Srirupa Roy - The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism

Drawing on my recent book (Stanford University Press, 2024), this talk is about how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a diseased and broken democratic system: an agent of “curative democracy." It traces the crooked line that connects these normative visions of curative democracy and the political outsider from the Long 1970s to the populist antipolitics and the authoritarian repertoires of strongman rule in our present times.

Srirupa Roy is professor and chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, and a founding co-director of ICAS:MP, the Merian-Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies.