Uniform as Assertion: The Politics of Caste Reservation in Colonial and Post-colonial Armed Forces of India (1930–2020)

Contemporary Voice of Dalit, Ahead of Print.
Recruitment of lower and middle castes remained a much-debated topic in Indian electoral politics till now. On the one hand, there was intense political debate between various castes, and on the other, there was judicial and administrative debate about social justice. Even though Ambedkar tried to use it as a method of social justice and state-sponsored social alleviation, because of its connection to identity politics, it quickly became a matter of electoral mobilization. Various parties that were attempting to win over various communities with their call for military recruitment eventually strayed from the real motivation behind that Ambedkarian demand. Lastly, since the turn of the twentieth century, the new political rhetoric of Hindutva has intriguingly transformed this call for military recruitment into a different cause. This article discusses how the demand for the Chamar Regiment and the Ahir Regiment in particular became the focal point of this debate for nearly a century.

Global justice must be seen to be done—A defense of integrated pluralism

Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print.
Over the past two decades the academic literature on global distributive justice has generated a proliferation of positions regarding the question of how to conceive a globally just distribution of goods. One important development within this global justice debate is the emergence and increasing influence of several Pluralist theorists of global justice—including, perhaps most prominently, Fraser, R. Miller, and Risse. This article argues that Pluralists have not yet sufficiently engaged with the difficulty of how their conceptions of global justice could satisfy the publicity condition. This condition requires that the demands of justice must be publicly known to be recognized and fulfilled. This article explains why meeting this condition is especially difficult for the Pluralists. Then, it outlines an Integrated Pluralist position which, by placing special emphasis on global background justice, can meet the publicity condition. This position “integrates” concerns of justice emerging from a plurality of sites of justice. Thereby it follows “Integrationist” approaches to global justice—like those of Caney and Walton—which claim that the contents of justice of a given site of justice must not be determined in isolation from contents of other sites of justice.
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