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ABSTRACTThis article illustrates how the potential of recognition‐based politics to achieve distributive justice is determined by political structures and the power relations that constitute them. In response to Nancy Fraser's framework of social justice, it shows that the meaningful coordination of identity‐based claims with distributive justice is constrained — not only by the content of the claims themselves, but also because redistributive demands are subverted through competing pursuits for power and legitimacy between rival political factions. The article describes how the separate‐state movement for Jharkhand in Eastern India was de‐radicalized by three instruments, namely, the reservation system, cultural nationalism and state development discourse. This explains why distributive measures do not feature prominently in the Jharkhand state and why recognition politics has taken a disciplined form in the electoral mainstream while distributive politics continues to be pursued through violent and extra‐parliamentary means.

This paper explains the potential implications of digital interventions for social accountability through the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India. The SCM represents India's transition to a new political economy based on rapid urbanization and wide-scale application of digital technology to reform public service delivery while simultaneously creating new markets for urban transformation. Within this wider context, the paper considers the future of democratic practices in urban governance. We argue that while citizen-led accountability practices were trialed by civil society organizations since 1990s, the SCM presented unique opportunity and challenge to institutionalize these tools within the framework of multi-scalar governance — between central-, state- and local-level institutions and between communities, private vendors and public bodies. Zooming into the four smart city projects — Indore, Kakinada, Panaji and Ranchi — we explain how each city engaged with citizen groups, communities and civil society and what their experiences tell us about the prospects and challenges of democratizing digital urban futures.

This article examines how middle‐class identity is experienced and employed by traditional and neo‐middle‐class identifiers in India. The economically and socially heterogeneous middle‐class identifiers vote similarly, but we know very little about what they want out of politics. We focus on the subjective experiences of middle‐class identifiers, we theorize the expressive function of middle‐class identities, and we examine the socially and personally focused core values of traditional middle‐class identifiers and neo‐middle aspirers. We introduce the "Class as Social Identity" scale and analyze qualitative interviews with strong middle‐class identifiers (Study 1) and the 2006, 2012, and 2014 World Values Survey India segments (Study 2). The interviews show that upper middle class and lower middle class identifiers express similar socially focused values but different personally focused values. The WVS analyses show convergence of upper‐middle‐class and lower‐middle‐class identifiers on conservation and self‐transcendence in line with dominant political narratives and divergence on materialism, hedonism, and stimulation in line with their rising differences in income and every‐day life pressures. We discuss the significance of these findings for the understanding of the political function of middle‐class identities in India in the context of heightened Hindu nationalism and recent socioeconomic challenges aggravated by the COVID‐19 pandemic.

This chapter explores the extent and nature of public support for democracy in Bangladesh by offering a detailed analysis of a nationwide Democracy Poll survey. Although the form of democracy that has evolved in Bangladesh is often portrayed as a core part of the governance problem rather than a solution, political attitudes surveys find that there is overwhelming public support for democracy. The data analysed in this chapter allows us to examine the level of support for democracy and question whether it can accommodate different types of democratic regimes. In particular the chapter extends a comparison between pragmatic and ethical attitudes to democracy, i.e. whether people view democracy as a means to an end and therefore are willing to sacrifice some aspects of democracy if it fails to deliver institutional benefits or whether they see democracy as an end in itself. The chapter concludes that the pragmatic approach to governance is something that the Bangladeshi urban middle class are more likely to consider.