Abstract
Current scholarship on democracy seems to be getting divided into two pathways of research and argument. One argues that there is a global backsliding of democracy. This argument invokes evidence of institutional decay, attraction of populist politics and authoritarian leadership in different parts of the globe. The other argument mainly using survey data suggests that popular support for and interest in democracy continues to be reasonable. As India completes 77 years of its independence and democratic experience, echoes of this debate reverberate academia and public sphere in India too. With deep polarization of the political arena, nuance is often lost. In previous two issues of SIP, therefore, we have sought to present the readers with papers that analytically engage with this puzzle which is simultaneously global and Indian in its composition.
In this issue, we continue that effort. Our colleague on the editorial managing team, Rajeshwari Deshpande has put together a special section in this issue of the journal that addresses the puzzle through a comparative perspective. This special section, in a sense, makes an important departure because the journal so far did not address the issues of the Indian political process in a comparative frame. This was a major limitation of the journal so far. With this special section, we cannot claim to have fully overcome the limitation but at least made a beginning. For both, analyses of Indian democracy and theorization about democracy, more comparisons need to be offered. We hope that we shall attract the comparative scholarship to contribute to the Studies in Indian Politics more actively in the future.
We are thankful to the authors of the papers in the special section and more particularly, thanks are due to Rajeshwari Deshpande for taking up the responsibility of putting the special section together.