Agenda

Is India’s Democracy Backsliding? Political Culture, Countervailing forces and the Resilience of Indian Democracy 

Lecture by Subrata Mitra, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University

Unprecedented scenes of frenzied crowds protesting against an amendment to citizenship laws (CAA) that appears exclusionary on religious grounds, legislation to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), global opprobrium abrogation of the special status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir (Art 370 of the Constitution of India), have deepened concern about the current state of Indian democracy. Is India’s democracy regressing? With a comparative and area-focused approach, the lecture will discuss what made democracy in India possible in the first place; which challenges it faces and, on the basis of available evidence, what prognosis can be made with regard to its stability in the foreseeable future.
 

Subrata K. Mitra, Ph.D. (Rochester), is emeritus Professor of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. He was educated in India and the United States. He has taught at Delhi University, the Universities of Hull in the UK, Singapore, and Heidelberg, where he held the Chair in the Political Science of South Asia, 1994-2014. He has held visiting positions at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris; Tsinghua University, Beijing; University of California, Berkeley; Jawaharlal Nehru University, and, Central University of Hyderabad, India and Nottingham University, UK.
Comparative Politics, Rational Choice, Methods, Citizenship, statecraft and foreign policy and South Asian Area Studies are his main interests.
His recent books include Kautilya’s Arthashastra: An Intellectual Biography – the Classical Roots of Modern Politics in India (2017), Citizenship and the Flow of Ideas (2012), Reuse: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety (2012), Politics in India: Structure, Process, Policy (London: Routledge, 2017, second edition), When Rebels become Stakeholders (2009), The Puzzle of India’s Governance (2005).
Professor Mitra edits the Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies and Modern South Asian Studies – Society, Politics, Economy, NOMOS. 
 

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