A talk by Yogendra Yadav
“On the sudden death of Modern Indian Political Thought”
Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Location: Room 207 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont
Moderated by Sandipto DasGupta (New School University)
Yogendra Yadav is an Indian activist and political thinker known for his unwavering commitment to democracy, social justice, and constitutional values. Starting his career as a teacher of Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh and then as a Professorial Fellow at Delhi based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), he was among the founders of Lokniti at CSDS, instrumental in the revival of National Election Studies in India, among the initiators of State of Democracy in South Asia reports and involved in rewriting of school textbooks of Political Science for the NCERT. He was involved in the making of education policy and was a member of the University Grants Commission. His books include Making Sense of Indian Democracy (Permanent Black, 2020) and Crafting State-Nations (with Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, John Hopkins University Press, 2011).
Since 1995 he was associated with Samajwadi Janparishad, an experiment in alternative politics, that drew inspiration from the Gandhian socialist tradition. In 2012 he was among the founders of Aam Aadmi Party and went on to establish Swaraj India. He was involved in the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, was in the apex committee that guided the historic Farmers protest in 2020-21 and walked from Kanyakumari to Kashmir with the Bharat Jodo Yatra. He is the National Convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan, a civil society initiative to protect and promote constitutional values and democratic institutions. His journey blends intellectual depth with grassroots activism, making him a prominent voice in India's democratic and social movements.
Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. For the 2024-25 academic year, he will be a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Before coming to The New School, Sandipto was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy.
His research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. He is the author of Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience.
