The Mutual Entailments of Democracy and Academic Freedom in India

While the parallels between democratic backsliding and the erosion of academic freedom are compelling if predictable, the concomitant assumption that academic freedom flourished in a more democratic past needs to be historically nuanced. The long-standing structural constraints on university autonomy and governance hold the key to an understanding of both the complex challenges of academic freedom in the present, and its likely predicaments even in a conceivably more democratic future. 

Speaker:

Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies. Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999).

source: csh-delhi.com