Journal of South Asian Development

On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, a nine-storey building that housed five garment factories, a commercial bank and several retail shops, collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. Had Bangladesh’s well-regarded building code been enforced, the tragedy would never have occurred. Through an exploration of the process by which real estate development projects are approved and building construction overseen, this article attempts to provide an explanation for why there is such a wide gap between formal policy and actual implementation. Following such tragic events, elected officials come under considerable pressure from civil society groups and citizens to pass stronger legislation, and Bangladesh’s political system, which concentrates power in the majority party and that party’s leadership, allows for the relatively easy passage of legislation. Nonetheless, dramatic population growth and limited availability of land create powerful incentives for developers to evade these regulations. Collusion between developers, the regulator and high-level government officials responsible for overseeing the regulator has ensured that both the laws and court orders are unenforced.

This article seeks to contribute to an understanding of the dynamics of religion in social mobilization. It argues that existing approaches to the study of the role of religion in social mobilization have been insufficiently nuanced and have failed to probe the multiple and often contradictory influences that religion can have on mobilization channels. On the basis of three qualitative case studies from Malaysia, Bangladesh and the United Kingdom, we identify three key factors of religion that can catalyze social mobilization: theological resources; religious spaces; and the interaction of both with the wider context. This leads us to conclude that the boundaries of the ‘religious’ dimension of social mobilization are fluid, and that the religious element of social mobilization can never be disentangled from its social and political context.

The decision to carry out a caste-based census in India in order to, among other things, get a more scientific basis for reservations has generated considerable debate. Much of this debate has focused on data quality, without much attention paid to the question of what should be the scientific basis for determining whether a caste is backward. This article explores the concepts used, implicitly or explicitly, in the literatures on caste and reservations to come up with a framework to determine dominance-based caste hierarchies in a milieu of change. We test this framework in an empirical reality drawn from the south Indian state of Karnataka to argue for a more disaggregated and inclusive approach to reservations.

Many state-led development policies in India are formulated for tribal communities who are deemed ‘backward’. The institutionalization of such ethnic categorizations through development policies reflects a tendency to homogenize communities (especially numerically small ones) who are either regarded as ‘backward’ resisters of development or as primitive victims of modernity. The experience of migrants is one way in which the impacts of development can be explored and this propensity to homogenize may be challenged. This article uses migrant narratives to understand how development is experienced by the Reang tribal community in Tripura (north-east India). The article presents two main arguments. First, migration ruptures conventional understanding of ‘community’ among the Reangs and is crucial in challenging the dominant notion of tribal communities as homogenous groups. The article argues that examining migration among Reangs reveals the growing internal divisions within this tribal community where state-led development is often experienced in ambivalent ways. Second, despite adopting development policies, tribal minorities continue to be perceived as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ by the dominant ethnic group, thus illustrating how stereotyped homogenous ethnic categorizations are created and reproduced in post-colonial India.

The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.