Rohit Mujumdar, a CASI Spring 2024 Visiting Fellow, is a student of Southern cities and urbanization. His research attends to the myriad ways in which monsoons' everyday wetness and extreme events weave into the urban majority’s life in India’s coastal monsoonal geographies, and explores the possibilities of decolonizing and democratizing climate change action through multimedia storytelling.
There are more women holding elected office in India than anywhere else in the world. Much of this is due to quotas, instituted three decades ago, that reserved 33 percent of seats in local offices for women. In 2023, India’s Constitution was amended to extend those path-breaking quotas to the Indian Parliament and state assemblies—a development that will usher in a massive infusion of women politicians at the highest levels of government.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s success over the last decade of Indian politics—and its frontrunner status in this year's Parliamentary elections—has often been ascribed to its welfare policies. How does this "new welfarism" differ from the rights-based approach that preceded it? Where do technological mechanisms, from Aadhaar to cash transfers, fit into this model? And how does the political narrative underpinning this shift attempt to reimagine Indian democracy?
Rachael Dougherty is CASI's Administrative Coordinator as of April 2024. They started at Penn in July 2021 as a Financial Administrative Coordinator and have an associates degree in digital media and bachelor's in communication studies with an art minor from Rowan University.
Lalitha Kamath is a CASI Non-Resident Scholar. She is an urbanist and planner working at the intersection of urban infrastructure, urban planning and governance, and the environment. She writes on dominant forms of urban transformations in the Global South – both the structural violence of spatial transformation and processes of slow violence to urban environments.
Why are debates over federalism and centralization particularly relevant in India’s 2024 general elections? How have quotas for women representatives—which will soon be in place at the national level—altered Indian politics? What are the elements of India’s “techno-patrimonial welfarism,” which has been a key plank of the current government’s success? What do we now know about how misinformation is used by political players in India?
