India's Democracy: Competitive Authoritarianism and Resilience

  • Thursday, 16. January 2025, 18:00
  • Great Lecture Hall of CATS, building 4130, Room 010.01.05
    • Prof. Dr. Rahul Mukherji

The lecture will explore the reasons for the decline in India's credentials as a liberal democracy. India is classified as a competitive authoritarian regime, where competitive possibilities co-exist with autocratic propensities that have consolidated themselves over time. It will present the results of an analysis of 13 civil society organizations to infer which parts of civil society are most aggressively attacked and for what reason. It will finally conclude with reflections regarding the possibilities for resilience that still exist. The competitive authoritarian condition is an essentially unstable one. It provides more opportunities for democratic consolidation than the possibilities from a purely authoritarian one.

Rahul Mukherji holds the Modern Politics of South Asia Chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg University. He was also managing director of the South Asia Institute (2020-2022) and spokeperson for the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (2021-2022) in Heidelberg. Mukherji had earlier served as an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore (2008 - 2016, Singapore) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (2006 - 2008, New Delhi). He has lectured at the University of Vermont (1999, Burlington), at the Hunter College of the City University of New York (1996 - 1998, New York), as a PhD candidate and President's Fellow of Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1997 - 1999). He has been a visiting scholar at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of the Australian National University (2002, Canberra), and at the Institute of Global Public Policy and Governance at Fudan University (2023, Shanghai). Mukherji was a visiting professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (2023, Mumbai) and is currently a visiting research professor and the Bandodkar Chair in political economy at the University of Goa in India (2024 - 2025).

  • Address

    Great Lecture Hall of CATS, building 4130, Room 010.01.05

  • Event Type

All Dates of the Event 'SAI Colloquium'