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The debate on citizenship in the Constituent Assembly was overshadowed by the partition of India, which created difficulties in making constitutional provision for citizenship on certain defined criteria. However, it was quite clear to most of the members of the Constituent Assembly that the criteria of citizenship could not be fixed beforehand, as it was not possible to anticipate future developments. Thus, the Constitution empowered the parliament to define citizenship from time to time in the light of changing conditions. Thus began the process of enactments revising the provisions for citizenship, which ultimately culminated into the violation of the Constitution through enactment.

The article examines the construction of religious identity among the Sikhs from the socio-historical perspective. It has been argued that the Sikh identity was constructed as a result of the colonial intervention in which the emphasis turned to the appearance instead of faith as such. The new identity was a product of the politics of the times and it was perpetuated in order to maintain the hegemonic domination. Sikhism, despite its egalitarian ideology, failed to create a casteless community. Discrimination and exclusion of lower castes continued. An empirical investigation into the conditions and perceptions of the lowest caste, namely Mazhabi clearly demonstrated their exclusion, whereas discourse of equality among the Sikhs is used to create a moral community. Despite the equality of worship among the Sikhs, the Mazhabis at the local level are denied the equal religious rights in the gurdwaras (Sikh temple) owned and controlled by the upper dominant castes. Roots of the exclusion have to be located in the history of the making of the religious community and the way a few castes after benefiting from religious conversion perpetuated the caste-based exclusions.

In a multi-religious social formation the understanding of caste and caste hierarchy requires a different theoretical and methodological approach from the conventional one. This article examines the case of Punjab society in which Sikhs and Hindus co-exist and the former claim to be an egalitarian religious community. Although caste hierarchies could be multiple in such a setting, the forces influencing dominance and change have remained same. Education and occupational changes have transformed the nature of hierarchy in Punjab owing to which the dalit assertion has increased. At the same time, the domination of Jats, though being frequently challenged, has remained the most potent element in the caste dynamics of Punjab.

Towards Sociology of Dalits, features 11 select articles with a comprehensive introductory chapter which provide a panoramic outline of the content of Dalit studies in India over time and space. The location of Dalits has been inseparably linked with the caste and economy of Indian society giving rise to the practice of untouchability duly supported by tradition and religious ideology. Three major issues discussed in the various chapters of this volume are untouchability and exclusion, conflict and change.

This paper examines the issue of India's development from the perspective of distributive justice to assess whether there has been a decline in disparities owing to the development path adopted after the independence. Basing the argument on the two documents of the Government of India which have frankly evaluated the policy of the state policy, it is shown how, despite various changes in the economy, the development process created disparities and became the source of agrarian discontent, particularly the Naxalite movement. In the preliberalisation phase characterised by mixed economy model, the major fault line was the lack of political will coupled with the apathy of administrators. In the post-liberalisation phase, the major issue was that of mal-governance. The paper explores the causes of the failure of the Indian state with regard to distributive justice.

Is there an Indian sociology, and if so, how 'Indian' is it? Is it an undifferentiated and/or an imagined composite whole having some common features, like India itself, being pulled in diverse directions and orientations? Like India, does it confront issues with epistemic and conceptual boundaries? Like India, does it still carry its colonial and western baggage? These are some of the questions that a student of sociology tends to ask, while traversing through the research terrains of sociology in India at the dawn of the new millennium. Indian Sociology, which is being reviewed in this article, precisely captures and represents the angularities of social researches in sociology and social anthropology of the bygone decade of the 21st century.

The article explores the alternative strategies adopted by the lowest caste groups known by the generic term dalits to improve their social status in India. The mapping of various strategies has been done by taking into consideration the four historical stages, namely, medieval period, renaissance, postcolonial modernity and postmodernity. It has been argued that in these stages different strategies were employed by the dalits. It is in the postmodern state that the dalit discourse of equality has shifted its emphasis from inclusion and equality to exclusivity and difference. There are two predominant dalit discourses, each complimenting the other, in contemporary India. The first is the use of democratic means to claim power at the formal level by creating a distinct voter-constituency through the articulation of dalit identity. The second is a strong articulation of the exclusiveness of the dalit experience. The argument is that the dalit experience cannot be comprehended by non-dalits as a result of which only dalit can theorise his experience.

Having said that, Ayyangar identified various challenges associated with the adoption of Hindi as the national language: (i) the question of numerals, (ii) the issue of language of states, and communication both between states, and centre and states, (iii) the language used in legislatures, high courts and the Supreme Court, and (iv) whether Hindi could develop a capacity to absorb ideas. Interestingly, Chapter III, entitled “Language of Supreme Court and High Courts, etc,” was important in the sense that it clearly acknowledged the incapacity of Hindi language at the time, in handling the technical use of the various aspects of law. Chapter IV, under the title “Special Directives,” of the proposed amendment consisted of two clauses: 301 H. Every person shall be entitled to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority of the Union or a State in any of the languages or in the State, as the case may be. 301 I. It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of Hindi and to develop the language so as to serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichments by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in other languages of India, and drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.3 In my opinion, the proposal sought to commemorate the ancient Hindu past through the Sanskritic tradition, without negating Persian, Pali, and Prakrit. [...]there must be a regrouping of states on linguistic basis.

M K Gandhi’s idea of the village was developed through his imagination of an ideal state that had an appeal from the masses and was also sought as the rightful response to the British colonial rule, whereas Ambedkar’s idea of the village was derived from his existential experience of living in Western countries as well as in Mumbai. [...]following Chandra (1992), it can be strongly believed that the binary opposition between modernity and tradition is normative and ideological when he writes, The dichotomy is projected back to explain and categorise even those actions, attitudes, beliefs and values that did not rest on, or stem from, such a polarity. [...]nationalism enabled a Dalit to be the chair of the Drafting Committee despite the fact that the Ambedkar– M K Gandhi relationship remained unfavourable after the Poona Pact in 1932. The existence of these village communities each one forming a separate little state in itself has according to Metcalfe contributed more than any other cause to the preservation of the people of India, through all the revolutions and changes which they have suffered, and is in a high degree conducive to their happiness and to the enjoyment of great portion of the freedom and independence.