Profiles of Povery and Networks of Power

2010

The purpose of the current chapter is to study the role of power brokers in Punjabi community to see how they replaced the cultural institution of leadership in name of deraydar. The paper tries to bring forth factors that made these power brokers influential and how did the traditional leader faded away from the cultural life of the villages. The paper also describes the sources of power that these brokers enjoy at local level and the manipulative strategies that are conscious held to maintain the social control through reciprocity towards group allies and coercive tactics towards the opponents. In order to better understand the role of power structure in the manipulating the developmental work, the inevitable existence of influential deraydars. Paper also discusses political set up of village to see how political set up of village revolves around the pressure groups of village. How these pressure groups are formed that is the source of power of these pressure groups due to which each group tried to manipulate benefits using their influence, political links, relationships, etc. The study also looks into that how these politically influential groups try to over throw their opponent groups.

2003

In this paper, an attempt has been made to study the changing pattern of power in Indian society. The paper also briefly examines the major theories of power and social stratification and discussed their applicability to Indian society.

XIDAS, Jabalpur, 2009

The findings of the study show that power pool exists in the village community, where there is diversity of interests among various groups. However, it is always the elites who enjoy the power positions over the common people. They derive power from different sources like formal official power position, economic strength, ritual superiority and traditional social status. According to their positions in the power pool they keep their social relations with the government employees working in the rural areas and exercise their power by adopting strong power strategy at one time and soft power strategy at other. Some village elites extract benefits by exerting pressure on the employees due to the numerical strength of their caste members and official power position. Some provide fringe benefits to them as tokenism to get their work done. Some use their traditional status as the mass appeal and achieve their goal. But over all they continue to subjugate the common mass.

Shodh Disha [ISSN 0975-735X] UGC Care Listed Journal, 2023

This paper in two sections elucidates upon how democracy enters a particular historical and socio-cultural setting and becomes ‘vernacularized’, and how through this process it produces new social relations and values which in turn shapes ‘the political.’ The First Section of the paper suc- cinctly puts conceptualization of power dynamics through the canons of Western Political Theory. The Second Section, then helps us re-imagine power dynamics in postcolonial democracies as an interplay of capital and social clout. Finally, in the Third Section, it brings back this discussion of power dynamics in postcolonial democracies into the heart of a fundamental problem in classical political theory i.e., the crisis of legitimation.

Commonwealth and Comparative Politics

Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol.16 (4–5). 2009

The web of post-modern power appears nomadic, elusive and always elsewhere. Like our online presences, it has no obvious boundaries and appears as spirit-like, a magic life haunting the net and the world. Government becomes liminal: 'Liminal identities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom and ceremonial' to quote Victor Turner. This liminality has changed the balance of power between the corporate and non-corporate sectors, however this does not mean that power is straightforward. When everything is interlinked through information technology then exercises of power may even increase confusion and undermine the bases or legitimacy of that power. Modes of ordering can produce perceived disorder. Knowledge of the system becomes divination and trapped in magic. It is suggested that an awareness of this, and focusing on contradiction, or oscillation is more useful than focusing on simplicity.

2018

This work has two intertwined components: first, as part of a research programme it introduces a new methodology for identifying `power-centres' in rural societies of developing countries in general and then applies that in the specific context of contemporary rural India for addressing some debates on the dynamics of power in rural India. Land-ownership, caste hierarchy and patron-client relation have been regarded as the traditional building blocks of political-economic organization in rural India. However, many believe that gradual urbanization and expansion of market economy have eroded the influence of the traditional power structure. This work is a contribution toward identifying the nature of `local' rural institutions based on primary data collected by ourselves. We took 36 villages in the states of Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh - 12 in each of these states - as the sites for our observation and data collection. We quantify nature of institutions from data on...