PACT Members

Professor Rochana Bajpai, principal investigator

SOAS, University of London

Rochana Bajpai (MPhil DPhil Oxf) is Professor of Politics. Rochana is the author of Debating Difference (Oxford University Press 2011) and of numerous journal articles and book chapters on the Indian Constituent Assembly debates; minority rights, secularism and pluralism in India; social justice and affirmative action in India and Malaysia.  She has also published on democratic authoritarianism, liberal ideas in India, interdisciplinary methods in political theory and comparative political thought.

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Dr Nicholas Cole, co-investigator

University of Oxford

Dr Nicholas Cole (MA MPhil DPhil Oxf) studies the political thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and is working on a digitial project that looks at the way constitutions and treaties have been negotiated over the last two hundred years.

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Dr Udit Bhatia, co-investigator

University of York

Udit Bhatia is a political theorist whose research focuses on normative democratic theory, constitutionalism, and political epistemology. Some of his recent papers have examined the legal and normative status of political parties, asking how their internal rules should be configured. In other work, he has engaged with epistocracy, the notion that competent persons should enjoy exclusive or disproportionate political power. He is also interested in the history of political thought, especially in relation to democratic institutions.

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Professor Sudhir Krishnaswamy, co-investigator

National Law School of India University

Dr. Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, Bengaluru and the Director of the Department of Professional and Continuing Education (PACE), NLSIU. He is also the Co-founder and trustee of the not-for-profit research trust, Centre for Law and Policy Research. Previously, he was the Director of the School of Policy and Governance, and Professor of Law and Politics at Azim Premji University. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2022 in the Humanities category.

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Vineeth Krishna, project partner

Centre for Law and Policy Research

Vineeth Krishna E is a Senior Research Associate & Editor at the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR), Bangalore, India where he leads the Constitutional Culture team. The team engages in interdisciplinary academic research and civic education around the Indian Constitution. At CLPR, Vineeth helped set up the constitutionofIndia.net website, and the Supreme Court Observer website which was incubated at CLPR. He currently leads the team that runs the ConstitutionofIndia.net website. Vineeth is interested in studying Indian Constitutionalism through intellectual history and political theory. 

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Lauren Davis Jarnach, senior documentary editor

Quill Project, Pembroke College, University of Oxford

As the Senior Documentary Editor of the PACT project, Lauren Davis Jarnach (MSt, Oxford) manages the archival research, editorial standards, and online data entry into the Quill Platform (Quill Project, Pembroke College) of information regarding the negotiation process surrounding the drafting of the Constitution of India from 1946-1950. She has done similar work on the United States state and federal constitutions and Bill of Rights and U.K. Brexit legislation. Her research interests include digital humanities, data and archive management, text-based analysis, negotiated texts, material texts, and digital curation and editing.

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Manas Raturi, PDRA

New Delhi, India & University of Oxford

Manas Raturi is a PhD candidate in Sociology at School of Liberal Studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. His thesis examines the epistemic premise of leprosy cure and rehabilitation in India through an archival and ethnographic study of a leprosy complex in Delhi. He is further interested in exploring the history of public engagement with constitution-making processes in India. He previously worked as Research Assistant to Legislators at Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies, New Delhi.

Sarfaraz Hamid, Research Assistant

New Delhi, India

Sarfaraz Hamid is a Delhi-based researcher specialising in Archival Research. He has a degree in Master of Arts in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His expertise includes navigating historical records from the National Archives of India and other state and private archives. Sarfaraz has collaborated on numerous research projects with leading academics from around the world. In addition to his research endeavours, he is also passionate about heritage conservation and conducts engaging heritage walks in and around Delhi.

Alice Winters, Project coordinator

SOAS, University of London

Amitabh Behar

Amitabh Behar, Executive Director (interim) of Oxfam International, is a global civil society leader, and an authority on tackling economic and gender inequality and building citizen participation. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Oxfam India.
Mr. Behar was the Vice Chair of the Board of CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society across the globe. He also serves on the boards of several other organisations, including the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA), an Indian public policy think tank and the Global Fund for Community Philanthropy (GFCF).
Prior to Oxfam India, Mr. Behar was the Executive Director of National Foundation for India and served as the Convener of National Social Watch Coalition and the Co-Chair of Global Call to Action Against Poverty, a network of over 11,000 civil society organisations.

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Gautam Bhatia

Gautam Bhatia is a practicing lawyer and legal scholar based in New Delhi, India.

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Emma Crewe

SOAS Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Professor of Social Anthropology; Director, GRNPP

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Rohit De

Rohit De is a lawyer and historian of modern South Asia and focuses on the legal history of the Indian subcontinent and the common law world. As a legal historian he moves beyond asking what the law was; to what actors thought law was and how this knowledge shaped their quotidian tactics, thoughts and actions. In recent years, this has enabled his research to move beyond the political borders to South Asia to uncover transnational legal geographies of commerce, migration and rights across East Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.

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Niraja Gopal Jayal

Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies.

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Tarunabh Khaitan

Tarunabh Khaitan is the Professor (Chair) of Public Law at LSE Law School, a Fellow at Mansfield College, an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He specialises in legal theory, constitutional studies, and discrimination law. He was the founding General Editor of the Indian Law Review and founder of the Junior Faculty Forum for Indian Law Teachers. He sits on advisory boards of the International Journal of Comparative Law, the Hart Studies in Constitutional Studies Series, the Rubinstein Center for Constitutional Challenges, the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, and the LUMS Law Journal. He is also a member of the European University Institute’s Research Council, an associate member of the International Association of Electoral Law, and a trustee of the Equal Rights Trust.

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