About the event

In Democracy’s Heartland: Inside the Battle for Power in South Asia (Juggernaut, 2025), India’s former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi argues that no other region has embraced the democratic experiment as fully, or as fiercely, as South Asia. From India’s electoral juggernaut to Pakistan’s power struggles, Bangladesh’s voter resilience to Nepal’s constitutional churn, Afghanistan’s downslide to Bhutan’s hesitant first steps, Democracy’s Heartland draws on decades of first-hand experience to offer sharp analysis and untold stories from the front lines of elections across the region.

Join us to mark the publication of Democracy’s Heartland with a discussion of the state of democracy across South Asia, and to ask why should we care about democracy’s fate in this pivotal world region.

Professor Shitij Kapur, the Vice-Chancellor & President of King’s College London will deliver the welcome remarks. 

Speakers

S Y Quraishi

Dr S Y Quraishi was the 17^th Chief Election Commissioner of India. He served on the Board of International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Stockholm for 9 years. He featured in The Indian Express list of 100 Most Powerful Indians of 2011 and 2012. He has observed elections in several countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, SriLanka, Myanmar and Pakistan. He was appointed as the Global Ambassador of Democracy, along with the late Kofi Annan in October, 2018 by International IDEA. He has published numerous books, including his magnum opus ‘An Undocumented Wonder - The Making of the Great Indian Election’. He delivered the Oxford India Lecture at the university of Oxford in Feb 2018, Keynote address at India Day at Harvard Kennedy School University in March 2019 and Keynote address at India Business Day at Columbia University, NY, April 2019. He was a Fellow at King’s College London in 2015 where the idea for this book was born. He is currently the Chancellor Emeritus of IILM University, Gurgaon, India.

Shandana Khan Mohmand

Dr Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, where she leads its Governance research cluster. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS); and a Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Her main area of research is inequality, inclusive politics, and the political economy of development. Her research has increasingly focused on the relationship between democratisation, inequality, and accountability, including in her book Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan (2019, Cambridge University Press).

Maya Tudor

Dr Maya Tudor is the Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and Fellow at St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford. She was educated at Stanford University (BA in Economics) and Princeton University (MPA in Development Studies and PhD in Politics and Public Policy). She has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy, and Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her research investigates the origins of effective and democratic states with a regional focus on South Asia. She is the author of two books: The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (2013) and Varieties of Nationalism (with Harris Mylonas, 2023).

Moderator

Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute. Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines the development of India’s ‘welfare state’ over the last century from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. Her forthcoming edited collection (with Rob Jenkins), Deconstructing India’s Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor, will be published by Orient Blackswan in 2025. Her earlier books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).

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