[Reader-list] SociologySeminar at SAU: Wield the Brooom ! Curative Democracy and the Promise of “New Politics” in India.

[Diya Mehra]

The Department of Sociology, South Asian University cordially
invite you to a seminar:

Wield the Brooom !
Curative Democracy and the Promise of “New Politics” in India.

By Dr. Srirupa Roy,
University of Gottingen

Wednesday, 19th August 2015, 2:30 pm, FSI Hall, South
Asian University, Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi

Abstract:  As the recent electoral victories of Podemos in Spain and
the Aam Aadmi Party in India suggest, the call to clean up democracy and
institute a substantially “new politics” has gained considerable traction in
India and other democracies across the globe in the present moment.

Drawing upon
ethnographic research on the Indian Aam Aadmi Party (2013-2015), this paper
examines the ideological, mobilizational and organizational contours of “new
politics” and the political consequence – the opportunities as well as
constraints – of such projects of “curative democracy”.

Srirupa Roy is Chair
of State and Democracy in Modern India, and Director of the Centre for Modern
Indian Studies (CeMIS), at the University of Gottingen. Her research and
publications have focused on two different aspects of the “Politics of the
New”: (1) the institutional and cultural practices of postwar “nation-building”
undertaken in decolonizing nation-state such as India and (2) the politics of
“curative democracy” or democratic reform and the growing importance of
non-electoral actors and institutions such as the media, judiciary, and civil
society activism in democratic political life. She is the author of Beyond Belief: India and the
Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke
University Press, 2007); co-editor of Visualizing
Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India (University of Michigan Press,
2012) and Violence and
Democracy(Seagull, 2006), apart from numerous journal articles and chapters
in edited volumes.