Political and Cultural Expressions of Indian Democracy: An International Conference at Yale University

The Political and Cultural Expressions of Indian Democracy Conference will take place on Friday, April 30th, Saturday, May 1st and Sunday May 2nd at Luce Hall in room 203. The Conference will include five sessions and a plenary concluding session, and will bring together the work of scholars from around the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Prof. K. Sivaramakrishnan, chair of the South Asian Studies Council, will open the conference on Friday at 2:30 pm, and conclude it as moderator of the plenary session.

On Friday, Prof. Sivaramakrishnan�s opening remarks will be followed by a session on Elections/Governance. Yogendra Yadav, from CSDS, Amrita Basu, from Amherst College, and Mukulika Banerjee from the London School of Economics will present their work. This session will assess free and fair elections, a predominant criteria for defining democracy, by taking elections as a central object of analysis. It seeks to address the dearth of scholarship on elections themselves, and will provide both theoretical and methodological suggestions for future scholarship with the object of understanding elections as reflections of the societies in which they are held. Steven Wilkinson, Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs will moderate the session, which will conclude at 5:30.

The conference will begin at 8:30 am on Saturday, with Session II: Capability/Opportunity. Rukmini Banerji, from PRATHAM, New Delhi, and Leena Abraham, from TISS, Mumbai will discuss the link between development and democracy in India. In recent elections, delivery of capability-building resources proved a key factor in election results. There is a deepening divide in India between those with access to resources like job security, education and health facilities. Banerji and Abraham will explore questions of what historical trend a modern pattern of education and health distribution show about India�s democracy, whether democracy should be assessed by these patterns, whether the patterns are more or less worrisome in a democracy with assumed accountability to its citizens, and is it necessary for democracy to achieve capability in these areas. Yale�s visiting lecturer, Vani Kulkarni, will moderate.

Session II: Civil Society/Political Society will discuss the work of Oxford�s Craig Jeffery, and Neema Kudva from Cornell. Moderated by Yale�s Political Scientist Tariq Thachil, this session will examine how the concept of civil society may be utilized, and how it is problematized, through the study of specific communities in India. They will seek to build a concept of civil society through grassroots experiences in local organizations in urban and rural India. This will be followed by a Session III: Women/Gender. Inderpal Grewal, Professor of Women�s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, will moderate. During the session, Flavia Agnes, from MAJLIS, Mumbai, will present a paper titled Gendered Nuances of Citizenship Claims, and Maya Unnithan from the University of Sussex will present her paper: Gender Justice and Democracy in India: The role of Rights Based Development in Facilitating Women�s Political Agency. The discussion will address questions of women�s representation in publicly elected office, whether democracy can change power relations between women and men, how gender equality can both transform and be used as a means of assessing a democracy.

The final session of the day: Cities/Urbanism, will discuss the work of Ananya Roy, from UC, Berkeley, and Juned Shaikh from the University of Washington. Shreeyash Palshikar, post-doctoral fellow, with a focus on violence in modern South Asia, will moderate the session. The increasing urbanization of people in India and subsequent growth of Indian cities has an effect on the development of democracy, which functions differently in rural and urban spaces. This session will explore the challenges that urban India poses to democracy.

The final day of the conference will feature a Plenary Session to explore themes, trends and patterns brought up during the conference with comments from Pratap Mehta, from CPR, New Delhi, Usha Ramanathan, Independent Law Researcher from New Delhi, and cultural anthropologist Akhil Gupta, Professor at UCLA.