Over the past seven weeks of CASI Election Conversations 2024, we tackled a host of key factors of India’s political economy—federalism, welfare, gender quotas, the BJP’s electoral model, party mobilization, misinformation, and political-economic centralization. In our final interview of the series, we turn the focus to the way India is studied within the political science literature at large.
India is often characterized in very particular terms—as a democracy where vote-buying is common, where voters tend to choose leaders who come from their own caste and community, and where political parties do not extend deeply into society. In “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case,” a paper published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press, twelve scholars of India pushed back against each of these assumptions and called for a re-evaluation of broader conventional wisdom about democracy in India, as well other parts of the Global South.
CASI Consulting Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Milan Vaishnav (Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar), one of the co-authors of the paper, about the research that upends those long-held assumptions about India, what the current period of BJP dominance means for each of those themes, and where he would like to see political science research on India go next.
Rohan: Tell us about “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case.” What prompted this paper with 12 authors on it?
Milan: First, let me just say that I am incredibly blessed to be a part of this generation of India scholars and students, many of whom you've already interviewed as part of this series. If you look across academia, you see many disciplines and subdisciplines where there's fierce infighting, rivalry, and competition. I'm really happy to say that the field of India comparative politics, to my mind, is not like that at all.
The genesis of this paper was a series of conversations about how best to aggregate knowledge in this space. Based on a lot of the ongoing work several of us were doing, we felt that there are these conventional wisdoms which have emerged in comparative politics—not limited to India, just comparative politics writ large. And India was being used as an exemplar of these conventional wisdoms in ways that did not fully ring true to us.
For instance, when you think about electoral politics, this is a space that's largely dominated by clientelism and patron-client relations. If you're thinking about vote choice in the developing world, you're always zooming in on ethnicity as the most crucial determinant. If you study political parties in the developing world, the general consensus is that they're organizationally very weak and under-institutionalized. These are conventional wisdoms borne out of the experience of a wide-ranging set of countries, but India was increasingly being used to justify each of these. But this application was out of sync with what each of us was seeing in our own work.
So, we decided to get together in 2016 to internally do a series of short presentations and talk about what it is that we know, what we're seeing on the ground, and where the tensions are between the two. For a while, we debated what the format would be, but ultimately, we were encouraged by Devesh Kapur (a mentor to many of us) to put our ideas on paper. Given the way academic publishing works, this paper finally came out in 2021, and I hope that it's seen as a useful reference for comparative politics as a whole.
Rohan: We spoke to Francesca Jensenius earlier, and she felt that the conventional wisdoms weren’t so much in the academic world, but beyond that—in the media, other observers, politicians themselves, and so on. I was wondering, with this paper, who did you want to speak to, but also who did you end up hearing from?
Milan: We heard from two groups of people. The first were fellow India scholars who said things like, "this is so great because I'm working on a dissertation looking at urban local politics. And what I'm seeing doesn't track with our canonical models of how we think about political machines in comparative politics." We also heard from a lot of people who do comparative politics work elsewhere—in Latin America, Africa, and other regions say, "this is so interesting because I don't know India, I'm an expert on Kenya, or Mexico, or Thailand. And I've been sort of led to believe that India looked like A, and you're telling me that actually India looks more like B. And that is updating my thinking in real time." When they refer to India in their own work, they are forced to think twice about the context in which they deploy India as an example.
I don't think this was written with the intention of influencing the broader debate, our aims were more modest. But certainly, one thing you see is that some of the academic "consensus," to the extent academics can arrive at a consensus, tends to then get replicated in the media and gets trotted out during election time, for instance. So, our hope is that over time, some of this more nuanced thinking will also have a broader reach.
Rohan: So, to move beyond the context to the text, what does everyone get wrong about Indian politics? What were you addressing in this paper?
Milan: I'm going to stick with the three major pillars of conventional wisdom this paper tries to interrogate. The first is that India is a classic “patronage democracy” in which you have a series of quid pro quo exchanges that take place between politicians and voters that define political relationships. You have a politician who is dangling some kind of goodie to a voter that he or she wants to win over. And in exchange for that goodie, this voter will give this politician support. That mode doesn't fully capture what's going on in India.
The second is the one that you hear often, which is that India is an “ethnic democracy.” What people mean by that is the old adage that “Indians don't so much cast their vote as they vote their caste.” Again, in research that a lot of us were doing, we found that the reality was just much messier in many different ways.
The third was this sense of political parties as almost empty vessels that were completely underdeveloped in terms of their institutions, internal hierarchy, and infrastructure. Superficially, that seems to make sense. But what many of us discovered through our own research is that parties are vibrant in hidden ways. They are providing the connective tissue between state and citizen in between elections, sometimes informally, sometimes not very visibly. Then, when campaigns come around, there's this massive mobilization that takes place that isn't possible if these are all just empty Potemkin villages.
In a nutshell, these were the three popular manifestations of the conventional wisdom in the discipline that we wanted to unpack.
Rohan: To start with the redistributive case, how do you establish that it's not just handouts, goodies, and vote-buying taking place?
Milan: It's important to spell out the elements of the conventional wisdom: You have a politician who's eager to win election and who feels they need to give some kind of inducement to the voter, particularly around election time. They give that inducement in exchange for this person's vote, and they have some capacity of monitoring how this person eventually does vote to make this investment worth it. In this setup, there's a very clear hierarchy where you have the politician at the top, and then you have their clients who are their voters. This model was largely established in the literature through studies of Latin America. Because the practice of "vote-buying”—and it's important to put that in quotes—is so prevalent in India, many people thought that this concept travels to India lock, stock, and barrel.
But in India, there are a few problems. The first is that it's never been clear that there is a quid pro quo, because of the nature of the secret ballot, electronic voting machines, and the way that parties are organized. It’s not obvious that any politician can guarantee that by giving somebody money, they're going to get a vote in return. You have a lack of monitoring capacity, or in some cases a lack of even interest from politicians in monitoring how people are voting. In the absence of a traditional political machine, you have many intermediaries, but they're not necessarily old-fashioned party functionaries.
Anirudh Krishna had this really fascinating work in the early 2000s on the “naya neta”—young up-and- comers who emerged in villages and towns to get people's work done for them. Sometimes they were affiliated with multiple parties or with no party. They were in some sense, a key part of this connective tissue, but not at all like figures in traditional party machines.
Through this series of empirical observations, many of us became skeptical that the classic kind of clientelism was the biggest game in town.
Rohan: Research has shown how this spending is often just to convince people that a candidate is viable rather than actually to pull in votes.
Milan: This is why I don't personally use the term “vote-buying.” Instead, I use “gift-giving” because I think that's more accurate. There's been research by Lisa Björkman showing that the main objective of the money is not to win people's votes, but to keep influential party workers on your side and keep them mobilized. Simon Chauchard has shown that this is essentially a defensive act. In other words, giving money or goodies of any kind doesn't guarantee that you'll win, but not giving is a pretty good sign that you'll lose. It's the cost of doing business. The analogy I've always used is a poker game. If you're playing poker with a group of friends and you want to get dealt a stack of cards, you have to ante up, you have to put something into the pot, and then you get your cards. Just because you ante up doesn't mean you're going to win your hand, but if you don't ante up, you can't play at all. In my mind, that's a more accurate reflection of what election inducements are doing.
Rohan: The paper, in a sense, suggests that the existing characterization of Indian politics is almost venal—and it’s a pushback against that. Clientelism, for example, is described as having implications that are bleak for democratic politics. How did you all think about the values element?
Milan: There is a bit of a pushback to the essentializing of Indian politics. We look around at politicians in the United States trying to deliver things to their constituents, whether it's pork barrel projects or helping them navigate the state, and we have a term for that: “constituency service.” One of the books that really informed some of our thinking on this was written by one of our co-authors, Jennifer Bussell, titled Clients and Constituents, which said that a lot of what politicians—MLAs and MPs and even lower-level politicians—are doing, is just answering the mail. It's not necessarily done with some partisan grand design in place. They're just trying to process as many constituents as possible in the hope that doing so will benefit their reputation and their re-election prospects.
The reason that we described the implications of this clientelistic model as “bleak” is because models of clientelism typically emphasize a hierarchy between politicians and voters, treating voters as if they're pawns in the hands of omnipresent, omniscient politicians. If you think about Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil's work on urban politics, for instance, one of the lessons for me is there's actually this competitive market for brokerage. If you go to a slum settlement in Bhopal or Jaipur, and you're a voter, you actually have multiple people you can work with. You're not locked into any one intermediary. Voters do have some agency and power, and that flips the script of the conventional wisdom.
Rohan: Given that pushback—how do you now read the conversations about “revdi” (handout) politics, and the BJP’s “new welfarism?” Is it updating your model, or simply fitting with what you laid out?
Milan: It is updating our model in a new way, but I do think it builds on something that we noted. A lot of the benefits flowing from politicians to voters are not necessarily happening during election time, but rather when the electoral spotlight is off. That's been borne out by this “new welfarism,” to use Arvind Subramanian’s term. Where it departs from our understanding is that the new welfarism is really focusing on private goods, which are not necessarily meant for short-term consumption but can be potentially welfare-enhancing over the long-term. I don't think we have a great handle on how this is playing out because it's not just the BJP. They may have been the first movers in defining this new welfarism, but you think about any party—BRS, Congress, YSR Congress, DMK—they're all doing some version of this.
I want to highlight here the work of Shikhar Singh, who's a CASI postdoc, because it is pointing us in some really interesting directions. One, he shows that this welfarism is centered on rule-based transfers, not discretionary distribution. That's creating a pool of cross-ethnic recipients. Despite this, Shikhar’s work tells us that identity politics still remains strong. In other words, Dalit voters still feel that Dalit politicians are more likely to do things that benefit them. Even though welfare goods seem to cut across traditional social lines, that hasn't totally erased this resort to clinging onto one's identity. Two, even though the new models of welfarism rely on technology and the so-called J-A-M trinity—and this has improved efficiency—voters are focused much more on outcomes as opposed to the efficiency of the process. Three, it's not clear that more expensive benefits are getting politicians greater electoral rewards. Shikhar’s findings show that you could get the same amount of electoral bang for your buck out of providing someone an Ujwala gas cylinder as the PM Awas Yojana housing subsidy, the latter of which is much more expensive than the former.
To round this out, it is notable how much of this discussion completely elides the conversation around public goods like health and education. I continue to think there is room for politicians and parties to mobilize on this front. Clearly, we've had at least one, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has tried to do so with some limited effect in Delhi. But if you're thinking about trying to tackle the BJP’s welfare juggernaut, I would bet that more parties are going to be moving in this direction. It's much harder to do and it's much harder to claim credit for, but the lack of conversation around it is a real shortcoming of the current approach.
Rohan: Picking up on the first part of Shikhar Singh’s work, there is the old cliché about Indians voting their caste, and a sense that Indian politics is described as just blocks of caste and community voters being moved around the chessboard. What is this missing?
Milan: Let’s start with some empirical anomalies. The first is Tariq Thachil's work on the rise of the BJP. Here is a traditionally upper caste party that had figured out how to woo tribal voters, Dalit voters, backward voters, initially through the social service organizations of the Sangh Parivar. It disrupted traditional identity-based calculations. Another good example is the work of Amit Ahuja, who has this terrific book on Dalit politics, showing that voting cohesion among Dalits is much weaker in places, ironically, where there's a history of strong Dalit social movements. That's because in those places, the social mobilization of the marginalized has led mainstream political parties to co-opt their agenda. Francesca Jensenius and Pavithra Suryanarayan have this nice paper where they show that voters can, under certain circumstances, reward incumbent parties irrespective of caste, based on their economic performance.
What does this mean at a meta-level? First, many parties are developing cross-ethnic reputations. It was fashionable to say until recently that the BJP was a “rahmin-Bania” party, and it was anti-Dalit, anti-tribal, and so on. But it's just not true now. Based on survey data from CSDS-Lokniti, we know that the BJP wins a majority of upper caste voters, but they also win a plurality of all other Hindu voters. It's important that we recognize that.
Second, there are ways in which class and ethnic politics are interacting. Pavithra Suryanarayan’s work shows that you have a greater propensity of ethnic voting in places where you have large inter-group economic differences. But where those inter-group differences are not so great, other factors come into play.
Last but not least, the book by Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma on ideology introduces this really powerful notion that—like most other countries in the world—ideology actually matters in Indian politics. This is something most of us have always dismissed. But Chhibber and Verma show us that parties have found ways to construct appeals that go beyond narrow caste or religious identity.
Rohan: Is this feature—the more recent cross-ethnic appeal—limited to the BJP as it has become dominant?
Milan: I don't think so. The first time I really updated my priors on this was in Bihar in 2010, when I was doing some fieldwork for my dissertation. It was around Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s re-election. I’ll always remember this line from a media column which said that for Nitish Kumar, caste was in the subtext of everything he did. But for former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, caste was both the text and the subtext. In other words, it's not as if Kumar was above caste, but he made this pitch to say social justice for social justice’s sake is insufficient. We need to marry social justice to a broader developmental agenda. It requires us to think about a broader social vision that goes beyond our parochial caste or community. That idea propelled him to win a series of consecutive elections.
Now, you can say that experiment may have petered out. Nitish Kumar first went after low-hanging fruit, like providing basic security, ending the culture of kidnappings for ransom, and improving basic service provisioning. It's much harder to deliver more complicated welfare goods. But you also see this with the AAP trying to build a greater consciousness on class and on broader lines that go beyond just jati. The BJP is not the only successful example we have to point to.
Rohan: The vote-buying argument is about getting a baseline assumption about Indian politics wrong. But this one seems more like a story of change, from a certain kind of ethnic voting that is shifting over time.
Milan: Yes, here, we are trying to update our understanding of Indian politics given the changes that we are seeing in political calculations and developmental realities. I don't think that this is meant to denigrate the foundational works which hit upon a very obvious relationship between caste or identity and voting. But rather to say that, as time has elapsed, this connection has become much more nuanced and subject to a whole set of contextual conditions.
Rohan: And then with the labharthi varg (beneficiary class) idea—that welfare through private goods creates a set of supporters across caste, community, religion—we're seeing that narrative play out in real time.
Milan: It's very interesting to listen to BJP politicians talk about democracy. There was a comment made by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar at a press briefing with US Secretary of State Blinken in which he talked about democracy as comprised of three elements:
- free and fair elections
- legitimacy and the trust of the people
- non-discriminatory provision of public goods
This is a very bespoke definition of democracy, but there's something meaningful in this narrative. The studies that have looked into the BJP’s welfare push have suggested that the new welfarism has been broadly provided and is not obviously discriminatory, anti-Muslim, or favoring one particular caste over the other. That's not to take away from the rest of the BJP's majoritarian politics, where we're seeing the volume turned up to 11 in this electoral campaign. But I do think that it would also be foolish of us to reduce everything just to majoritarianism. Clearly, they're operating on multiple planes here.
Rohan: There's much we can continue to unpack on that, but let’s move forward to the parties question. What is this idea of parties as a network and why does it better explain what we see in India?
Milan: Traditionally, parties, not just in India but across the developing world, have been characterized as organizationally weak in two respects. One is that institutionally, power and responsibility are distributed in a haphazard way. And then, infrastructurally, the brick-and-mortar presence of parties seems to be lacking. But what we've seen in India is that parties do come alive during election time. Rather than thinking about parties as vertical organizations, what we suggest is that it might be more useful to think about them as horizontal, informal social networks where you have a series of interconnected members who can draw upon their own human, financial, and physical assets and then be mobilized for politics.
Ironically, these very attributes of “parties as networks” can help to reinforce a weak organizational structure. It's hard to see how parties ever build, as traditionally conceived, strong organizations. But there is a powerful informal social network at play, and we should not lose sight of that. Again, coming back to Tariq Thachil and Adam Auerbach's work, you're really seeing this at its most micro level. These parties who have expanded their reach into squatter settlements in places like Bhopal and Jaipur, where, if you were to look at the party hierarchy, you may see some weaknesses, a lot of power entrusted with the chief minister or the state leader, but in fact, there are people who are tied—either because of loyalty, ideology, or social networks—to this larger political idea of the party.
Rohan: You see this across parties?
Milan: The BJP is the closest we have to a middle ground between parties-as-networks and parties-as-organizations, in my view. There's been some interesting reporting lately about the financial investments the BJP has made in trying to establish more of a traditional brick-and-mortar setup. But even a party like the Congress, which we think of as exhibiting this secular decline, when you go to villages and towns, you still see individual brokers or intermediaries who are tied with the Congress. Maybe that partially explains why, despite all of its shortcomings, in a national election, one in five voters is still voting for the Congress.
Rohan: Can parties begin as networks, and then build organizations? You suggested earlier that one might be antithetical to the other?
Milan: It's truly difficult to do on a pan-Indian basis, also because of political funding. Outside of the BJP, it’s hard to see any other political party at this present juncture having the wherewithal to establish a nationwide presence, with office buildings, clear hierarchies, and party officials saturating the space to such an extent. The AAP example from 2014 was pretty instructive. Here's a party that came out of nowhere, made an immediate mark in Delhi, and set its sights on having a national-level footprint. Then they realized just how hard it was to build up a party apparatus. There may be certain shortcuts that parties can use, like technology, promoting a charismatic leader, and so on. But some of the ways that parties are structured put limits on how much they can evolve from a network model to a traditional organizational model.
Rohan: Stepping back, were there other conventional wisdom elements, beyond these three, that you considered addressing?
Milan: There are several other things worth looking into, some of which were left out and some of which are emerging. One I would point to is what political scientists call “campaign effects.” As we're seeing right now in real time, campaigns do really seem to matter in terms of the effect that media narratives, get-out-the-vote operations, and messaging can have. We have comparatively very little empirical work in India that tries to measure the value addition of each of these things or examine what works and what doesn't. In American politics, entire libraries could be filled with the literature on campaign effects.
Second, we talked about this a little bit, but this question of ideology is deserving of a deeper dive. We have Chhibber and Verma's work, which shows that there actually is a lot of ideological content in politics, but it can't be boiled down to a traditional left-right spectrum. India has its own dimensions, which they call the “politics of recognition” and the “politics of statism.” More recently, there's is a nice paper by Rajeshwari Majumdar and Nicholas Haas, which tries to empirically test the Chhibber and Verma framework and finds that it largely holds. Ideology can provide a useful framework for understanding parties and voters.
However, there's an interesting disjuncture. If you look at where people fall on that ideological spectrum, it is predictive of voting for the BJP. More conservative voters tend to vote more for the BJP. But that's not true of the Congress. Being more progressive doesn't necessarily translate to more votes for the Congress. So, there is some asymmetry in terms of the effect that ideology is having, which actually would fit with our current understanding in which the Congress struggles to really define what it's about and how it's different.
The last thing I'll mention is the issue of gender. There's been a lot of work on female politicians, what the quota system at the panchayat level has done, and the role of self-help groups in trying to nurture a talent pipeline. But it is striking that all of that coexists with women who still appear to be incredibly economically disempowered, if you just look at female labor force participation rates. Gender is going to be an increasingly important factor in Indian politics because we now have gender quotas for state and national elections written into law, although they haven't come into force yet. These are going to give gender issues even more attention in the years to come.
Rohan: Given the aim of this paper is to push back against conventional wisdoms, in this comparative context, is it tiring to have to constantly address those ideas? Or is that just how comparative work is everywhere, pushing back against misconceptions?
Milan: I would characterize the pushback slightly differently. A lot of India scholars have to justify why focusing on India in and of itself is important and how India can then shed light on larger questions of comparative politics. It's this old question of “external validity.” Over time, as people have realized that one out of every four voters on Earth resides in India, and that most Indian states are larger than the countries that comparative politics scholars work on, this reaction has attenuated somewhat.
But there has also been this feeling that India is such a unique case. It was a democracy that gave universal suffrage at such a low level of per capita income. In terms of its diversity, it's unprecedented. It's maintained a democracy for 75 years, which makes it one of the longest in the developing world. So, part of this is also pushing back not so much on how India is characterized, but also saying, "Look, the lessons of India suggest that politics across the world, especially in the Global South, may be more complicated than we're making them out to be." Perhaps, and we talk about this in the paper, some of our work on these three elements actually finds echoes in work that's being done on Africa or in Latin America too. Our hope is that this will lead to a bit more of a nuanced discussion.
Rohan: Has that changed over time?
Milan: It's gotten a lot easier. I remember giving a presentation that Neelanjan Sircar and I made, probably in 2010 at a comparative politics seminar at Columbia University, looking at how politicians meddled in the distribution of public school construction in Tamil Nadu. We had a political logic that explained these infrastructure investments. I remember the first question was, "Okay, this is great, but you're telling us about one state in one part of India." And then, when we mentioned the population statistics—Tamil Nadu then had 70 million people—you could see everybody in the room take a pause, think about their country of study, and say "Oh, okay, wait a second—that’s huge."
So, I do think it's changing. Part of this, frankly, mirrors India's rise on the global stage. I realize that's not the subject of this conversation, but I think India has become a hot field to study, in the same way that if you are working for the U.S. government, working on the India account is a place you want to be, a posting that was once seen as a backwater. There is greater awareness that, as an establishment, we are heavily underweight as far as India is concerned.
Rohan: To the final few questions then. What areas do you want to see studied on India?
Milan: The first is just about better understanding the present moment in Indian politics. There is an essay by Ravi Agarwal in the current issue of Foreign Policy, which I thought had a provocative thesis. We keep talking about Narendra Modi and the BJP as a supply-side issue, that they've become a hegemon, and they're reshaping politics in a certain way. Ravi's argument is that Modi's really a demand-side issue. In other words, the electorate has shifted, and he's meeting them where they are, as opposed to fundamentally moving the electorate in a more conservative direction. That seems, at first glance, to be perhaps an obvious insight, but I actually think it's a profound one. I don't think, as political scientists, we've really tried to disentangle this. In other words, is Modi the leading edge of something, or, in some sense, is he responding to changes that have been underfoot for a while? That's a big question that I have.
Second, it strikes me that we have these conversations about India's economy and how it is this anomaly. It has moved from a largely agrarian to a services-led economy skipping over manufacturing, with a delayed or stalled structural transformation because agriculture still accounts for 40 percent or so of the labor force. Yet there really hasn't been a lot of attention paid to contemporary study of Indian politics on agriculture. What is the payoff to farm loan waivers? What is the political efficacy of Minimum Support Prices? Even the question of inflation—we have this saying, "If you want to know who's going to win an election, look at the price of onions." But we don't have a single paper, as far as I am aware, that actually establishes that. One person who has tried to crack this, though he looks at it from a more historical lens, is Aditya Dasgupta, who has looked at the political economy of rural societies. His work looks at the political effects of the Green Revolution. But I think we need a lot more in this area.
The last thing is something that Aditya Dasgupta and Devesh Kapur have done some work on: the Indian state. We need to think more deeply about the state as an organization, how it works, and how the constraints the state is under can limit what politicians want to do. For example, MPs and MLAs have constituency development funds and they want to undertake local community-based projects to brandish their personal reputation. These are things that they have to do through the state. It's not something they can do on their own. But we don’t question enough what the capacity is of the state to respond, what the hindrances are, what ability do politicians have to actually make the state function better. There's a whole set of nested questions in there that I would like to see more work on.
Rohan: We'll put that out there in the world and hopefully people will bite. Do you have recommendations for those who’d like to read further on these themes?
Milan: One book which is really worthy of study and further reflection is by Akshay Mangla, titled Making Bureaucracy Work. It flows naturally from the last point I just made, which is saying that, rather than treating the Indian bureaucracy as a black box, what Akshay does is look at how differences in bureaucratic norms generate different patterns of implementation and then, by extension, different patterns of development outcomes. It's based on two years of ethnographic field work combined with original data collection. It's exactly the direction we have to move in to try to problematize the state. And I think it's going to be a really important book in thinking about state capacity.
The other book title I think is on many people's lips these days is Karthik Muralidharan's Accelerating India’s Development, which similarly tries to compress decades’ worth of research on political economy to focus on what incremental change we can undertake to improve the quality of the state. I hope that that's a book that doesn't stay in the narrow realm of development economics by virtue of who the author is, because I think there's a lot for us in political science to learn from.
Milan Vaishnav is a Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a CASI Non-Resident Visiting Scholar.
Rohan Venkat is the Consulting Editor for India in Transition and a CASI Spring 2024 Visiting Fellow.
As millions of Indians set out to vote over April, May and June, India in Transition brings you CASI Election Conversations 2024, an interview series featuring renowned scholars reflecting on the factors and dimensions of politics, political economy, and democracy that will define India’s 2024 election. Earlier in the series, we featured Louise Tillin on federalism in India, Yamini Aiyar on the BJP’s “Techno-Patrimonial” welfare model, Rachel Brulé on the promises and pitfalls of gender quotas, Pavithra Suryanarayan on the BJP and “anti-redistributive” politics, Francesca R. Jensenius on misconceptions about the Indian voter, Sumitra Badrinathan on misinformation in India, and Neelanjan Sircar on political-economic centralization.
India in Transition (IiT) is published by the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) of the University of Pennsylvania. All viewpoints, positions, and conclusions expressed in IiT are solely those of the author(s) and not specifically those of CASI.
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