School of Social and Political Science

Description

This event will take stock of the outcome of the 2024 Indian General elections, with close to 1 billion voters the largest election in the world.

How has the BJP/NDA and the INDIA Opposition fared? What does the result mean for the politics of religion, caste and region? How will it affect the future trajectory of Indian democracy? And why does the outcome matter for citizens across the world.

To address these questions, political scientists Rekha Diwakar (University of Sussex) and Wilfried Swenden (University of Edinburgh) will analyse the general trends by party, region, social group (religion, caste, class) and chair a broader discussion with the input from colleagues and students associated with the Centre for South Asian Studies and Politics and International Relations.

Rekha Diwakar is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at University of Sussex, UK, and has previously held academic positions at LSE, UCL, King's College and Goldsmiths College, London. She completed MSc in Public Administration & Public Policy, MRes and PhD in Political Science at LSE. Her research interests include Indian politics and public policy, comparative politics, especially electoral competition and voting behaviour, size of party systems and research methods in political science. She is the author of Party System in India (OUP, 2017), has published articles in leading international journals and recently contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics (OUP, 2024) and Judicial Review and Electoral Law in a Global Perspective (Hart Publishing, Bloomsbury, 2024)

This event has been sponsored by the SPS Student Development Office and is supported by the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Centre on Constitutional Change.