Niraja Gopal Jayal

6.30 Tuesday 2 October
Bookings: 9351 7940

India's democratic record provides a spirited repudiation of the predictions of the doomsayers of the early post-independence period, who argued that a society marked by multiple ethnic cleavages and desperate poverty could scarcely sustain democratic institutions.

Today, India has a strong institutionalized democracy and a robust civil society; the social base of the polity has widened considerably and a regionalization and decentralization of power has taken place.

This lecture will indicate some of these successes of India's democracy, but will reflect substantively on the important challenges that remain to be confronted. These include the gap between procedural and substantive democracy; the obscuring of redistributive politics by the politics of recognition; and the puzzle of why, in a democracy in which the poor vote more than the middle and upper classes, the policy outcomes are not pro-poor.

Niraja Gopal Jalyal is a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the author of Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (1999); co-author of Drought, Policy and Politics in India (1993); and editor of Democracy in India (2001). Her current research interests include the Indian idea of citizenship; gender and governance; decentralisation; and environmental political theory. She is Director of the Ford Foundation project Dialogue on Democracy and Pluralism in South Asia.

Co-presented with Sydney Democracy Forum