Politics

Mamata Banerjee’s identity politics: empowerment or social engineering?

Mamata Banerjee's politics of recognition: Mamata Banerjee’s welfare and development boards transformed identity politics in West Bengal through state patronage rather than grassroots mobilisation. While presented as instruments of empowerment for marginalised communities, they also reshaped electoral alignments, regional power structures and the politics of recognition, leaving a legacy that continues beyond her government.

Shibaji Pratim Basu
15 min read
Mamata Banerjee’s identity politics: empowerment or social engineering?

The beginning of the 1990s did not only mark the end of Socialist regime/s in Soviet Union and its East European satellites and as a result, the end of the cold war, it also indicated a paradigm-shift in national politics across the world: from the old ideal of socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice, it moved towards embracing, as the political philosopher Charles Taylor phrased it, Politics of Recognition.

Once the supra economic-political and conceptual category like class

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Shibaji Pratim Basu
Shibaji Pratim Basu
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