The Rise of the BJP

This book will allow you to rethink the way India’s democratic imagination embraced planning for development. The book’s new research focuses on two aspects of India’s planning process in the 1950s. Mahalanobis, a formidable figure in statistics, created a top-notch institution base to collect statistics. The book also examines ingenious efforts to include everyone, from Sadhus and Bollywood, in the publicizing of Five-Year Plan. This is a refreshing glimpse at the way that development discourse was constructed. Pratap Bhanu Metta, author of The Burden of DemocracyPlanning Democracy contributes to the growing literature about the history of India after Independence. This book blends history and biography, exploring how historians and politicians once considered the idea of planning central to India’s republic. His pen portraits are especially well done, and the author has skillfully accessed a variety of primary sources. Ramachandra Guha is the author of India After Gandhi: History of the World’s Largest Democracy. This engaging account of India’s intertwined attempts at democracy and planning provides a fascinating insight into India’s independent experimentation with both planning. The story of how popular culture was used to promote the plan is a fascinating glimpse into the tensions that were present in the building of a secular democracy. Planning Democracy, by Niraja Gopal Jayal (Centennial Professor), London School of Economics and Political Science. Written with wit and energy and meticulously researched, Planning Democracy is a bold new contribution that we can make to our understanding of India’s state after 1947. Menon’s book is the best available history of India’s experiment with statistics. It was a data-driven attack against social and economic inequalities that sought to be compatible with participatory democratic democracy. Menon blends intellectual and institutional history to argue that planning should be less about whether it “failed” or succeeded, in any sense. Instead, we should concentrate on the profound ways it shaped India’s political imagination. This book will be appreciated by a broad range of disciplines. Sunil Amrith is the Dhawan Professor in History at Yale University. This book, written with engaging prose and a rare sense of humor among Indian academicians, exposes the “dissonance” between planning in its “technocratic, democratic realms” as well as the contradictions of “planned Modernity in a Democracy”. This book is a great resource for students and lay readers of Indian history and planning. It is a remarkable story about democratic leaders, technocratic planners and even holy men of Hinduism during Nehruvian planning’s high noon. This was when the dream of rapid industrialisation under the control of the state was realized. The book’s scope is much wider than the technical details of planning models. — Niranjan Rajadhyaksha — Mint LoungeA stunning panorama of India’s involvement with development planning and the lessons learned — Amitabha Bhattacharya – Financial Express