THE IDEA OF EQUALITY IN 20th CENTURY INDIA by Yogendra Yadav

About the Talk
The modern European idea of equality made its entry in India in the late nineteenth century, leading to a paradigm shift in the pre-existing imagination of spiritual equality before god. This paradigm shift was followed by a period of free translations when received ideas about socialism, Marxism or the Russian Revolution were selectively and imaginatively grafted onto Indian reality. M N Roy, and in a limited way Jawaharlal Nehru brought this phase to an end and set up an official doctrine. This was followed by long phase in which this ideological orthodoxy was played out in the real world of politics with modest returns. This phase was also marked by various creative and heterodox encounters represented, for example, by Rammanohar Lohia. The collapse of the Soviet Union was something of a dead end for this journey; this challenge also created an opportunity for re-imagining the received idea of equality and its reintegration with alternative traditions of thinking about equality. Such an attempt, reflected in Kishen Pattnayak's writings, set the stage for contemporary recasting of the idea of equality.
About the Speaker
Yogendra Yadav is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Professor Yadav's areas of interests include democratic theory, election studies, survey research, political theory, modern Indian political thought and Indian socialism. Yadav has published extensively in academic journals and popular media. He is co-author of State of Democracy in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Crafting State Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). He was Founder Director (1997-2003) and later Co-Director (2003-2009) of Lokniti: Institute of Comparative Democracy, a research programme of the CSDS.
From 2005-2012 Yadav was one of the two Chief Advisors in Political Science for the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) who supervised the writing of the new textbooks for Political Science for class IX, X, XI and XII. In 2010 Yadav was appointed to the National Advisory Council to oversee the implementation of the Right to Education act (RTE), and served as Chair of the Task Force on Research and Evaluation of RTE from 2011-2012. Yadav was awarded the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies in 2008. In 2009 the International Political Science Association honored Yadav with the first Global South Award “in recognition of outstanding work on the politics of the developing world.”