Talk:Sankaran Krishna

By Sachi Anjunkar

Sankaran Krishna is a Professor at the Department of Politics, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i, Manoa as of July 2023. According to his University profile, his area of research interest includes international relations, postcolonial studies, and political economy with a focus on India/ South Asia, specifically on its Eurocentric epistemology and its obliviousness to matters of race, colonialism, and inequality on a global scale. In the bio of his university profile, Sankaran Krishna states "I am keeping a wary and increasingly worried eye on the rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism in the country".

He has published no books, papers, or research pertaining to Hindus, the Indus Civilization, or caste.

In 2021, he 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."

In 2016, he signed a letter endorsing a letter submitted by the South Asia Faculty Group where it addressed the State Board of Education, California Department of Education, dated May 17, 2016. In this letter they requested removing the word India from textbooks. In addition, they falsely stated:

1. "There is no established connection between Hinduism and the Indus Civilization."
2. "It is inappropriate to remove mention of the connection of caste to Hinduism."

Publications related to India

Journal Articles

1. Krishna, Sankaran. “Number Fetish: Middle-Class India’s Obsession with the GDP.” Globalizations, vol. 12, no. 6, Oct. 2015, pp. 859–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1100854.

   Sankaran is confused as to the uses and limitations of GDP as a metric to measure growth and prosperity of a nation. In this article, he singles out India and its middle-class population in a discussion where he claims that there is an obsession by a part of the Indian population on the benefits of overall growth of the country's economy, ignoring that this is one of the most widely accepted metrics to measure growth and prosperity of a country. He fails to understand that while there are many metrics that are also produced by every country around the world, the most highlighted metric remains GDP and GDP growth.

   Sankaran feels that GDP growth is "is likely to generate worse societal outcomes for the vast majority of India’s population.” while ignoring the very real benefit to the lower-economic strata or the number of people whose lives have improved along-side GDP growth.

2. Krishna, Sankaran. “Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Destitution: Law, Race, and Human Security.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp. 85–101. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24569425.
3. Krishna, Sankaran. “On Introducing Ambedkar.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 16, 2014, pp. 23–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24480149.
4. Krishna, Sankaran. “Migrant Acts: Deterritorializing Postcoloniality.” Theory & Event, vol. 12, no. 4, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0094.
5. Krishna, Sankaran. “The Bomb, Biography and the Indian Middle Class.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 23, 2006, pp. 2327–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4418323.
6. Krishna, Sankaran. “Methodical Worlds: Partition, Secularism, and Communalism in India.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 27, no. 2, 2002, pp. 193–217. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40645045.
7. Krishna, Sankaran. “Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 19, no. 4, 1994, pp. 507–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644820.

Books and Book Chapters

1. Krishna, Sankaran. Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka and the Question of Nationhood, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
2. Krishna, Sankaran. “The Social Life of a Bomb: India and the Ontology of an ‘Overpopulated’ Society,” in Itty Abraham (ed.) South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009: 68-88.
3. Krishna, Sankaran. “Forgetting Caste While Living It: The Privileges of Amnesia,” in D. Shyam Babu (ed.), Caste In Life: Experiencing Inequalities, New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2010: 7-19.

References

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