The Mortara Center is launching a new article series covering the Mortara Research Seminar, our flagship forum where guest scholars present their works-in-progress to our international affairs research community. Each week, a member of the Mortara community will contribute an article summarizing the seminar’s discussions and key insights. For this first piece, undergraduate research fellow Anna O’Sullivan attended the seminar and spoke with the guest speaker. She reports on a compelling discussion with Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University, who presented his latest work on comparative democracy in India.
On Monday, March 17th, the Mortara Center had the honor of hosting Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University as a distinguished guest for the weekly Mortara Research Seminar. The Mortara Research Seminar is a vibrant forum uniting Georgetown and visiting scholars in comparative politics and international relations, offering a platform for presenting and refining works-in-progress through rigorous discussion and feedback. Professor Varshney, the Sol Goldman professor for International Studies and Social Sciences at Brown University, presented an unpublished book-in-progress on comparative democracy in India.
Professor Varshney is a political scientist whose groundbreaking scholarship has profoundly shaped the study of ethnic conflict, civil society, and Indian politics. As the director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Professor Varshney has established himself as a leading authority in comparative politics through his extensive body of highly recognized work, including Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life and Battles Half Won. Professor Varshney has also contributed his expertise to global policy initiatives, serving on Kofi Annan’s Millennium Task Force on Poverty and advising institutions like the World Bank and UNDP. Through his scholarship, public engagement, and advisory roles, he continues to illuminate the complexities of democracy, development, and urbanization in India, making invaluable contributions to academia.
Professor Varshney’s current work echoes a recurring theme of democratic backsliding in India within his scholarship, but this time takes a more comparative approach; Varshney has identified key similarities between the growing governmental oppression of Muslims in India to multiple other eras of oppressive lawmaking, including the American South during the Reconstruction era. The argument is heavily anchored in democratic theory and identifies a widening gap between liberal and electoral democracy within India –a gap that may have profound implications for constitutional rule. In the seminar, Professor Varshney explored the impact of Hindu Nationalism’s legal project to lessen the “disloyal” (Indian Muslims) from public life and participation, therefore decreasing democracy within the state.
The informative seminar concluded with a Q&A, where graduate students and professors had the opportunity to discuss the research in further detail. Afterward, I sat down with Professor Varshney for a dialogue on his research and presentation journey. When asked what drew him to present at the Mortara Research Seminar, Professor Varshney reflected that these talks have historically hosted some of the most “brilliant minds” in higher education and how the invite itself was an honor. Professor Varshney values higher education strongly and described the American higher education system as holding “supreme excellence” as compared to other systems internationally. Professor Varshney’s generation favored American education as opposed to those in the UK, of which he remarked his parent’s generation leaned towards, as a result of the rise in international influence of the US. We concluded our discussion with a brief reflection on the importance of soft power in the United States on his educational journey and how he hopes to see this power maintained.
