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.

More information here.

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.

More information here.

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.

More information here.

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.

More information here.

Vineeth Krishna, co-investigator

Centre for Law and Policy Research (project partner)

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. 

More information here.

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.

More information here.

Gautam Bhatia

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

More information here.

Emma Crewe

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

More information here.

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.

More information here.

Vrinda Grover

Bio coming soon.

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.

More information here.

Tarunabh Khaitan

Tarun Khaitan is the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory at the Faculty of Law at Oxford, 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 Assocaition of Electoral Law, and a trustee of the Equal Rights Trust.

More information here.