About the event

Join Christophe Jaffrelot and Niraja Gopal Jayal for the keynote address of the 2022 King's India Institute Graduate Conference.

Lately, the hybridisation of democratic regimes has led political scientists to qualify those which do not fulfill the criteria of liberal democracy as “hyphen-democracies”. Independent India, in spite of being known as “the world’s largest democracy” has always been one.

While the clientelistic dimension of the “Congress system” had given birth to a conservative democracy till the 1970s, kisan politics in the 1970s-80s and quota politics in the 1990s-2000s had resulted in a certain democratization. Partly born in reaction to this process, Hindu nationalism, after taking over power, has taken India in a different direction. Three pillars of the new polity epitomise this transformation of the socio-political scene:

1. a return to forms of upper caste elitism and an accentuation of inequalities
2. a variant of majoritarianism featuring an ethnic democracy - and even a de facto Hindu Rashtra - at the expense of the minorities
3. an illiberal approach of power finding expression in centralisation and the undermining of pluralism as well as the rule of law.

The combination of these three trends is impacting the political trajectory of India in such a way that the rise to power of the BJP can be interpreted as the dawn of a new political system, and not only as the making of a new party system.

Speaker

Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology, King’s India Institute

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 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.

Chair and Discussant

Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal, Avantha Chair, King’s India Institute

Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies. Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. Professor Jayal undertakes research in the fields of citizenship, democracy and welfare in India.

About the King's India Institute Graduate Conference

Each year, students from the King's India Institute organise a graduate conference, which is attended by 35+ universities around the world and offer the opportunity to explore the current challenges facing South Asia.

This year's Graduate Conference is hosted in partnership with the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore and consists of 12 panel sessions across three days (21-23 June 2022), as well as one workshop and two public events.

2022 theme

Change, whether of political, social, or economic nature, stands out as a contemporary theme arousing scholarly interest across disciplines. Transformative change can occur at all levels of analysis and maintains relevance to students of ideas, interests as well as institutions. A focused perspective on technology and the interplay with identity and security matters offers a trenchant lens to understand the recent developments in the South Asian region.

Security constitutes a cross-cutting theme which allows us to evaluate the changing efforts of protecting human individuals, national interests, and capabilities as well as the world climate, thereby provoking us to think more critically about which kind of change is desirable. The emergence of new technologies in South Asia has stipulated novel questions pertaining e.g. to the gig economy, the nature and substance of discourses, and the governance of the internet.