Professor Mukulika Banerjee discussed recent developments in democratic freedoms and republican values in India, in a public lecture co-hosted by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the Geneva-Asia Society on 9 March. Mukulika Banerjee, the inaugural Director of the South Asia Centre and Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, has published widely on election cultures, popular perceptions of democracy, citizenship and rituals. Her books include Why India Votes? (2014), Muslim Portraits (2007), The Sari (2003) and The Pathan Unarmed (2001).

Professor Banerjee is currently completing a monograph entitled Cultivating Democracy on the social imaginaries of democracy based on fifteen years of research in rural India. Presenting material from this forthcoming book, in her talk she argued that the state of democracy in India can only be fully understood through a study of both its democratic practices and its democratic institutions. Drawing on protests against the newly-implemented CAA (January 2020), she argued that, while democratic institutions had been challenged in recent years, political practices remained spontaneous and robustly democratic, with women in particular taking the initiative. To draw conclusions about the state of India's democracy, she proposed that scholars and public intellectuals must study India's political and social forms of democracy, and the dynamic relationship between them.

Watch her talk: