Drawing heavily on both survey data and interviews with potential candidates, this chapter argues that men are more likely than women to look in the mirror and see a qualified candidate, someone who has what it takes to run for office. Women are more likely than men to see someone who doesn’t quite embody the credentials, skills, and traits they think a candidate should possess. Differences in potential candidates’ self-appraisals are strong evidence of a gendered psyche, whose imprint leaves women feeling far less efficacious than men to envision themselves as candidates and, consequently, far less likely to consider running for office.

Introduction

The carbon emissions of the world's richest 1 per cent are more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent, despite the fact that climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the poor, especially in the warmer parts of the world (Oxfam 2020; Goswami 2020). This suggests that climate and socio-economic justice are intertwined, and understanding the nature of the relationship between carbon emissions and economic inequality can help us arrive at potential pathways to address both.

Climate and socio-economic justice are crucial in the case of India. India is a significant player in the global economy, as its gross domestic product (GDP) is the fifth largest in the world (World Bank 2021). However, the country also experiences staggering levels of economic inequality. It has the third highest number of billionaires, but it also has the largest poor population in the world (Ankel 2020; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2019). The wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the Indian population is more than four times the total wealth of the bottom 70 per cent (Economic Times 2020). These indicators of economic inequality demonstrate a dire need to enhance socio-economic justice in India.

Three different indicators of carbon emissions are widely used for analytical purposes. The present climate crisis resulted from historically accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The United States (US) is the largest contributor, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global cumulative carbon emissions between 1751 and 2019, while India contributed about 3 per cent (Ritchie 2019). Hence, India's historical cumulative carbon emission is rather low. The second indicator measures annual carbon emissions, or a country's current emission levels. Based on this indicator, India has the third highest carbon emission levels globally; it trails China and the US by a huge margin. The third indicator is per capita annual emissions, which accounts for differences in the population size of countries. When countries are ranked in descending order of their per capita carbon emissions, India ranked 128 out of 210 countries in 2019 (Crippa et al. 2020). Even though India's per capita carbon emissions and its share in cumulative global emissions is low, its current scale of emissions is a matter of concern (Matthews 2016).

Arundhati Roy famously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a

As inspiring and insightful as these words are, such juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia barely scratches the surface of what and who we are as a nation. The soulcrushing images of burning pyres in parking lots turned into makeshift graveyards, which international and national media have immortalized, offer a clue, as does the sombre poetry of Parul Khakhar (Tripathi 2021). India is a land pockmarked with a million fires.

The COVID-19 crisis has come as a shock to many middle-class Indians. Yet, to India's Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized groups, haunted by centuries of oppression, this crisis is yet another in a long list of historical and ongoing crises. For example, the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand have been burning for over a century now. As a result, at least 130,000 families have, quite literally, lived through a century-long trial by fire (Rahi 2019). Since 1995, the state-owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) has claimed to have a ‘master plan’, which is possibly gathering dust in some almirah of the coal ministry (S. Kumar 2021). One would imagine that a pandemic like COVID-19 might scare the minister whose job includes ensuring the welfare of the 3.6 million people who work in mines with a less than adequate supply of fresh air. Yet, in 2020, India's coal minister valorized coal workers as ‘our coal warriors who are toiling day and night to keep the lights on even during the corona pandemic’ (Press Information Bureau 2020). They toiled very hard indeed.

A year later, as India struggled to confront the monstrous second wave of the pandemic, Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL), recorded the highest-ever single-day coal dispatch of 80 railway rakes (PNS 2021).

In this chapter, we examine whether traditional family role orientations systematically hinder women’s emergence in the political sphere. We begin by considering how potential candidates’ early political socialization relates to their political ambition as adults. The majority of the chapter then turns to gender dynamics in respondents’ current households. Our findings reveal that even among the youngest generation of potential candidates, women are less likely than men to have grown up in politicized households, more likely to be responsible for the majority of household tasks and childcare, and less likely to be encouraged to run by those closest to them. But, somewhat surprisingly, the traditional division of labor doesn’t affect interest in running for office. Although women continue to struggle balancing family with professional responsibilities, traditional gender roles don’t impede their interest in running for office in the way many might expect.

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita is an 18-chapter philosophical dialogue between Arjuna, the despondent warrior hero reluctant to raise arms against his kin, and his divine charioteer, Krishna, who exhorts him to wage war with detachment as an instrument of divine will. It is set on the battlefield in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, moments before the beginning of a war. The Bhagavadgita (henceforth Gita), as Richard H. Davis elucidates in his ‘short biography’ of the text, intrigued scholars with its ‘doubleness’ – ‘its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life’. Its ambiguities and accommodation of multiple theological currents made it possible (and continues to do so) for the text to appeal to diverse groups of readers and commentators in medieval, pre-colonial, and colonial India and beyond. It gained a transnational community of readers in Europe and America, as colonial commentators, Christian missionaries, Romantic philosophers, and Indologists popularized it as a Hindu philosophical text at par with the Quran and the Bible. By the early twentieth century, it came to provide a wide range of Indian political thinkers, from Aurobindo Ghose to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who were occupied in anti-colonial struggle with an opportunity to ‘rethink politics in a novel language of action without consequence’. Among such engagements, M. K. Gandhi's approach to the Gita as a guide to moral action in the realm of politics has attracted maximum scholarly attention. Such works have accorded due focus to the genealogies of (mostly Western) political and religious thought that informed his readings and the innovative agency of Gandhi himself.

This chapter, however, shifts the optic from Gandhi to the Gandhian(s) to draw attention to the hermeneutics of reading the Gita through the prism of non-violence (ahimsa) that Gandhi introduces in Indian sociopolitical thought and constructs an intellectual history of such hermeneutical exercises. Through this, I wish to move beyond the individual centricity that has characterized the global intellectual history of Gandhian thought.

This short chapter focusses on general concepts involved in Remove-based analyses: conflicting structure assignments, short life cycle effects, and displacement without movement. In addition, it illustrates how the new approach may ultimately reconcile the seemingly incompatible trends towards simpler syntactic representations, on the one hand, and highly complex cartographic representations, on the other.

In this concluding chapter, we turn to the persistence of the gender gap in political ambition. Why hasn’t it begun to close? How can we reconcile its intractable nature with women’s steadily increasing numeric representation? What do women and men in the candidate eligibility pool believe contributes to the static gap? After providing a brief summary of the book’s central findings, these are the questions to which this chapter turns. Ultimately, we conclude that despite women’s significantly greater – and growing – presence in politics, women continue to be less likely than men to see themselves as candidates for elective office. They also continue to be less likely than men to be seen by others as candidates for elective office. There’s no question that “it takes a candidate” to achieve gender parity in US political institutions. But when it comes to breaking down long-standing beliefs about politics and the very nature of the political domain, this book makes it clear that it takes more than a candidate.

Any type of asset can be tokenised, i.e., registered on a blockchain or other type of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Hence, the resulting cryptoassets take many forms, including currency/payment tokens, security/financial/investment tokens, and utility tokens. The technology offers new opportunities for issuers, investors, and the financial system at large but also challenges, including some new risks in addition to those already known by conventional financial systems. The EU regulatory framework for cryptoassets seeks to address these challenges while facilitating innovation and competition across the European Single Market. These rules have evolved since the EBA’s 2014 recommendations on AML/CTF provisions through the 2018 FinTech Action Plan and the 2020 Digital Finance Package. This has now resulted in an updated AML/CTF framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) as a bespoke piece of financial regulation to fill gaps in existing EU financial law, the Pilot Regulation as the EU’s “regulatory sandbox” for DLT market infrastructures, and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) that promotes cybersecurity in the financial sector.

The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.

Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.

We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.

For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.