Rights, Welfare, Accountability: India In Comparative Historical Perspective

Event Series:

Friday, November 20, 2015 - 10:00pm-11:30pm (ended)

223 Moses Hall 

Sanjay Ruparelia, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School

Sanjay Ruparelia earned his PhD in politics from Cambridge University. He holds a joint appointment in the bachelor’s program in The New School for Public Engagement and in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research. Ruparelia’s areas of research and teaching span democratic theory, comparative politics and political economy of development, primarily in South Asian studies. He has a secondary interest in China.

In the past, his work has focused on Indian democratic transformations since 1989, as well as the rise and fall of the broader Indian left vis-à-vis the Congress and Hindu nationalist BJP. Ruparelia has also looked at the prospects and difficulties of power sharing in federal coalition governments, and the role of institutions, power and judgment in politics. His new research examines the recent attempt to enact a right to basic social welfare in India through an innovative state-building project. It is part of a long-term collaborative research initiative, which analyzes the phenomenon of prosperity amidst poverty and inequality in India and China, and assesses its consequences domestically and for the global political economy. Ruparelia’s research has been supported by the Commonwealth Foundation, and he has been recognized with awards and fellowships from Cambridge, Yale, Columbia, Notre Dame, and the New School. He has served as a consultant to international and non-governmental organizations on governance and development, and as a media commentator on contemporary India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.