Wednesday
02
September 2026
5:00 PM IST
Location
Room 019, GICT Building
Central Campus
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How Unique is the Crisis of Indian Democracy?
The Nalanda
Pratap B Mehta
University Lecturer, Princeton University
Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research Delhi
Speaker
Mona G. Mehta
Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Arts
School of Arts and Sciences
Moderator
Speaker
Pratap B Mehta
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is University Lecturer at Princeton University and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research Delhi. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of Ashoka University and President of the Centre for Policy Research. He has also held appointments at Harvard University and NYU Law School. He has published extensively in the fields of political theory, constitutional law, international relations, intellectual history and the politics of India. is the author of The Burden of Democracy (Penguin 2003) and has produced several edited volumes. He is co-editor, with Madhav Khosla and Sujit Choudhary of The Oxford Handbook to the Indian Constitution, with Milan Vaishnav and Devesh Kapur, India’s Public Institutions, with Niraja Jayal, The Oxford Companion to Indian Politics. His forthcoming books include a History of Global Political Thought in the Twentieth Century. He is also Honorary Fellow, St. John’s College Oxford and Fellow of the British Academy. His policy experience includes being Convenor of the Prime Minister of India's Knowledge Commission (2005-2007) and member of India’s National Security Advisory Board. He is a member of Club de Madrid's Commission on Democracy and Multilateralism. He is also Editorial Consultant to the Indian Express and contributes prolifically to public debates. He has also published in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Liberties, and numerous dailies. He is a winner of the Malcolm Adishesiah Prize, and of the Infosys Prize 2011.
Moderator
Mona G. Mehta
Professor Mona G. Mehta is Associate Professor and Associate Dean, Arts at the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She is a political scientist with research interests in urban transformations, democracy and middle class politics in the context of Gujarat and India at large. Professor Mehta has previously taught in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Scripps College in Claremont, USA (2010-2012) and in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar (2012-2020). She has authored several scholarly articles and book chapters pertaining to her research interests. Her academic writings have been published in journals such as Economic and Political Weekly, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Contemporary South Asia and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.