Modi bowled them over, but they are fans and not citizens

Mukulika Banerjee reflects on the Indian Prime Minister’s performance at Wembley Stadium last Friday. She writes that the 60,000 strong audience that turned out to see Modi speak during his visit to the UK wants desperately to believe India finally has a leader who will turn around the country’s fortunes and put an end to their sense of shame at its failings

Cricket and the rise of modern India

LSE’s Mukulika Banerjee moderates a discussion on the rise of cricket in India and its relationship to the country’s politics and culture

Democracy shouldn't be limited to elections

Voter participation in the 2024 UK election was 60 per cent, the lowest in over 20 years. Mukulika Banerjee argues that the UK needs to cultivate a democratic culture that engages citizens on political issues beyond just the elections. Otherwise, democracy and its institutions are in danger of disintegration

Leadership and political work

Taking cognisance of the lack of studies on leadership in modern India, this book explores how leadership is practiced in the Indian context, examining this across varied domains — from rural settings and urban neighbourhoods to political parties and state governments. The chapter presents a case study of the nature of the Communist Parties’ presence at the village level in West Bengal

Debating “Why India Votes?” at the House of Lords

Last Wednesday Why India Votes? a book by Mukulika Banerjee, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the LSE, was launched at the House of Lords. The panel featured Jonathan Spencer, Regius Professor of South Asian Language, Culture and Society at Edinburgh University, Salil Tripathi, journalist and Director of policy at the Institute of Human Rights & Business, and Dr Banerjee herself. The event was hosted and chaired by Lord Bikhu Parekh. Sonali Campion reports

Gandhi and Frontier Gandhi

Frontier Gandhi died on 20 January 1988, 40 years after Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948. Their relationship – both personal and political – holds profound lessons for the world today. The Pathans (or Pashtuns) of the North West Frontier are regarded as a warrior people. Yet in the inter-war years there arose a Muslim movement, the Khudai Khidmatgar, which drew its inspiration from Gandhian principles of non-violent action and was dedicated to an Indian nationalism. On the anniversary of the death of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, founder of the Khudai, Mukulika Banerjee reflects on the legacy of this unique movement among that challenged traditional perceptions of wild and “hot-headed” Pashtuns and their relationship with Gandhi

New research project: explaining electoral change in urban and rural India (EECURI)

LSE’s Dr Mukulika Banerjee introduces a new interdisciplinary research project that will examine electoral politics at the grassroots level in India to analyse evolving forms of democratic governance and ask ‘why people vote’

LSE South Asia Centre to launch 1st June

Next week, India at LSE will become the South Asia at LSE blog as it becomes part of the new LSE South Asia Centre. SAC Director Mukulika Banerjee introduces the Centre and highlights the significance of the region at this time

Money and meaning in elections: towards a theory of the vote

This article offers a comprehensive set of explanations for why people vote. Based on evidence from Indian elections, where voter turnouts remain consistently high—and rising—despite voting not being compulsory, the article shows that two broad sets of reasons exist. First, a set of transactional factors, labelled ‘money’ here, encompass within it the instrumental and coercive reasons that propel people to vote. Secondly, evidence shows that people also attribute ‘meaning’ to the act of voting itself so they vote for the sake of performing the act itself. Drawing from the wider literature and the author's own ethnographic work, including comparative ethnographic research conducted by a team across India, this article brings together these diverse set of reasons to propose a holistic explanation for why people vote