Narendra Modi Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

Naked Oligarchy

How billionaires captured power and hollowed out democracy

June 19, 2025 • by Salvador Santino Regilme

The choice is stark: rule by the many, or rule by the billionaires who already act as if they own the world. Across the globe, extreme wealth has overpowered democracy. The world’s billionaires no longer merely influence politics; they dominate it. Behind the rhetoric of innovation and market efficiency lies a ...

Democracy

What Is Illiberal Democracy?

Scholars discuss Trump, Modi, and Erdoğan

February 20, 2025 • by Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Mark Frazier, Jeffrey C. Isaac and Pratap Bhanu Mehta

In November 2024, the India China Institute at The New School hosted the online panel "Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Democratic Regimes," which featured scholars Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Senem Aydin-Düzgit, and Jeffrey C. Isaac in conversation with moderator Mark W. Frazier about patterns of takeover, decay, and distrust of political institutions ...

South Asia

The Future for India’s Opposition

Democracy remains at risk

June 24, 2024 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

This result is certainly a setback for Modi, the BJP, and the Hindu nationalist Right more broadly; it is certainly a respite for opposition forces. But it would be foolhardy to celebrate this moment as a victory....

South Asia

The World’s “Largest Democracy”?

Modi leads India down a dark path

May 30, 2024 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

Corrosive nationalism and monarchic consciousness have become so normalized that other political forces, including the opposition, are now mimicking Modi’s practices....

Economy

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Reconstructing our tax system is an integral part of future national industrial policy as we restart the economy

July 2, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback

Taxation is one of those areas that exposes the contradictions at the heart of globalization. Globalization of goods has proceeded quickly, as has the harmonization of industrial standards across countries. Harmonization of taxation? Not so easy. The power to tax is the ultimate national prerogative, one that very few sovereign nations would ...

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Public Health

The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic

Around the world, far-right leaders’ responses to the pandemic feature key elements of fascist ideology

May 25, 2020 • by Federico Finchelstein and Jason Stanley

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring out the fascist ideology in countries under far-right rule. In the world's three largest democracies, national leaders are using the COVID-19 crisis to wage war on immigrants and minorities, while testing the limits of common sense. NEW YORK/NEW HAVEN -- In stark contrast ...

Reviews

Whose Home? Whose Rule?

Nandita Sharma’s Home Rule and the politics of autochthony

May 21, 2020 • by Mat Cusick

Nandita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press: 2020) In February 2002, five months after Narendra Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, an anti-Muslim pogrom erupted in his state. In three months of violence, Hindu nationalist rioters raped and murdered hundreds of Muslim ...

Feature

“Will Modi Return?”

The Inevitable Question from the Indian Elections 2019

May 16, 2019 • by Sarbani Sharma

For at least a few months now, most Indians in their workplaces, homes and within their communities have been unwittingly discussing the inescapable context of the 2019 General Elections. At the time I write this article, the 17th General Elections are underway in India and six out of the seven ...

Feature

Pulwama and the Battle of Optics

Political opportunism in the escalating standoff between India and Pakistan

March 19, 2019 • by Udeepta Chakravarty

“No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men...” Adorno’s caution against the possible realization of the barbaric principle of “mutually assured destruction” is not a triviality when ...