Abstract
We are happy to announce that the next issue of the journal will have a special section on India’s foreign policy—mainly in the more contemporary context. This will be a major step in the progress of the journal. While Studies in Indian Politics (SIP) mainly focuses on domestic politics in India, scholars of both foreign policy and domestic competitive politics will be unanimous about the deeper connection between making (and presenting) of foreign policy and competitive politics in a democratic set-up. Therefore, in our continuous effort to expand the boundaries of the ways in which India’s politics is understood, we shall have a special section on India’s foreign policy in the June 2025 issue. With this, we look forward to broadening the scholarly interest that students and researchers of Indian politics have evinced in the journal.
In the past couple of years, SIP has also attempted to bring together works on India’s politics in a comparative context. In this issue, as part of that exercise, we are happy to have the article by Katherine Adeney and Wilfried Swendon on India’s federal politics in comparison with Europe’s federations and multinational polities.
This issue also has a large and rich collection of papers on India’s parliamentary elections that took place in the middle of the year. As a large number of countries across the globe went to polls during the calendar year of 2024, the debates about their meaning and also their implications for democracy in this century are bound to become more significant. But before we enter into those debates, it is important to first analyse the outcomes and how these outcomes are shaped. Therefore, we requested scholars to take a careful look at India’s 18th parliamentary elections and throw light on how the outcome was shaped. More about that in the Introduction to the special section. We thank all contributors who helped put together this section despite the time constraint imposed by the short interval between the schedule of publication and the timing of election results in early June.
Inevitably, we had to slightly delay this issue so as to be able to bring together the papers in the special section. We thank the Sage Team for their patience and efficiency in shortening the delay.