Join Professor Dr Rahul Mukherji, Modern Politics of South Asia Chair at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, for a lecture and conversation with Professor Maya Tudor, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government.

The lecture will explore the reasons for the decline in India’s credentials as a liberal democracy. India is regarded 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 organisations 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 that may arise from a purely authoritarian condition.

Professor Dr Rahul Mukherji

Professor Dr Rahul Mukherji holds the Modern Politics of South Asia Chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg University.

He was managing director of the South Asia Institute (2020-2022) and spokesperson 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 (Singapore, 2008-2016) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi, 2006-2008). He has lectured at the University of Vermont (Burlington, 1999) and at the Hunter College of the City University of New York (New York, 1996-1998), 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 (Canberra, 2002), and at the Institute of Global Public Policy and Governance at Fudan University (Shanghai, 2023). Mukherji was a visiting professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, 2023) and is currently a visiting research professor and the Bandodkar Chair in political economy at the University of Goa in India (2024-2025).