University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University or CU) is a collegiate public state university located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.&nbsp;Within India it is recognized as a &quot;Five-Star University&quot; and accredited &quot;A&quot; Grade by National Assessment and Accreditation Council.

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The University of Calcutta has secured the Fifth position among the Universities of India in the prestigious &quot;Indian University Ranking 2019&quot; list, released by the NIRF of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India.

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It was established on 24 January 1857, and was one of the first institutions in Asia to be established as a multidisciplinary and Western-style university. Its alumni and faculty include several heads of state, heads of government, social reformers, prominent artists, only academy award winner and Dirac medal winner in India, many Fellows of the Royal Society and five Nobel laureates as of 2019 which is highest in South Asia.

University Of Calcutta

As Irom Sharmila Chanu breaks her sixteen-yearlong fast on August 9, 2016, struggle for peace in India’s Northeast seems to have turned a full circle. On the one hand, her battle against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958—the law that empowers even a noncommissioned army officer to open fire on a civilian and in the process kill her with impunity, that is to say, without ever being tried in a court of law—by all accounts made her the “iron lady” and “the Face of Manipur” to the world. On the other hand, notwithstanding her indefinite fast—widely believed to be emblematic of the “collective moral outrage” against the Act—persistent appeals made by a host of national and international human rights groups, eminent public intellectuals, and the recommendation of the respective Committees in favor of repealing it, the Act remains very much in force in parts of Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast even after fifty-eight years of its enactment, resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians. This article seeks to explain the implications of this paradox for peace politics in the region. Why does Sharmila have to take the otherwise painful and albeit difficult decision of breaking her fast even when there is little sign of repealing the Act? Insofar as she takes the difficult decision of breaking her fast, she realizes that her prolonged fast becomes subjected to a variety of technologies of governance: first, by calling for the complete sacrifice of her private life, second by turning her fast into a public spectacle rendering it both “unsuccessful” and necessary—significantly both at the same time—and finally by inculcating in her and in many of us the intense desire of pursuing peace through the established political institutions, particularly electoral institutions. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Political Science

Alternatives

Prisoners of Peace

While globalisation unleashes forces that the Indian State1 finds increasingly difficult to stop and contain, a variety of intermediate institutions has emerged in recent years ranging between a fully securitised State and a State integrated fully into the world economy. These obviously call new configurations of border and border economy into existence as much as contribute to the production of new and hitherto unknown political subjects. Border economy produces the community and not the other way round. Border trade is one of the many instrumentalities through which the flow of persons, goods and services is sought to be contained in order to help making the nation in the border. Ethnicity and ethnic identification serve as a technology for governing the unofficial trade and contributes to the production of ethnic subject. Besides, it is important to understand how a number of people eke out a living by taking advantage of differential pricing across the border. Thus, the labouring life of the subaltern has become an agent, and a moral community thus gets produced, bringing about, in the process, mutation in the dominant discourses of national security and functional integration. © 2014 Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA).

India Quarterly

Border Economy and the Production of Collective Subjects in Indiaâ€™s East and the North East

The Indian State is the first of a four-volume research surveys and explorations in political science conducted by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). While focusing on the review of literature on the Indian State during 2003-9, this volume goes beyond the confines of this period to explore links, continuities, and research trends since the 1950s. Exploring the themes of the social character of the Indian State, political economy, social policy, and law and rights, the volume provides a summary evaluation of the state of research on these themes. It also highlights research trends, provides a valuable bibliographic guide, and suggests possible lines of future enquiry. In the course of their analyses, the contributors capture the trajectory of the evolution of various perspectives and theoretical frameworks that have significantly informed the writings on this subject-institutionalism and neo-institutionalism in the 1950s and 1960s; pluralism and state pluralism as well as Marxism in the 1970s; cultural studies and discourse analysis; and critical studies that emerged at the beginning of the new millennium. © Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi 2013. All rights reserved.

GENERAL

Although forced migration in India is usually divided into two broad types – internal and external, depending on the territorial expanse within which it occurs, we propose to concentrate more on the first type for reasons not beyond our comprehension. First, while the problem of immigration from across the international borders has been a topic of frequent discussion and responsible for sparking off many a nativist outburst in different parts of India, the issue of internal displacement has assumed alarming proportions especially in recent years, but has hardly received any attention worth its name in popular circles. There is no denying the fact that the issue of internal displacement is yet to acquire the kind of legal standing – whether national or international, that is usually accorded to the external one – particularly of the refugees. Secondly, whereas India's role as a refugee receiving country has been widely acclaimed both within the country as well as abroad, her role in generating refugees has been of marginal significance compared to that of some of her next-door neighbours. This, however, does not leave any room for complacence, and the pressures on the state to adopt certain pre-emptive and corrective measures are now formidable. […] Thirdly, it is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to make a watertight distinction between these two types for much of what we call, internal displacement is externally induced and has international spillovers at least in the neighbouring regions. © 2008 Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

World University root node

The Fleeing People of South Asia: Selections from Refugee Watch

Population displacement in India: A critical review

Elections in large-sized states are universally accepted as the watchword of democracy. A country that does not hold periodic elections and removes its rulers from power through the instrumentality of elections based on universal adult franchise does not qualify as democratic under the present circumstances. The paper argues that the institution of elections – widely held as the lifeblood of democracy under modern conditions whether in India or elsewhere – is produced through what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘a state of exception’ while paradoxically ‘safeguarding’ it. As he puts it: Far from being a response to a normative lacuna, the state of exception appears as the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the order for the purpose of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation. The lacuna is not within the law (la legge) but concerns its relation to reality, the very possibility of its application. Viewed in this light, it is a study not so much of elections being the illuminated face of our democracy but of the dark face that is hidden by it. Yet the very suspension of electoral rules and norms makes the conduct of ‘normal’ elections possible, gives credence to them as an institution and thereby strengthens the foundations of our democracy. The term ‘suspension’ is used here in three relatively distinguishable senses of the sovereign state deciding first not to apply the laws, rules and norms that it has otherwise set for itself, second, to apply them in a way that infringes on what Montesquieu calls, the ‘spirit’ of laws and third, that disarticulates the moral community. © 2009 Sharmila Mitra Deb and M Manisha.