India has long held an exceptional status as the most consolidated democracy in the developing world. However, this status is now seen as at risk by the government of Narendra Modi. His governing projects are associated with intolerance toward minorities and dissenters and exhibit centralizing authoritarian tendencies. To understand the rise of right populism in India, Professor Chhibber reflects on an earlier period of the 1960s and early 1970s when Indira Gandhi launched a populist campaign of the left against the entrenched power structures of the Congress party in India. The panelists explore the relationship between the left populists in the 1970s and the right populists in the 2010s whether there are differences in the authoritarian practices of left and right populists.

Dr. Pradeep Chhibber is Professor of Political Science and the Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the politics of India, political parties and party systems. His recent research is on religion and politics in India. Professor Chhibber is an active contributor to the editorial pages of ThePrint. He co-authored ‘Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party System of India’, Oxford University Press (2018); ‘Religious Practice and Democracy’, Cambridge University Press (2014). He received an M.A. and an M.Phil. from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from UCLA.

Dr. Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where she leads its Governance research cluster and the IDS Pakistan Hub. She is also an Associate Fellow at the IDEAS; and a Fellow at the MHRC. Her research focuses on the relationship between democratisation, inequality and accountability, including in her book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (2019, Cambridge University Press). Dr. Mohmand received a D.Phil in Development Studies and a Masters in Governance and Development from IDS, University of Sussex.

Dr. Hassan Javid is an Associate Professor of Sociology at LUMS. His research broadly looks at questions related to class, state, and power, with a specific focus on how the institutional legacy of colonialism affects contemporary politics in Pakistan. In recent years, he has published work on the dynamics of democratization in Pakistan. He completed his PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he also spent some time as an LSE Fellow in Political Sociology.