Front and Back Covers,Volume 31, Number 4. August 2015

Front and back cover caption, volume 31 issue 4 Front cover India's godly democrats In 2007 a temple priest designed a poster depicting the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje, as the bread‐giving goddess Annapurna. Miss Raje appeared crowned and mounted on a lotus throne, from which she showered an assembly of parliamentarians, legislators and ministers gathered below with rays of light and golden coins. The poster sent ripples of nervy amusement through the Anglophone press, which saw in this a spectacle of all that is ludicrous and embarrassingly backward about India's popular politics today. Speaking to Anastasia Piliavsky, whose narrative is featured in this issue, the priest turned out to be neither a kook nor a serf, but a man strikingly astute, witty, assertive, and conspicuously sane. He explained that he depicted Miss Raje as the bread‐giving Goddess because she expanded the midday meal scheme in primary schools. ‘In India’, he said, ‘we respect seniors and people who have the power to bring good to people. This is an old Indian tradition. Worship is a way to show our respect’. Indeed, the worship of politicians as kings, heroes and gods is widespread in India: Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi; the head of the People's Party Mayawati; Bengal's Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee; and the Tamil Chief Minister Jayalalitha have all attracted colourful forms of mass devotion. External observers and India's cosmopolitan elite see this as a sign of a political malady, a degeneracy of their most cherished political values, most of all the equality and autonomy on which modern democracies ought to rest. But the very citizens who worship their political representatives as gods and goddesses have proven exceptionally good at democracy, both in the scale and the intensity of their involvement, and in their remarkable political choosiness. Their story – full of colour and fun as it is – holds serious political and intellectual lessons whose implications reach far beyond the subcontinent. Back cover LAW IN MYANMAR Open‐air displays of cartoons and caricatures are new to Myanmar since press freedom was introduced in 2012. Recently, Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘icon of democracy’, has become a favourite target. This cartoon, which was displayed during a cartoon festival in 2013, depicts Suu Kyi staring at the country's constitution while a famous love song plays in the background. With parliamentary elections due later this year and presidential elections next year, the former prisoner of conscience has devoted much of her energy – so far, unsuccessfully – to campaigning for an amendment to the 2008 constitution, which in its current form prevents her from being nominated as presidential candidate. The army, which dominates the legislature, has refused to accommodate her demands. Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of much‐loved General Aung San, who played a crucial role in the country's independence from British colonial rule in 1948. Having spent much of her life under house arrest in her family home in Yangon, she returned to the political sphere in 2010 as the head of her party, the National League for Democracy. Since then, the Nobel Peace Laureate has pushed for legal reforms. Meanwhile, in spite of some hard‐won liberties, human rights violations continue. In this issue, Judith Beyer examines the difficulties citizens experience in locating the specifics of their legal rights amidst a confusing array of legal texts, many of which they do not have access to.