Videos

Watch videos of the department to get an impression of our work.

You can find all videos of the department on Youtube.

Youtube Site of the Department

This lecture held by Dr. Agnieszka Kuszewska-Bohnert on October 28th, 2024 explores the role of emotions in shaping Pakistani politics, focusing on how emotionalization reinforces power structures and defines enemies of the state. It examines the contestation of liberal values in Pakistan's socio-political context, considering narratives of threat and conflict, including the country's ongoing tensions with BJP-led India. The talk highlights emotions as key forces in shaping both domestic and international political orders.

Join Dr. Mander as he reflects on his journey to Auschwitz and as he draws implications from this experience for contemporary India. Dr Mander speaks of his longing to “gently hold the hand of every Indian who feels elevated by the politics of hate and fear and unfreedom and walk with them through the bleak grounds of Auschwitz”. He further discusses the admiration of the founders of Hindutva nationalism for Adolf Hitler and the way he “solved” the Jewish problem and the surging contemporary support for the Far Right in Germany, and in countries around the globe. For all of them to heed, he recalls the terrors of Auschwitz, to reveal how ordinary people can so quickly tumble so deep into the rabbit hole of intense hate. This talk which took place in October, 2024 is part of the lecture series on Governance and Politics in South Asia, hosted by the Department of Political Science, SAI, University of Heidelberg.

Join Dr. Mander for a deeper look at the dynamics of South Asian politics, with particular attention to India’s changing political scene. This lecture explores developments in policy, identity, and governance. At the same time, Dr. Mander talks about Germany's past and remembers history that should not be repeated, neither in India, Germany or anywhere else in the world. This talk was given at the Cinema and Social Justice Film Festival.

This video published by Scroll.in features an interview with three globally recognised social scientists and leading scholars of Indian politics - John Harriss, Christophe Jaffrelot and Rahul Mukherji - on the future of Indian democracy after the 2024 national elections, conducted by Harsh Mander at the University of Heidelberg. 

17 March 2021: In the 2nd lecture of our RECONNECT Global Webinar Series: ‘Democratic and Constitutional Backsliding. Causes, Consequences and Prospects from around the World’, Prof. Mukherji takes stock of developments with regard to democratic backsliding in the “world's largest democracy”, India.

Rakesh Tikait is now the main leader of the ongoing farmers' protests in India. He is being interviewed by Prof Rahul Mukherji from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act in India (OUP: New Delhi, 2020) by Dr. Himanshu Jha explores the what, why and how of institutional change through the lens of the transformation of the ‘information regime’ in India by tracing the passage of the Right to Information Act (RTIA) of 2005. Drawing on archival material, internal government documents and interviews, Dr. Jha shows that institutional change resulted from ‘ideas’ that emerged gradually and incrementally, leading to a ‘tipping point’. The first book in the Institutions and Development in South Asia series (OUP New Delhi), this volume examines the information regime in India from an alternative historical institutional perspective.

India's democratic institutions are particularly challenged on the eve of the country's seventy-fifth birthday. The symptoms that characterise a layered transition to authoritarianism are imminent. An overlay occurs when a layer of new institutions bearing a new moral imperative sits atop an old and established morality. Such a movement to constrain social action can drive politics towards a competing authoritarianism. Today's authoritarian takeovers are an evolutionary process. Gradually, the institutions of democracy such as the courts, the media, the internet and regulatory bodies are being hijacked. The leadership is also trying to eliminate the independence of the civil service. Most of these regimes are avowedly anti-elitist. They look down on the supposedly sophisticated, foreign-influenced elites who have not served the old and revered culture. These features of authoritarian temptation that characterise regimes from Orban's Hungary to Kaczynski's Poland are also beginning to characterise India's widely accepted democratic institutions under Narendra Modi. This lecture assesses India's competitive authoritarian inclinations in recent times.

How and when did India become a lucrative emerging market in the twenty-first century? Brand New Nation explores the long history of India's capitalist transformation into an enclave for global investment flows. Far from being a countervailing force against free market globalisation, India's twenty-first century hyper-nationalism is deeply intertwined with the promise of capitalist growth. India itself has become a business enterprise that aspires to be the ‘factory of the world’: its lifeblood is the dream worlds of the ‘India growth story’ and the majority's aspiration to recreate a mythical golden Hindu past.

From 2004, India enacted a series of laws that extended the right to economic security and social opportunity to the country's most disadvantaged citizens. A striking feature of this new welfare system was its emphasis on the link between corruption, transparency and accountability. On the one hand, many rights advocates believed that greater transparency would expose the failure of public institutions to provide basic entitlements due to corruption. Thus, social activists demanded a ‘right to inspect the state’, which was reflected in the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 and through the right to participate in local social audits in many other programmes. On the other hand, many officials emphasised the need to reduce ‘leakages’ through corrupt middlemen and unintended beneficiaries. Hence, in 2009, Aadhaar, a unique biometric identity card, was introduced to target cash transfers and welfare benefits to deserving beneficiaries, enabling the government to ‘see like a state’. Why is the politics of seeing a crucial dimension of India's new welfare architecture? How are the sources and mechanisms of corruption, transparency and accountability conceptualised, justified and operationalised by both sides of this debate? And what impact have these struggles had so far? This paper addresses these questions by analysing the assumptions, implementation and consequences of these two competing visions of social welfare in India.

In a recent publication, India was described as ‘the epitome of clientelist democracy in the post-colonial world’. However, other scholars argue that India is ‘post-clientelist and post-clientelist’. The aim of this talk is to examine the basis for these seemingly contradictory claims in the light of recent research by political scientists and anthropologists.

Professor Rahul Mukherji gave a talk titled ‘Authoritarianism and Democracy in Times of the Pandemic’ on 15 September 2020. This lecture was part of a three-day web talk series organised by the German Centre for Research and Innovation (DWIH) in New Delhi on the topic ‘Social Impact of Covid-19, Indo German Perspectives’.

Professor Rahul Mukherji gave a lecture titled ‘Economic Reforms in India’ on 15 September 2020. This lecture was organised by SDS Public Policy, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.

Prof. Dr. Rahul Mukherji, Head of the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University, and Prashant Bhushan, Public Interest Lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, discussed India's political crisis. In this substantive discussion, they discussed the attack on institutions, the crisis of the opposition and the strategies to save India's constitutionalism.

Prof Rahul Mukherji's article on ‘Misconceptions about Indian Democracy: Majoritarianism and Tradition’ sheds light on the political crisis in India today. He emphasises that the idea of India needs to be rethought. Will India become a Hindu nationalist state? Or will it draw on an Indian tradition and work towards coexistence and mutual learning from different religious and spiritual traditions?

The inaugural lecture by Prof Dr Rahul Mukherji on the topic ‘Governing India: What do we know and what do we need to know?'

Date: 15 November 2017
Venue: Old Auditorium, Heidelberg University