the conduct of Indian diplomacy and the ways in which a commitment to an anaemic secularism diverts our attention from such casteism. Aiyar exemplifies the schizoid character of an Indian diplomatic class wherein a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism, secularism and anti-racism is often accompanied by casteist elitism and disdain for those regarded as less meritorious and cultured than oneself. Diplomatic practice, facility in English and allegiance to a narrow definition of secularism are critical components in the production and sustenance of inequality, distinction and status within India. By focusing on Aiyar's memoirs, public pronouncements and political life, this study critically engages the study of diplomacy and international relations in post-independence India.

This chapter focuses on the history and impact of colonialism as the main reason for the contemporary divide between first and third worlds – and suggests that many of the proposed explanations are underlain by this more fundamental cause. The East India Company's monopoly over the lucrative trade with India made it a growing power within England. Yet it was kept in restraint for at least two reasons. First, strange as it may sound to a reader in world, back then there was little that England produced that found a ready market in India – so the company had to pay for its purchases with gold and silver. Second, given the enormous strength of Mughal Empire, the company had to behave itself if its rights to trade in India were to be renewed periodically. The Mughal Empire underwent a slow decline from the 1730s on and wars of succession had further weakened it by the middle of the eighteenth century.

International Relations (IR) as a discipline explains the fact of global inequality through a discourse of meritocracy. In the early decades of the discipline, such explanations were explicitly racial, and justified empire and Western dominance on the basis of their innate superiority over the rest of the world. In later and in contemporary times, such racialized explanations for inequality have been replaced by ostensibly merit-based explanations that turn out, on closer examination, to replicate the inner logic and exclusionary claims of earlier ones. The notion of meritocracy has been a key element in the ideological appeal of IR as a discourse to elites and aspiring middle classes central to nation-building efforts in the global South. This latter fact complicates efforts that equate decolonizing the discipline with the promotion of diversity in its membership and the widening of its empirical and theoretical concerns. Central to any notion of a genuinely decolonial IR must be an attack on the very idea of merit as explaining and justifying international and domestic inequality.

This review begins with a shameful confession: despite being a student of Indian politics and history for many decades now, I spent a fair amount of time poring over the map of north-eastern India ...

Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked in 1972 about the historical impact of the French Revolution, supposedly quipped that it was “too early to say.” Zhou’s reminder that the legacies of large historical events unfold not over years or decades but centuries is astute and timely. The partition of the Indian subcontinent may have occurred in mid-August 1947, but the ramifications of that decision continue to profoundly affect the lives of millions of people now divided among three nation-states. While an aging generation still has memories of childhoods spent across the border, millions have been rendered suspect “minorities” in lands their ancestors have lived in for millennia. Still others migrated across borders only to realize assimilation or acceptance was neither easy nor guaranteed. Tens of thousands have spent lifetimes trapped in litigation over citizenship and property. Political parties continue to make capital out of the blame-game for the events of that time, and the rising tide of majoritarian religious nationalisms across the subcontinent seem continuously energized by contentious narratives about the event. If, in the initial decades, partition was the silent and repressed twin of a celebratory independence, a burgeoning literature has more than made up for that reticence in more recent times, and the surge of scholarship on an ever-widening range of issues shows no signs of abating. The three works under review are useful additions to this corpus, and their contributions merit closer attention. Urvashi Butalia’s edited volume Partition: The

President Obama's commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers - Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki - this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies.

The Afterlives of Partition - Partition: The Long Shadow. Edited by Urvashi Butalia. New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2015. 272 pp. ISBN: 9789383074778 (cloth, also available as e-book). - Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition. By Devika Chawla. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. 288 pp. ISBN: 9780823256433 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). - Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965. By Haimanti Roy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780198081777 (cloth). - Volume 78 Issue 1

Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border. By Jason Cons. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. 224 pp. ISBN: 9780295995526 (cloth, also available as e-book). - Volume 77 Issue 2

David Kang's explanation for the peace and stability in East Asia that continued from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries positions itself against mainstream understandings of world order in the field of International Relations, which derive exclusively from the experience of the West. However, Kang's own explanations and theories remain worryingly Eurocentric and are profoundly mimetic of the very approaches he seeks to go beyond. The implications of this Eurocentrism for epistemic and physical violence against ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and various others in border-zone areas-in both the West and the East-are dire and merit explicit attention

Recent cricket contests between Australia and India offer a fascinating theatre to examine issues of race, class, nation, and gender. I chart their protean character as they are performed and deployed in these encounters. Instead of exploring relations between already extant and singular entities called India or Australia, it might be more useful to see the performative practices of those situated at different loci of enunciation by which those categories are momentarily congealed and given meaning or content. While there is a surfeit of charged cricketing encounters between the two nations, I focus on two in this essay: (a) Rahul Dravid's speech at the annual Bradman Oration in 20111, and (b) what has come to be called Monkeygate' - a bitter and acrimonious cricket test match between India and Australia in 2007 played in Sydney.

The global middle class is frequently seen as a guarantor of democracy and its consumerism the basis for the next wave of growth in the world economy. This article questions both premises and suggests that middle classes are frequently the creation of state projects based on selective inclusions and exclusions, and their desired futures constitute a real threat to planetary sustainability at this point in time.

A powerful new wave of alienating land from those who live on it is sweeping the global commons, and discourses such as “Emerging Economies” and “Brazil, Russia, India, China” are the ideological mediators of this wave. In India, the “slow violence” of the Nehruvian decades has been replaced by the accelerated pace of such processes under a neoliberal dispensation. In both periods, the overwhelming costs of “development” have been preponderantly visited upon Dalits, tribals, and landless laborers. Colonial laws regarding land acquisition and Eminent Domain have been an important legacy for the postcolonial state in its efforts to acquire land for private capital. They have intersected with notions of race and caste within the habitus of the Indian middle class, whose efforts to make the nation are simultaneously the unmaking of various subaltern groups and classes. Yet, as the struggle between the multinational Vedanta Corporation and a tribal group called the Dongaria Kondh in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha in southeastern India demonstrates, the outcomes are by no means a foregone conclusion.