Perspectives on Indian Democracy

South Asia @ NYU is pleased to host a series of discussions over the Spring semester, 2022 offering perspectives on India democracy from different experts.

Organizer: Arvind Rajagopal <ar67@nyu.edu>

Click here for our full spring schedule. 

Feb 4. 11AM. Saba Naqvi, Political commentator and journalist, New Delhi. “On a time of fake news, calls for genocide, and electoral campaigns in the Hindi heartland.”  https://jgu.edu.in/jsjc/saba-naqvi/

Arvind Rajagopal (NYU) will interview Ms. Naqvi about her experience as a political commentator and journalist at a time of fake news, calls for genocide, and electoral campaigns in the Hindi heartland.

Author, Journalist and Commentator, Saba Naqvi is one of India’s best known political analysts. She has published three books.  In Good Faith, published in 2012, chronicles a two year long journey across India in search of syncretistic traditions and pluralist communities. It is the book closest to her heart. Capital Conquest, 2015, is about the emergence of AAP, the so called citizen’s party that now rules Delhi. Her third book, Shades of Saffron: from Vajpayee to Modi, released in June 2018, chronicles the journey of the BJP that Saba covered for two decades. It’s a firsthand account with the author as the primary source of news and information and has profiles of all the leading figures in the BJP’s ascent to power. Saba’s most recent book, Politics of Jugaad: A Coalition Handbook, was published in 2019. 

The former political editor of Outlook magazine (under the legendary editor Vinod Mehta), Saba writes columns in leading national dailies and websites. She is also an election analyst on television and a known political commentator. 

Saba has been a Reuters fellow at Oxford University, a Jefferson Fellow at the East West Centre at Hawaii, has been selected for the Asia Leadership Fellow Award given by the Japan Foundation at Tokyo and the US State Department’s fellowship for leading professionals from across the world. 

Mar 23. 5:00 PM. Sudha Narayanan, Economist and research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi, “The Future of Indian Farming.”  https://www.ifpri.org/profile/sudha-narayanan

RECORDING

Abstract: Globally, farms are growing larger leaving fewer small farms than ever before. India bucks this trend, as farms grow smaller in size with each decade and farmers with holdings less than a hectare, account for a rising share of all farmers. Recent evidence makes it clear that farming no longer offers an exclusive source of livelihood for Indian farmers. Many have joined the ranks of the “functionally landless” or “landed labor”.  Additionally, agriculture faces the crisis of climate change and environmental degradation. This trend has led to calls for deep reform of Indian agriculture. These involve suggestions to allow consolidation of farms, liberalization of input and output markets, policies to promote the exit of small farmers, to enhance productivity of farms to help Indian farmers become competitive in the global markets. Recent policies such as the controversial farm laws, land acquisition acts, digital technology policies are examples of this effort. Undergirding these recommendations is a belief that agriculture is a problem and needs to employ fewer people.  This lecture interrogates this view of structural transformation of the economy and will attempt to provide a broad perspective of farming futures in India. In particular, it will focus on Indian agriculture’s trilemma– how can the sector be economically viable, while also being environmentally and socially sustainable? 

 March 25, 3:30pm. Navkiran Natt (student activist and co-editor of Trolley Times),  “Democracy at the Barricades: The Farmer’s Movement in India”

RECORDING

Abstract: The Indian farmers’ protest 2020 is being hailed as ‘the biggest ever people’s protest in the history of the country.’ The protest has created a worldwide audience and rekindled the hope for a mass movement to bring about progressive change in the agrarian sector in India. Now the farmers went back home victorious in last December after protesting the three farm laws, passed by the Indian government in 2020, at the borders of the national capital for more than a year. Apart from the grandeur, the aesthetic that this movement had was unique as compared to the traditional farmer-worker-trade union protest aesthetics which not just captured the attention of media nationally but also globally. Mobile trolley homes, free medical camps, 24-hour langars (a Sikh tradition to provide free meals to everyone), libraries at every kilometre, film screenings, musical evenings, open discussion sessions; we believe there was hardly anyone who had witnessed all this in one protest ever before. People across caste, class, gender, region and religion boundaries participated in this movement and Indian diaspora played an important role in making this movement global.

Bio: Navkiran Natt is a student-youth activist and film/media researcher who works between Panjab and Delhi, India. She is trained as a dentist and later completed her Masters in Film Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She works on transnational Panjabi migration and its reflections in Panjabi popular culture and media. Her primary areas of interest are media and politics, visual culture of new media, transnational migration, popular culture, caste and gender. She did a podcast series on the Green Revolution’s health implications in Panjab with the Goethe Institut, New Delhi. Currently, she is co-editor of Trolley Times, a newsletter that started from India’s ongoing farmers’ movement.                  

Mar 30. 5:00pm.  Apar Gupta, Executive Director, Centre for Internet Freedom, New Delhi. ““Digitisation as challenger to India’s constitutional framework”. https://in.linkedin.com/in/apar1984. Zoom link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/94215793773

RECORDING

Description: Successive governments have prioritised increasing tele-connectivity, open data platforms and digital identity in India. These have resulted in mass internet access and use of technology in governance. Policy design has also de-prioritised an emphasis on fundamental rights. This is most tangibly perceptible in areas of free expression and privacy. The end result of relentless digitisation has resulted in harms that have ultimately challenged the democratic framework of India towards greater aggregation of power towards Governments and private beneficiaries of policy largesses. 

Apar Gupta is a lawyer qualified to practice in India with a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Law, New York. He is the Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organisation in India for which he has been awarded the Ashoka Fellowship in 2019. His work is focused at the intersection of technology and civil rights through strategic litigation in cases such as Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India and Justice Puttaswamy v. Union of India. This is complemented with online campaigns and civic literacy efforts such as the one for Network Neutrality under the SaveTheInternet.in, or for data protection laws under SaveOurPrivacy.in. He has also deposed before Parliamentary Committees of Information Technology and Science and Technology to inform topics of study including Internet Shutdowns, online obscenity and the DNA Bill. 

Apr 6. 5PM. Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin Law School, Madison. “Planted Poison and Wrongful Convictions in Colonial South Asia.”  https://law.wisc.edu/profiles/sharafi  ·  Research website: https://salh.law.wisc.edu/#

RECORDING

Abstract: This talk explores a preoccupation of state toxicologists in colonial South Asia during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries: planted poison, or poisoning by one person made to look like poisoning by another. Searching for signs of false poisoning involved subtle technical challenges for the chemical examiners, the military physicians who tested forensic samples for the criminal justice system. It also triggered debates over the risk of wrongful convictions. Before the late colonial-era Indianization of the forensic professions, the focus on planted poison reflected a belief in “native mendacity,” and particularly, in poisoning as a South Asian specialty. Offering a non-US prequel to the late 20^th-century history of the Innocence movement, the talk shows that efforts to identify planted poison in India presented an alternative configuration for how racial bias, false evidence, and the desire to avoid wrongful convictions could interlock.

Apr 13, 5pm. S. Panneerselvan, political commentator and author of Karunanidhi: A Life (Penguin 2021). Q&A session with a long-time observer of Indian politics, and specifically Tamil Politics.

RECORDING

Abstract of book on Karunanidhi: There are two trajectories for nation- building—holding together and coming together. Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, who exemplified the path of coming together. Karunanidhi: A Life, a biography published by Penguin Random House in mid-2021 documents the life of writer-politician Muthuvel Karunanidhi. He is amongst the most important political figures India has ever seen. He was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu for five terms and leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) for over five decades. His fruitful career as a regional leader who helped in the formation of various coalition governments at Delhi—from the Janata Experiment in 1977, to the formation of the National Front government in 1989, the United Front government in 1996, the third NDA government led by Vajpayee in 1999, and two full terms of the UPA-led by Man Mohan Singh between 2004 and 2014—and his contribution to Tamil history and culture have been invaluable. The biography explains how Karunanidhi became a sort of metaphor of modern Tamil Nadu, where language, empowerment, self-respect, art and literary forms and films coalesce to lend a unique vibrancy to politics. The discussion and interaction at NYU will touch some of the defining moments that led to the protection of the linguistic plurality of India and its federal core.

A.S. Panneerselvan is an Indian journalist, editor and columnist. He heads the Centre for Study in Public Sphere, Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai. His is tasked to create a fellowship programme to study and document  various aspects of culture and modernity in Tamil. In March 2021, Penguin Random House published his definitive biography of one of the most popular Indian politician, Karunanidhi. In 2022, the Government of Tamil Nadu has conferred G.U. Pope Award on him for his literary contributions. In his extensive career in the media, he has worked with several prestigious media houses and networks, including as Managing Editor at the Sun Network and as the Chief of Bureau at Outlook magazine, an English language weekly. He was the longest serving Readers’ Editor at the Hindu, a position he held for nine years between 2012 and 2021. He is also Executive Director at Panos South Asia, an organisation that seeks to use media as a tool for fostering public debate and democracy. He is the governing council member of K M Adimoolam Trust for Arts in Chennai. He was a steering committee member of the Global Forum for Media Development, and a Fellow of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.  He has been working on the question of devolution and federalism for nearly four decades. He is also a journalism teacher and an adjunct faculty member at the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai. He has lectured widely on politics and media in Europe, UK and the USA. He has edited anthologies of essays produced by journalist fellows that include “Uncertain Journeys” published by the Speaking Tiger. His next book is “Periodic Table of Tamil Modernity: 1858 to 1968”.

Apr 18. 5PM. Dilip D’Souza and Joy Ma. “The Deoliwallahs: The untold account of the 1962 Chinese-Indian internment.”

RECORDING

Abstract: The India-China war of 1962 was brief and brutal, but otherwise just another marker in the long-running power struggle between the two emerging powers in Asia; If not all-out war, the hostilities continue even today. In 1962, what started as a border skirmish rapidly evolved into the deployment of troops, but was swiftly resolved to bring peace at the disputed border. But far from the border, the war also completely disrupted the lives of the community of Chinese-Indians.

Just after the Sino-Indian war of 1962, 3000+ Chinese-Indians were sent to a camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. Indians with Chinese features, Chinese names or family ties who had lived for generations in Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Shillong, Tinsukia were taken from their homes and transported to Deoli Internment Camp. The Deoliwallahs, as they later came to be known, would go on to spend years and for some over four years in a disused prisoner of war camp with unsanitary conditions and meager rations. While the war lasted for a month, suspicion and paranoia ensured that families remained in these prison camps without any means of employment or education, and under constant surveillance. Even after their release, many struggled to return to their lives and resume work. A large number of them moved to Canada, USA, Australia and other countries, leaving behind a painful past in India.

Sixty years later, the story of the Deoliwallahas remains largely forgotten in Indian history. Joy Ma, who was born in the camp in 1963, recounts her mother’s and other internees’ days at the Deoli camp and reminds us of India’s tryst with concentration camps, something that we Indians only associate with stories from Europe and America. Dilip D’Souza discusses the geopolitical context and narrates stories from many such Chinese-Indians.

Dilip D’Souza: A U.S. educated and Mumbai-based writer, Dilip’s writing has won several awards, including the Statesman Rural Reporting award, the Outlook/Picador nonfiction prize and the Newsweek/Daily Beast South Asia Commentary Prize. He has published eight books.

Joy Ma attended Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and the New School for Social Research in the US.

Apr 27. 12:00-1:30pm. Aakar Patel, Chair, Amnesty International India. “The BJP’s War on NGOs”

  RECORDING

Over 20,000 NGOs have closed shop in India in just the last two years, as they have struggled to function amidst a hostile political climate where arbitrary government actions imperil their operations. Ironically, NGOs have long assisted the Indian government in serving populations that were out of reach to or underserved by state institutions.

Aakar Patel is a syndicated columnist who has edited English and Gujarati newspapers. His books Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here, and Price of the Modi Years were published by Westland in 2020 and 2021 respectively. His translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu non-fiction, ‘Why I Write’, was published by Tranquebar in 2014. He is Chair of Amnesty International India.

Aakar Patel’s talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, and by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.