Stanford University

Independent Media in Modi’s India with Dr. Siddharth Varadarajan

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At a time when democracies face an onslaught from authoritarianism, we wonder — where on Earth is the world’s largest? Dr. Siddharth Varadarajan has raised the alarm on the decay of democratic liberties in India before many in his time. As the former editor of The Hindu, and the founding editor of The Wire, which has become one of the few fully independent media outlets operating in the ‘new India,’ he is situated at the frontlines of the largest battlefield fought by democrats today.

In conversation with Abeer Dahiya BA/BS ‘22, he shares how to hold a government accountable in an ecosystem where conventional media fails to do so, and how Stanford students can contribute to independent media in their home countries to uphold transparency.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Siddharth Varadarajan is a Founding Editor of The Wire and senior fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, New Delhi. Previously, he was the Editor of The Hindu. An economist by training, he studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and taught at New York University before returning to India to work as a journalist. He has been a visiting lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Abeer Dahiya

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Siddharth Varadarajan
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The Troubling State of India's Democracy

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About the Session: Join Dinsha Mistree, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, to discuss "The Troubling State of India's Democracy," a volume he is co-editing with Sumit Ganguly and Larry Diamond.

 

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Dinsha Mistree
About the Speaker: Dinsha Mistree is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a special focus on India. Recent and forthcoming scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at Stanford Law Review, Social Science and Medicine, Public Administration Review, and Comparative Politics. Dr. Mistree holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, along with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He was previously a CDDRL postdoc (2015-16).

Online, via Zoom

Dinsha Mistree

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Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages the Program on Strengthening US-Indian Relations. He is also a research fellow in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School and an affiliated scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a regional focus on India. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL and was a visiting scholar at IIM-Ahmedabad.

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Research Fellow, Rule of Law (SLS)
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2015-16
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Global Democracy Leaders Gather Virtually for the 2021 Draper Hills Summer Fellowship

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This week we launched the long-awaited 17th year of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's Draper Hills Summer Fellowship Program. Founded in 2005 with generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, Draper Hills is an executive training program for world leaders striving to promote democracy. For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

Fellows in the class of 2021 were selected from among thousands of applicants for their ground-breaking work to defend democracy. These 34 leaders drawn from 30 countries around the world are pioneering new approaches and models to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. Representing business, government, and the nonprofit sector, our fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. In countries moving towards democracy, our fellows are working to institutionalize new systems and practices to support democratic transitions.

An Unconventional Year


Traditionally, Fellows would travel from their home countries to the U.S. and spend three weeks on campus at Stanford learning together. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the program is currently taking place virtually for the first time (for the same reasons, the program did not run in 2020). The shift to online programming posed a number of logistical obstacles – from what time to run virtual sessions when participants span over a dozen time zones to how to foster the sense of belonging and personal connections that occur more naturally in in-person settings.

To begin addressing the latter, Fellows were sent welcome packages to build excitement and foster community both within the program and at Stanford. Upon receiving hers, Aisha Yesufu of Nigeria shared, "I am so excited at the different people I'll be meeting from all over the world, and also learning from different people, lecturers, professors... It's going to be quite interesting, and, for me, that is what I am most looking forward to."

"One of the most important things I have ever been involved with."


Opening against the backdrop of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the importance of the Draper Hills program and the need to promote democratic change is now more evident than ever.

The inaugural session for the 2021 cohort began with Francis Fukuyama introducing the fellows to several of the esteemed faculty they will be learning from over the next two weeks, including Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and Michael McFaul. McFaul shared that not only did he found the program, but "it is one of the most important things I have ever been involved with." Jensen later added that "participating in this program is one of the great pleasures I have every year."

More to Come


Throughout the next two weeks, our Draper Hills Fellows will examine the political development, democratic transitions, and the relationship of law to economic development, public administration, administrative law, transitional justice, food security, and global health policy, among others. The group is eager to learn, and we look forward to seeing the many great things the training they receive here will enable them to do in their home countries and beyond.

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For the next two weeks, Fellows will participate in workshops led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty to study new theories and approaches to democratic development.

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LAD Course: LBSNAA Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration

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This five day intensive program for a select group of mid- and high-level Indian government officials and business leaders is designed to address how government can encourage and enable the private sector to play a larger, more constructive role as a force for economic growth and development. A driving principle of this LAD-LBSNAA program is that policy reform is not like engineering or other technical fields that have discrete skills and clear, optimal solutions. Instead, successful reformers must be politically aware and weigh a broad range of factors that influence policy outcomes. This program is designed to provide participants with an analytical framework to build these leadership abilities and operate effectively under adverse conditions. 

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LBSNAA Campus

Mussoorie, India

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Leadership Academy for Development Workshops
Leadership Academy for Development

Power from Doing Nothing: Why Some Government Agencies Start with Autonomy

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Why do some government agencies start with more autonomy than others? Conventional studies of autonomy at genesis are few and far between, with most of this sparse literature focusing on why a single founder—usually a politician—unilaterally chooses to delegate power to the new agency. In this article, I suggest that the decision to bestow autonomy to a new agency is not always made by a single founder alone. Instead, politicians must sometimes rely upon other actors to create a new government agency. When multiple founders collaborate to create an agency, they can either agree to share power or they can seek to prevent one another from controlling it. When they pursue the second option, the founders often compromise by empowering the new agency with autonomy from its start. I term this process “contestation,” as multiple founders seek to insulate the new agency from those whom they had to initially work with. I proceed to examine the creation of several government higher education systems in India, finding that contestation best explains why some of these systems start with more autonomy than others. I then consider the generalizability of this process, suggesting that it might explain variation in autonomy across many kinds of government agencies as well as variation across private universities. This work carries important implications for international engagement in higher education reform, specifically where we should expect outsiders to be able to create universities with greater autonomy. 

 

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Dinsha Mistree

When Law Matters: the Everyday Life of the Indian Constitution

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This event is sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for South Asia.

 

When the Indian Constitution was adopted in 1950, its egalitarian and inclusive spirit was widely seen as ahead of its time and out of sync with India’s many entrenched inequalities. Due to the efforts of its main author, the renowned Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar, the Constitution contained multiple safeguards of cultural, religious and political rights as well as the most ambitious affirmative action program in the world. Over the following six decades, the Constitution shaped Indian society in numerous ways but its most profound impact was in framing public discourse and the way citizens and communities present their claims and demands in public. Despite deep and often violent social and political conflicts, the Constitution and many of its key provisions – religious tolerance, uplift of the historically disadvantaged, recognition of the rights of distinct communities, unity of the nation – are invoked and claimed by all sides in these conflicts. At the same time, the Supreme Court of India has emerged as an active and activist court that is widely respected as the guardian of the Constitution.

 

In this seminar, two distinguished speakers will highlight and analyze why and how the Indian Constitution acquired this key role in the nation’s life.

Professor Rajeev Bhargava is a renowned political theorist who has published seminal studies of Indian secularism and law, and the Director of the well known Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. 

Dr. Rohit De is a legal scholar and Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. His forthcoming book is entitled Litigious Citizens, Constitutional Law and Everyday Life in the Indian Republic.

 

The two presentations will be followed by shorter commentaries from:

Francis Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at FSI and Director of CDDRL

Erik Jensen, Professor at the Stanford School of Law

Dr. Vivek Srinivasan, Program Manager for CDDRL's Program on Liberation Technology

 

Rajeev Bhargava Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies
Rohit De Assistant Professor of History at Yale University Assistant Professor of History at Yale University
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Empowering Women Leaders

Sweeping reforms of Indian government institutions created space for women’s political inclusion at an unprecedented scale. As of 1993, one-third of all positions in Panchayats (local government councils) are reserved for women, and in some states as much as half the positions are reserved for women. Evidence shows that women’s presence in local government improves women’s access to justice and public goods and reduces corruption.

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