“The Congress Century†is a collection of papers highlighting various facets of the eventful century-long existence of the Indian National congress. It may be somewhat amusing, given the rhetorics of Congress leaders today against the reactionary orientations of civil services and the role of foreign hands in destabilizing India, that the Indian National Congress should have started as an organization with more than the usual concern with expanding Indian participation in administering British India and with taking stands on international issues even though India was then a colony. S.R. Maheshwari, M.R. Kazimi, and N.K. Kumar discuss these themes in their papers in the historical and more recent contexts. The congress as a nationalist movement was a complex segmental organization encompassing a veriety of “Internal†organizations and forging alliances with the diverse political parties outside its fold. Asha Gupta, Pushpa Bali, and Davinder Kaur focus on the relationships of the Congress with the Congress Socialist Party, Swarajya Party, and Muslim League. As the major political vehicle of Indian nationalism in a multiethnic society, the Congress party has been exceptionally sensitive to the secular Character of the Indian State, but as a political party competing in democratic elections in a socio-economic setting that is partly traditional and partly modern, the Congress has often found itself on the horns of an unresolved dilemma stemming from the dialectical interaction between tradition and modernity. National Concerns in this process often get bogged down in the quagmire of caste and class, religious and regional conflicts. Runki Basu examines the theory and practice of securalism in India and Meenakshi Jain and M.P. Singh analyse the strategies of political mobilization adopted by the Congress party in the recent decades. Veena Kukreja tries to place the Indian democratic experiment in the South Asian regional comparative perspective.
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