in partnership with the South Asia Center, Political Science Dept & PDRI-DevLab
About the Seminar:
Over the last decade, the BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has carefully built an electoral narrative around its welfare posture. Early in its first term, the Modi government made a concerted push toward scaling the technology-enabled direct benefit transfer architecture, which soon became the lynchpin for expanding a distinctive welfare politics built around direct cash and in-kind transfers. The hallmark of this model lies in its ability to cut through traditional intermediaries by local leaders and state governments, enabling in its place a direct emotive connect with welfare beneficiaries built around the Prime Minister's personality cult. This seminar explores how this politics unfolded in the electoral sphere in the 2024 election. It examines the relationship between political attribution of welfare schemes and voter choices to offer a deeper understanding on how the dynamics of this new welfare politics unfolds. It goes on to unpack the consequences of this approach to questions of political centralization and terms of the social contract.
About the Speaker:
Yamini Aiyar is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University. From 2017-24, she was the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a leading public policy research think tank in New Delhi. Her work sits at the intersection of research and policy practice and her research interests span the fields of contemporary politics, state capacity, social policy, federalism, and India's political economy. She sits on a number of boards and advisory committees of research centers and non-profits, and her policy commitments include Commissioner and Chair, Governance Working Group, Lancet Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System; Member, United Nations Committee of the Experts on Public Administration; Council Member, United Nations University, Member, Chief Minister’s Rajasthan Economic Transformation Advisory Council (2022-2023). She has published widely both in academic and current affairs journals and newspapers including The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Indian Express, and The Hindu. She has a regular column in Hindustan Times and Deccan Herald, two leading mainstream newspapers in India. Her forthcoming book, Lessons in State Capacity, will be published in October 2024 by Oxford University Press.