In 1977, when M. G. Ramachandran, a megastar in Tamil cinema, was sworn in as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, he became the first Indian actor to hold that prestigious office. Over the next few decades, M.G.R. and others with deep connections to the film world continued to hold the state’s top elected office. Notable names included M. Karunanidhi, a five-term Chief Minister and screenwriter, and J.
Deepaboli Chatterjee is a PhD Student in the Political Science Department. Her coursework at Penn has primarily trained her in the subfields of Comparative Politics and American Politics. Her research interests lie at the intersection of identity politics and information politics, with a regional focus on South Asia, primarily India. Her current work examines the logic of supply of different types of political messaging in mainstream news on television and their political impacts on voters.
CASI is pleased to announce Advait Rajagopal Aiyar as a Sobti Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) for the 2024-25 academic year.
India is in transition but not all Indians are able to prosper. The country’s growth story has been characterized by widening inequality and a failure of the state to lift its citizens out of poverty and other forms of economic deprivation such as undernutrition among children. While some forms of anti-poverty welfare programs have existed throughout independent India’s history, they had limited impact.
The global quest for digital transformation has found a new champion in the form of digital public infrastructure (DPI). The United Nations has identified DPI—digital building blocks operating at a societal scale in fields like digital identity and digital payments—as a high-impact initiative for achieving the sustainable development goals.
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 quot
In 2019, despite widespread economic distress and the failure of flagship policy moves like demonetization, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were re-elected to power, with a bigger victory in parliamentary elections than their 2014 success.
Fears about the effects of misinformation on Indian politics seem omnipresent today. Reports suggest huge volumes of “fake news” and misleading content filling up WhatsApp groups and social media feeds, with potentially dangerous consequences. The advent of generative AI and “deepfakes” have only made those concerns more immediate.
Indian voters don’t care about ideology and are not particularly attached to parties. They “vote their caste” rather than cast their vote. They also rarely coordinate well in picking candidates, leading to tremendous volatility in election outcomes. Those are just some of the long-standing stereotypes that recent research on India has sought to upend.
Questions over redistribution and social justice politics versus religious fault-lines seem front and center once again in India’s ongoing general elections. How is the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party—which has historically been ambivalent about social justice politics—mobilizing poorer voters, especially among the upper castes? What role does “social status” play in how voters choose their candidates? And when do anti-redistributive politics become salient?