About the event

This roundtable discussion will reflect on the immediate and long term implications of India’s 2024 general election results. Arguably one of the most pivotal elections in recent memory, the verdict will significantly shape India’s trajectory, with knock on implications for the global economy and polity.

How will India’s 18th Lok Sabha address entrenched as well as new challenges spanning society, polity, the economy and India’s international relations? How will the new government choose to interpret its mandate? To what extent should we expect continuity or change in the policy priorities, and style of governance, of the new administration?

Our panel of experts on Indian politics, international relations, and economy will discuss these questions and more.

Speakers

Professor Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008. He is a regular commentator on Indian and Pakistani politics in France, UK, north America and in India where he writes a fortnightly column in The Indian Express.

He has authored several books including Modi’s India – Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy and more recently, Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today's India.

Professor Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute. Her research interests span federalism, democracy and territorial politics in India, and the history and politics of social policy design and implementation. Her books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).

Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) is a history of the development of social policy in India over the last century.

Dr Anit Mukherjee

Anit Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer at the King's India Institute. He joined King's after ten years in Singapore where he was an Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. From 2010-2012, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), New Delhi. Anit is the author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India (NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), which examines the role of civil-military relations and military effectiveness. He is the co-editor of India-China Maritime Competition: The Security Dilemma at Sea (Routledge, 2019) and India’s Naval Strategy and Asian Security (Routledge, 2015). Formerly, he was a Major in the Indian Army and is an alumnus of India’s National Defence Academy (NDA), Khadakwasla.

Dr Sunil Mitra Kumar

Sunil Kumar is the Acting Director of the King's India Institute and a Senior Lecturer in economics at King's College London. His research focuses on questions related to inequality and discrimination, particularly in the context of development. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Development Studies and Economia Politica, and he is currently leading an ESRC-funded project on the role of small firms in UK-India trade. Sunil received his PhD in Economics from the University of East Anglia, his MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and his BA (Hons) in Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. During 2005-2008 he worked for the Social Initiatives Group of ICICI Bank, an erstwhile major funder of non-profit activities in India. You can view Sunil's website here.

Moderator

Meenakshi Ravi

Meenakshi Ravi is an Executive Producer with Al Jazeera English. She has been with the channel since its launch in November 2006. The shows she works on are: The Listening Post, a weekly show examining media narratives; All Hail, a series that uses intersectional journalism to dissect big issues like the power of algorithms and the climate crisis; and The India Report which brings deeply reported stories from the sub-continent - with a level of nuance and detail not often seen on international news outlets.Prior to working with Al Jazeera English, Meenakshi was a producer at CNBC in Mumbai, India. She studied journalism at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, India.

Subscribe to King's India Institute's monthly newsletter