Talk:Aparna Sundar

By Rutvi Dattani

Aparna Sundar is an independent researcher based in Canada, as of November 2022. According to her academia profile, her research concerns Indian politics, political economy, labor, and democracy.

In 2021, she along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

1. Rajangam, Krupa, and Sundar, Aparna . “Reading the Entanglements of Nature-Culture Conservation and Development in Contemporary India.” Journal of South Asian Development, vol. 16, no. 1, 2021.
2. Menon, Gayatri A., and Sundar, Aparna .“Uncovering a Politics of Livelihoods: Analysing Displacement and Contention in Contemporary India.” Globalizations, vol. 16, no. 2, 2019, pp. 186-200.

   1. The article begins with the 2016 moment when the workers in Bangalore's export garment industry went on a widespread ash strike in response to rising unemployment and unstable employment conditions. Workers were protesting changes to the rules governing the Employee Provident Fund. The government backed down and withdrew the proposed changes.
   2. The second moment examines popular conflicts over common lands in established rural fishing villages in south India. These conflicts are related to the early post-independence decades' state-led capitalist modernization of agriculture and fisheries. For three days, more than a thousand villagers' women blocked the major road with nets and kattumarams.
   3. They asked that the trawler owners adhere to the local law's stringent fishing prohibitions. In the late 1970s, people started to oppose trawlers and the harmful fishing methods they used.
   4. The third moment talks about how Mumbai's pavement dwellers work to carve out a space for themselves, which is crucial for social reproduction and manufacturing. These city people can trace their migration from agrarian livelihoods to their arrival in the city. A sizable fraction of Mumbai's population lives in unofficial settlements, illustrating the greater dynamics of urban poverty and displacement. Their fights center on protecting the fundamental rights to space, which are crucial to their survival.

3. Sundar, Aparna. “Skills for Work and the Work of Skills: Community, Labour, and Technological Change in India’s Artisanal Fisheries.” Journal of South Asian Development, vol. 13, no. 3, 2018, pp. 1–21.
4. Nilsen, Alf Gunvald, and Srila Roy, editors. “Can the Subaltern Be Secular?” New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India, 2015.
5. Sundar, Aparna .“Introduction: Sovereignty, Development and Civil War.” Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development, 2000.
6. Sundar, Nandini, and Aparna Sundar. Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development. Sage, 2014.
7. Sundar, Aparna .“From Regulation to Management and Back Again: Exploring Governance Shifts in India′s Coastal Zone.” Conservation and Society, 2014.
8. Sundar, Aparna .“Thinking beyond Secularism: The Catholic Church and Political Practice in Rural South India.” Samaj Revue (South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal), 2012.
9. Sundar, Aparna .“Civilians and Citizenship: Perspectives on Civil War in South Asia.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XLV, no. 18, 2010, pp. 37-42.
10. Goldring, Luin, and Sailaja Krishnamurti, editors. “The South Asia Left Democratic Alliance (SALDA): The Dilemmas of a Diasporic Left.” Organizing the Transnational: The Experience of Asian, Caribbean and Latin American Migrants in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007, pp. 206-214.