Democracy and its Discontents

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal is the Avantha Chair and Professor of Politics at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Centennial Professor from 2019 to 2023 in the Department of Gender Studies at The London School of Economics. She is an Indian political scientist who works on issues concerning citizenship, representation, democracy, and welfare in India. Her research combines theoretical insights with empirical analysis to understand political participation, state-society relations, and the dynamics of inclusion in democratic systems. Professor Jayal delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2009, and was Vice-President of the American Political Science Association (2011-12). She has held visiting appointments at, among others, Princeton University, the University of Melbourne, and the EHESS in Paris.

She is the author of Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) and Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (2021). She has co-edited, with Aparna Chandra and Gautam Bhatia, The Cambridge Companion to the Constitution of India, to be published in 2026. Professor Jayal 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 (Oxford University Press, 1999). She is the editor of Democracy in India (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today (Penguin Random House, 2019); and co-editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Companion to the Politics of India (2010). Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents, published by Harvard University Press and Permanent Black in 2013, won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015.

Neelanjan Sircar

Professor Neelanjan Sircar is an Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Sciences. Professor Sircar completed his bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. Professor Neelanjan Sircar was a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University. His work has focused on party and electoral behaviour, welfare delivery, urbanisation, and environmental and health policy. He has also worked with the governments of Andhra Pradesh and Punjab to study issues ranging from health policy to welfare benefits. Professor Sircar is a co-editor of the volume Colossus: Anatomy of Delhi, which seeks to understand the social, spatial, and structural inequalities in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi. He regularly publishes on Indian voting and party behaviour in academic journals and public media, including Contemporary South Asia, Economic and Political Weekly, Perspectives on Politics, Urbanisation, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Environmental Research Letters.