Indrajit Roy Politics of the Poor

Publications

Monograph

2018, Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

2019, Class politics and social protection: A comparative analysis of local governments in India. Journal of South Asian Development.

2019, Disjunctions of democracy and liberalism: Agonistic imaginations of dignity in Bihar, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

2017, Emancipation as social equality: subaltern politics in contemporary India , FOCAAL: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 76: 15-30.

2016, Equality against hierarchy: Imagining modernity in subaltern India , Contributions to Indian Sociology, 50(1).

2015, Utopia in crisis? Subaltern imaginations in contemporary Bihar, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45(4): 640-659.

2014, Reserve labor, Unreserved politics: Dignified Encroachments under India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(4): 517-546.

2013, Development as Dignity: Dissensus, Equality and Contentious Politics in Bihar, Oxford Development Studies, 41(4): 517-537. (Sanjaya Lall Award for Best Graduate student paper)

2013, Contesting Consensus, Disputing Inequality: Agonistic Subjectivities in Rural Bihar, South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal

2011, New Lists for Old: (Re-)constructing the Poor in the BPL Census, Economic and Political Weekly, 46(22): 82-91.

2008, Civil Society and Governance: (Re-)conceptualizing the Interface, World Development, 36(4): 677-705.

2006, Representation and Development in Urban Peripheries: Reflections on Governance in Ahmedabad Suburbs, Economic and Political Weekly, 41(41): 4363-4368.

2005, “Good Governance and the Dilemma of Development: What lies Beneath?”, Socio-Economic Review, 3(1): 83-116

Book Chapters

Forthcoming 2019, Inclusive exclusions: Citizenship practices among circular labour migrants after 1989, Migration and mobility in India: A citizenship perspective (eds.) Ashwani Kumar and RR Bhagat. Routledge.

Forthcoming 2019, Democracy as dignity: Agonistic imaginations after liberalism. Coming of age in Bihar: Readings in Social Sciences (eds.) Shaibal Gupta. Primus Books.

2019, Global Poverty, Understanding global politics: Actors and themes in international affairs (eds.)
Ruth Wittlinger and Klaus Larres. Routledge.

2017, Sanskritisation: Critical perspectives from North Bihar in comparative perspective, Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Inequalities: Caste and Power in Twenty-first Century India (eds). Surinder Jodhka and James Manor: Orient Blackswan, pp 312-348.

2015, 'Transformative politics: The imaginary of the Mulnibasi in West Bengal'. In Uday Chandra, Geier Heierstad and Kenneth Bo Nielsen (eds), The Politics of Caste in West Bengal, London: Routledge

2014, Flaunted transcripts, Taunted Elites: Interrogating Domination in Bihar, Persistence of Poverty in India (eds). Jonathan Parry and Nandini Gooptu: Social Sciences Press.

Co-authored Journal Articles

2016 (with Manali Desai), Development discourse and popular articulations in Urban Gujarat, Critical Asian Studies

2015 (with Matthew Mccartney), A Consensus Unravels: NREGA and the Paradox of General Welfare in India, European Journal of Development Research, 1-17.

2006, (with Uma Pradhan) "Pluralism and Civil Society Partnerships: Perspectives from South Asia", Contemporary South Asia, 15(1): 55-74.

2000 (with JJ Roy-Burman and Rajib Das) Whither Gram Sabhas: The prospects for agricultural markets for self-reliance in rural India, Journal of Anthropological Society, 35: 207-219

Public Engagement

2019, Co-curator, India Tomorrow, a seven-episode podcast focusing on the social, economic and political dynamics of India's 2019 General Elections.

Introduction: Whats at stake in the Indian elections

Episode 1: Fake news and the battle for information

Episode 2: The politics of Hindu nationalism

Episode 3: Kashmir

Episode 4: Women, gender and love

Episode 5: Economic growth, inequality and jobs

Episode 6: What young Indians want

Episode 7: What Narendra Modi's win means for India

2019, ‘Denied the right to have rights: Social and political exclusion of internal circular migrants’, contribution to the flagship India Exclusion Report 2019, Centre for Equity Studies.

2019, Conflict over Kashmir: A web of complicity, Expert Feature, University of York, March 14 (co-authored with Zahid Ullah)

2018, ‘Portable citizenship’, Interview with Rana Mitter on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking, October 2

2017, Photo Exhibition, Lives on the Move, Wolfson College, Oxford, UK. Thirty pieces were exhibited, November 2017

2017, Photo Exhibition, Lives on the Move, Hotel Maurya Patna, India. Twenty-five pieces were exhibited, March 2017

2016- ongoing, Lives on the move project website, (www.livesonthemove.com)

2016, Presenter, What does it mean to be a migrant in your country?, Social Science Division, University of Oxford

2019, Beyond the Congress/ BJP dichotomy: Reflections on the possibility of a Third Front. Asia Dialogue Nottingham, April 4

2019, Ensure voting rights for migrant workers, Hindustan Times, March 18

2018, Lalu Yadav might be halted but laluwad will not be, The Citizen, January 28

2016, Trump and Modi: Birds of the same feather, The Conversation, December 2

2016, India’s slow brewing political storm is steadily gathering strength, The Conversation, October 27

2016, Disenfranchised citizens, unfree labour: The social and political exclusion of India’s internal circular migrants, Open Democracy, October 3

2015: Why Development in Bihar is about Social Justice , The Wire, November 8.

2015, Bihar Polls: PM Modi’s ‘Caste vs Development’ Battle-cry is Misleading, The Huftington Post, November 7.

2015, Why is the media outraging against OBC reservations when it’s the higher castes who have cornered jobs? Scroll, May 14.

2015, When Modi Mocks NREGA, he ridicules 80 million Indians, Scroll, March 28

2014, The past is not all that dead, Hindustan Times, May 27.

2014, Our Unrepresentative Representative Democracy, The Hindu Center for Politics and Public Policy, April 28

2014, Secularism deserves better champions, Hindustan Times, April 25

2014, Bolstering privilege: Reservation debates during Elections 2014 , Round Table India, June 3

Media mentions

2019, Comment on social media and democracy, The Guardian, May 13

2019, Comment on nationalism and democracy in India, G 1 Globo, May 21

2019, Comment on democracy in India, Les Echoes, April 10

2017, Comment on policy for social inclusion for migrants in India, Hindustan Times, Feb 20

2017, Comment on internal migration in India, Hindustan Times, Feb 7

Blogs

2015, Curator, Sociology of Citizenship Series, Politics in Spires, managed by University of Oxford and Cambridge

2014, What’s left of the Left? Ballots and Bullets blog, Nottingham University, June 4

2014, Transformational politics in India: Whatever happened to social justice, Effective States Inclusive Development blog, May 15

2014, Neither development nor identity: The imaginary of social justice in the Indian elections, May 13

2013, Development as dignity, Debating Development, Oxford Department of International Development, October 13

Commentaries

2013, Ashis Nandy’s critics and India’s thriving democracy, Economic and Political Weekly, 48(8): Web exclusive.

2004, Jhajjar and Iraq: Tales of dehumanization, Economic and Political Weekly, 39(5): 399-402.

2003, Development and its Discontents: Civil Society as the New Lexicon”, Development: Journal of Society for International Development, 46(1): 80-87.

2003, “Penury amid Plenty in western Orissa”, Himal 16(7).

2002, Community, organization and Representation, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(35): 3591-3595.

Working Papers

2014, (with S-J Cooper-Knock, C Kulzer Sacilotto) (eds) 'Focus on India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA)', QEH Working Paper Series

2015, Political settlements and social protection: The case of India’s NREGA, ESID Working Paper 46

Book Review

2013, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence and poverty in India by Akhil Gupta. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 887-888.