Abstract
In 2011, Aruna Roy was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most-influential people in the world. In prior years, she had received similar recognition, including, in 2000, the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, and, in 2010, the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award for Excellence in Public Administration, Academia, and Management. On each occasion, her most significant achievement was identified as the campaign for greater transparency and accountability in government. The Right to Information law enacted by the Indian Parliament in 2005 gave India’s citizens a powerful tool for monitoring official actions and protecting their rights.
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Notes
Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi The Man: The Story of His Transformation, 3rd ed. (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1997), pp. 130, 140.
For an overview, see Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design, ed. Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Philip Selznick, “An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy,” American Sociological Review 8:1 (1943), pp. 47–54.
For discussion, see Martin Krygier, Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 21–28, 71–76.
Aruna Roy, “Survival and Right to Information” [lecture, Hyderabad, 1996].
Teena Baruah, “Conscience Keeper,” Harmony Magazine 4: 7 (2007), p. 31.
Aruna Roy, “Towards Democratic Pluralism: Challenges for Social Development in the 21st Century” [lecture, Mumbai, 2003].
For a general argument supporting political assertiveness among the poor, see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
See, especially, Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Vintage Books, 2011),
and B. R. Nanda, In Search of Gandhi: Essays and Reflections (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). Gandhi himself admits that, at least in some situations, hunger strikes are coercive.
Aruna Roy, “Information, Democracy and Ethics” [lecture, Bangalore, 2000].
For a general assessment of the RTI and other mechanisms, see Yamini Aiyar and Michael Walton, “Accountability and Service Provision in India” (draft circulated by authors, January 2013).
See Rob Jenkins, “In Varying States of Decay: Anti-Corruption Politics in Maharashtra and Rajasthan,” Regional Reflections: Comparing Politics Across India’s States, ed. Rob Jenkins (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 227–231.
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 244. Jim Yong Kim is now president of the World Bank.
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 171.
See Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy: Institution Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (London: Verso, 2003).
For a different view, see Albert W. Dzur, Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
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© 2015 Kenneth Winston
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Winston, K. (2015). By the People: Becoming a Practitioner of Democracy. In: Ethics in Public Life. Asia Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492050_7
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