The view that bureaucracies are bloated with far too many employees preying on taxpayers money is a widely held myth. Research shows how significantly understaffed the Indian state is.

We’re thrilled to launch the first edition of Con-GRA, a conference dedicated to graduate students in the social sciences—particularly economics, political science, and sociology—whose research focuses on contemporary South Asia.

Con-GRA offers a space where emerging scholars can share their work, receive thoughtful feedback, and engage in sustained, interdisciplinary conversations. We approach South Asia not as a regional case but as a site of theoretical innovation, where new questions, methods, and frameworks are emerging across disciplines.

This inaugural edition marks a commitment to building an enduring intellectual home for social science scholars of South Asia.

New York is America’s most cosmopolitan outpost, not its heartland. One must look at what happened elsewhere in the US on 4 November.

The two-decade long reign of Nitish raises an important question: Can governance stripped of politics achieve the goal of radical social transformation?

A new study on urban India reveals that Muslims, Dalits, and tribal communities are denied equal rights and access to public services while upper castes enjoy the best living conditions, with Kochi and chennai standing out as rare examples of inclusive urban equality.

The capacity to live a full life in India's cities is heavily constrained by class, caste and religion.

Leela chats with Steve as he wonders about the different ways humans worship.

Leela Prasad is St. Purandar Das Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. She is the President of the American Academy of Religion (2025). She has received prestigious awards and fellowships for the study of religion, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright-Nehru senior fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Without the humanities, we may produce efficient workers — fluent in algorithms and markets but unable to envision and inquire.

Far from a grand bargain, the GST is an imperfect compromise constrained by a political culture with a limited commitment to the federal principle

India can take the discourse of development beyond instrumental power play—build solidarities across the emerging economies and bargain for equity.

Pakistan is likely to enjoy closeness with the US, China and Saudi Arabia. This is different from its relative isolation of recent years.

Even with the option of EU markets, China will have to be a significant part of India’s economic policy. But the difficult security relationship is an important complication.

The credibility of the Election Commission is in question. A recent survey by CSDS-Lokniti across five states and Delhi-NCR points to a significant drop in trust in the Election Commission. It is an important warning.

The Citizenship, Inequality, and Urban Governance (CIUG) Project, a collaboration between scholars at Brown University and Indian researchers, recently carried out one of the largest surveys of Indian cities, covering over 31,000 households across 14 urban centres. The study looks at how class, caste, and religion influence access to basic services, and how citizens exercise their rights in rapidly growing cities. It finds sharp inequalities in water, sanitation, housing, and civic participation, with class standing out as the main factor determining access to services.

Unless dramatic reversals take place, the core of India’s foreign policy, which, at least since 2000, has focused on the US, Pakistan, China, and Russia, stands on the verge of collapse.

Tariffs have been used in the past by countries like Japan and South, to promote or hinder industrialisation. The surprise in Trump’s tariff argument is two-fold.

Disenfranchisement by institutional fiat is profoundly undemocratic. The effect of the ECI's new documentary process in Bihar will tilt the scales in favour of the BJP.

At a deeper level, both Left and Right populism are linked to globalisation, the world’s greatest economic force between 1980-2010.

Much drew on the past, much represented a break from history

Aiyar writes: "To be clear, in interrogating efficiency, and questioning its dominance as the core value proposition of the State, I am not making the case that efficiency is undesirable. Indeed, entrenched waste, corruption and incompetence of the State is visible to citizens at every turn."

Varshney writes: "Trump-Modi summit was, of course, not without benefits for India, but benefits for US are greater."

Arvind Subramanian gives assessment of India's economic slowdown in podcast with FT's Martin Wolf

New documentary tells the story of legal suppression in India.

Varshney writes: "Unwavering civility would perhaps be the best way to describe what I experienced. Even when in positions of high power, arrogance never touched him, and civility never failed."

Aiyar writes on Twitter/X: "Reframing the cash transfer debate in India today New Year issue. I am no fan but to deride investments in welfare as "freebies" & "revadis" is just wrong. The real prob is this new fad distracts frm structural challenges in the econ while feeding the authoritarian beast"

Varshney writes: "The BJP’s principal claim was that it had done more than any other major party to restore the justly great status of Ambedkar in the national public realm. But, to Ambedkar, Hindu unity was exactly the opposite of what his project sought"

Politically and ideologically, in J&K and Haryana, closer analysis reveals BJP's performance is less than it seems.

Varshney: "There is an attempt in the presidential campaign to revive the nativist tradition of American nationhood"

Varshney: "Economic growth without sufficient job creation, and authoritarian repression of dissent, is insufficient for political legitimacy"

Why Politicians Choose Statist Solutions Over Economic Reforms

Varshney opines: If Modi continues to oppress Muslims, the government will fall

On June 4, results came in from the largest democratic election in history. Over 640 million people voted in India’s election, which took place at over one million polling places across the country over the course of six weeks.

In the past two decades India experienced an unprecedented expansion of rights-based welfare. This expansion cut across a range of sectors − education, employment, public health, poverty reduction − but was also accompanied by a...deepening of state institutions and a shift from patronage politics to citizen empowerment. In this paper [the authors argue] that India was a least likely case for welfare expansion and that contrary to what the traditional welfare state literature suggests, civil society...has played a significant role in institutionalizing reforms, especially at the local level.

Varshney: "Election results will be assessed by the democratic spaces they open up between polls"

In this episode, Nivedita Menon speaks about her new book, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (Duke University Press, 2024; Permanent Black, 2023).

Varshney: "Elections expressed a yearning for defence of constitutional values and citizen dignity"

Prof Ashutosh Varshney has recently visited UP. His understanding is that there is winds of change in the state.

In his Indian Express column, Professor Varshney writes that election travel often overlooks women's preferences, as evidenced by data showing they voted for Modi in larger proportions than men.

Prof Ashutosh Varshney discussed India’s high-stakes election on NPR/WBUR.

Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and Social Sciences at Brown University, discusses one of the most critical questions of our time. Is India still an electoral democracy?

Varshney: "Except for the regional parties allied with the BJP, most disagree with the idea. If the BJP passed a “one nation, one election” law in the next Parliament, it would push regional parties into a corner. A fundamental rearrangement of the polity should be based on a larger consensus, not on a brute majority."

In his Indian Express column, Professor Varshney writes about the larger democratic implications of the new political developments in India.

The idea of ‘one nation, one language’, which took shape in late 19th-century Europe, was challenged by Gandhiji, says Ashutosh Varshney, who spoke at an event in Bengaluru last week.

"This special issue began with a workshop at the Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University, in 2017. We gathered a small group of scholars from anthropology, philosophy, religious studies, literature, and political theory with the open-ended aim of investigating what a non-Eurocentric ‘global’ thought might look like, and what the stakes of such an endeavor may be."

Prof. Varshney discusses the impact of India's Prime Minister inaugurating a controversial Hindu temple on a former mosque site with NPR.

This essay draws a parallel between the political and social dynamics of Hindu nationalism in India under Narendra Modi and the policies of racial segregation of the Jim Crow era in the United States (from approximately 1880 to 1965). As with the marginalization of black Americans based on race during Jim Crow, Hindu nationalism aims to marginalize Muslim Indians based on religion. Methods similar to those used in the Jim Crow South—including exclusionary laws, segregation, and vigilante violence—are now being deployed in India to subdue Muslims.

Sethi will host study group on ragas for University students beginning in October

A controversy is making the rounds ahead of the upcoming G20 summit over the name of host country India. The debate centres on a possible shift from "India" to “Bharat”, a word dating back to ancient Hindu scriptures.

Weighing in on gender inequalities, Prof. Singh states, “You just have to look at the most basic indicators of women’s wellbeing to realize that India is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, if you’re lucky enough to be born in the first place.”

In his recent article published in the Indian Express on June 27, 2023, titled "In a Sweet Spot" Ashutosh Varshney reflects on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the United States and discusses the primacy of geopolitics, specifically national security, over economics and democracy in international relations.