HAIT-colloquium
Democracy and Academic Freedom in India: A Contingent Relationship

Regime-types have played a defining explanatory role in the recent scholarship on academic freedom. The Academic Freedom Index (of the Varieties of Democracy project) confirms the correlation between waves of democratization and autocratization, on the one hand, and levels of academic freedom on the other. Such broad correlations, however, tend to occlude the historical specificity of particular locations. This talk will focus on the case of India, where academic freedom has always been contingent, on account of structural conditions that render it more vulnerable in the autocratic conjuncture.

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, New Delhi. She also held the Centennial Professorship (2019-23) in the Department of Gender Studies at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

She is the author of Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) and Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black, 2021). Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015.

The lecture is part of the HAIT-colloquium „Under pressure. Attacks on science in democracies and dictatorships“ in the winter semester 2025/26.

The colloquium takes place via Zoom. 

This event is financed by the Saxon State government out of the State budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.