Electoral Processes and Governance in South Asia/edited by Dushyantha
Mendis. New Delhi, Sage Pub., 2008, 480 p., tables, figs.,
ISBN 81-7829-738-5.
Electoral Processes and Governance in South Asia/edited by Dushyantha
Mendis. New Delhi, Sage Pub., 2008, 480 p., tables, figs.,
ISBN 81-7829-738-5.
Contents: Acknowledgements. I. Introduction: 1. Editor's introduction: South Asian democracies in transition/Dushyantha Mendis. II. Country Papers: 2. Bangladesh/Muzaffer Ahmad. 3. India/Partha S. Ghosh. 4. Nepal/Birendra Prasad Mishra, Krishna P. Khanal and Nilamber Acharya. 5. Pakistan/Rasul Bakhsh Rais. 6. Sri Lanka/K.M. de Silva. III. Statutory framework and institutional arrangements: 7. Bangladesh/Muzaffer Ahmad. 8. India/Ujjwal Kumar Singh. 9. Nepal/Nilamber Acharya and Krishna P. Khanal. 10. Pakistan/Zulfikar Khalid Maluka. 11. Sri Lanka/Dushyantha Mendis. IV. Group discrimination at elections: 12. Bangladesh/Sohela Nazneen. 13. India/Amit Prakash. 14. Nepal/Hari Prasad Bhattarai. 15. Pakistan/Rasul Bakhsh Rais. Select Bibliography. About the editor and contributors. Index.
"Most South Asian Countries--following independence from British Rule in the late nineteen forties, and in the case of Nepal, liberation from the autocracy of one family group in 1950--have enjoyed democratic systems of governance at least at some time or the other, often for extended periods of time, and, in a few cases, over the course of their post-independence history. Electoral processes have, however, been found wanting to greater or lesser extents in all these countries. Electoral malpractices are of critical concern to all South Asian Countries.
It is in this background that the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Kandy, Sri Lanka, with funding from the Ford Foundation, organised in 2002 an international conference on electoral processes and governance in South Asia. The South Asian countries selected for study were Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and papers were presented by experts in the area of electoral processes and governance in these countries. This book, based on the papers originally presented at that conference, seeks to understand electoral processes as they actually operate in South Asia, to discuss the reasons for the flaws in these systems and the degrees of success or failure in attempts at reform."