MY first appearance at the CSDS turned out to be my ‘job talk’. This was in early 1993. I was then teaching Political Science at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, and desperately wanted a change in my life. I had decided to quit my university job. Much against everyone’s advice, I was planning to settle down in my village in Haryana to pursue social and political work. A few months later, I had a chance encounter with Professor D.L. Sheth at a seminar at the IIAS, Shimla and was flattered by the interest he took in my work. This was followed by an invitation to give a talk at the CSDS.

Till then, I had an intense but remote relationship with the CSDS. An encounter with Rajni Kothari’s Politics in India (in an impossibly difficult Hindi translation) during my BA days had opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about politics. This fascination for his work survived JNU’s Marxism, thanks to teachers like Sudipta Kaviraj and Rajeev Bhargava. An opportunity to read Footsteps into the Future during my M.Phil had ignited my interest in Kothari’s intellectual biography. But I had never met him properly. I remember fancifully thinking of him as my Dronacharya.

Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy left a deep impression on my mind. His style of reasoning was unfamiliar and not quite to my taste. But he made it possible for me to see and state clearly what I found instinctively wrong with the Indian left: the radical edge of their egalitarianism was punctured by their cultural and intellectual heteronomy.

And then there was Lokayan that I had vaguely known for some time, largely through the negative lens provided by my political activist friends. But D.L. Sheth’s interventions during the Mandal controversy stood out for their clarity and persuasive power in the midst of strange turnabouts by many leading sociologists. My interest in Kothari’s intellectual biography turned into an interest in the CSDS as a school. But I had never been to the Centre, not even known where Rajpur Road was, and had little idea of the organizational history of the institution.

I remember little about my talk at the CSDS on the Indian socialist discourse, part of my unfinished doctoral dissertation, except for some fascinating questions by Shiv Visvanathan about Annie Besant’s socialism. What I do remember, however, is the post-seminar chat with the seniors – Ashis Nandy, D.L. Sheth and Giri Deshingkar – who made me an offer to join the Centre. I did not have a PhD, a book, a foreign degree or even a stint abroad, nor an academic godfather. I do not know of many top-end institutions that would be able to take such a risk. Anyway, that put paid to my plans of being a full-time activist. I joined the Centre in July 1993, first on deputation from my university and soon thereafter on a regular basis.

 

The Centre I entered was different from the CSDS legend that is etched in the memory of Delhi intellectuals. Some of the founders had left. Rajni Kothari came by once in a while, though he was very much an insider in the animated evening discussions. Ramashray Roy had retired, and felt like an outsider. Bashiruddin Ahmed had joined the Centre for Policy Research and was to become the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia. Gopal Krishna made a guest appearance, then as now. One could see that they all had their history with one another, but none wanted to implicate this newcomer into that. All four of them were very good to me. Gopal Krishna and I shared a socialist background and I learnt a lot from occasional conversations with him. Bashir saheb was exceptionally generous and would drop in once in a while to share tips about survey research techniques, and more. Sujit da, the Centre’s librarian who recently passed away, was an institution by himself. He took his time to warm up to you, but when he did, it was unconditional.

 

The organization was a three-tier structure: the ‘uncles’ like Giri Deshingkar, Ashis Nandy and D.L. Sheth (V.B. Singh later joined the club) took decisions. Suresh Sharma, Harsh Sethi and Shiv Visvanathan were the intellectual heirs and presumed to be their successors. And then there were the infants like Jyotirmaya Sharma, Tridip Suhrud and myself. Ashis Nandy had successfully reduced the Director’s position to a mere formality, but only because the Uncles ruled collectively. Formal mechanisms of internal democracy were largely nonexistent. Faculty meetings were an insignificant ritual that took place once every few months. There were no faculty committees. Rules were meant for the rule book and finance, accounts or audit simply meant ‘Mr Chaddha’.

Yet the system worked and was not oppressive. Not because it was a happy family and no one was excluded, but because the context and cost of exclusion was predictable and delimited. Not because there were no hierarchy, but because it was subtle and operated gently; you could differ with the uncles and laugh at them. Not because administration and finance worked well on auto-pilot mode (they did not, and the administrative and financial problems kept accumulating), but the inefficiencies did not come in the way of the principal task of sustaining an intellectual fellowship. For a formally registered organization that survived on government funds, the Centre was remarkably free of bureaucracy. There was a charmed circle, no doubt, but you could live a normal and dignified institutional life even if you did not belong to it.

The famous lunch was still on, with its high quality discussion. I was mostly a spectator, for a combination of Giri Deshingkar’s British accent, Harsh Sethi’s self-deprecating humour and Shiv Visvanathan’s sarcasm was more than my small-town social skills could handle. This was clearly not a school of thought any more, even as the differences continued to reflect a shared frame. The Uncles met every evening and occasional participation (I was granted an honorary ‘dry’ membership within a few months) in this club was as insightful as a high quality seminar. Their differences could be fundamental – Ashis (Nandy) da and Dhirubhai (Sheth) diverged in their basic orientation to modernity. The exchanges were not bound by formal rules of politeness. Yet the conversation never broke down; there was a need to engage with one another and a willingness to learn. This was in sharp contrast to either vicious factionalism or empty social politeness – the two dominant modes of non-engagement that I had seen in most Indian institutions.

 

Attending these meetings was also a lesson in institution building. For me, it was the first experience of participating in collective thinking on institutional matters. Coming from the university system, this was such a welcome change that I jumped into it, unmindful of how it might be viewed by others. The search for prospective faculty was no less serious than an Indian family’s search for a son-in-law. I often differed in my judgment – for I feared that the vantage point for these judgments was dated and getting narrower. The Uncles’ judgment about a person was often unduly shaped by how that person responded to them. This was unacceptable in my book. Yet, in the last instance, no decision was taken merely on personal likes and dislikes; intellectual judgment – even if mistaken – trumped every other consideration. This is what saved the institution from intellectual decline, even when finances were bleak and the administration was lax. The Uncles were remarkably free of the insecurities that almost always characterize the top echelons of Indian academia. My apprenticeship taught me that great institutions are based on deep and ongoing conversations.

The Centre continued to enjoy a fairly high standing in academic and intellectual circles. At the same time, insiders knew that sustaining this reputation for a long time was not going to be easy. The institution faced three kinds of challenges: the challenge of financial viability, the challenge of generational transition, and the challenge of retaining an intellectual cutting edge. In itself, each of these challenges were manageable. The trouble was that these challenges reinforced one another and their combination could lead to a crisis. I had some sense of the intellectual challenge but was blissfully unaware of the other difficulties when I entered the Centre.

 

Intellectually the Centre had opened up fresh ways of thinking about Indian society and politics ever since its inception in the 1960s. The first decade was characterized by the introduction of empirical research on politics and a sophisticated defence of the ‘Indian model’ of political modernity. The second decade brought in non-western ways of modelling the world order, and an interrogation of the idea of development. The third decade was known for the focus on non-party political formations, interrogation of colonial consciousness and a critique of modern science and technology. What were the new, cutting-edge ideas or research themes of the fourth decade? The answers were not very clear. The founders were, understandably, focused on completing their life work rather than in search of something new altogether. The next generation was extending the work of the founders in interesting ways, but the place was still in search of new, big ideas.

New ideas required fresh recruitment, but a chronic resource crunch meant that the organization was in no position to fill all or even most of the faculty positions. The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) was the principal funder from the early 1970s. Yet the ICSSR institutes could not claim all the legitimate expenses from the government; the government’s grant barely covered the salary bill. Unlike other state-based institutions, the Centre did not get any matching grant. To make matters worse, the ICSSR had put an arbitrary ceiling on annual grants for all its institutions, irrespective of their size and needs. In the past, such difficulties were managed with large projects, usually generously funded by foreign donors. Of late, such big projects had dried up.

By the mid-1990s, there was a sense of impending financial crisis. At one point, the regular faculty strength came down to a single digit, less than half of the faculty strength sanctioned by the ICSSR. The ratio of the faculty to other staff was very adverse. The institution was sliding into a negative spiral: a financial crunch meant no new recruitment, which in turn reduced the capacity to raise resources. The founders could not be expected to keep bringing in projects and funds as energetically as they had done twenty years earlier.

 

The challenge of a generational transition complicated an otherwise difficult situation. The Centre did not face the usual Indian problem of institution building where a successful institution builder refuses to let go, even if it means a strangulation of the organization. Rajni Kothari had set a model by giving up the Director’s position before he turned 50. In any case, formal positions of power did not matter much at the Centre. In sharp contrast to what happens in other institutions, a faculty person had to be persuaded to take up the directorship, and happily this remains the case even today. So there was no obvious power struggle. Yet, institutions require authoritative decision making. The changing situation at the Centre required a generational transition, but it did not happen when it should have. As far as I could tell, there was no design to block this transition, but at the same time there was no clear roadmap for a generational shift in the leadership. I don’t know why. I did not understand it then and I do not quite understand it even after a decade and more. However, the lesson I did pick up from this experience was that the founders’ making themselves dispensable is a crucial part of successful institution building.

 

The 1990s were the ‘dangerous decade’ that the Centre was not quite prepared to handle. There was more than one point when it could have slipped into the familiar Indian story of decline and fall of famous institutions. Recounting the history of how the Centre recovered, slowly and partially, from the deferred transition in its intellectual focus, financial status and leadership, is beyond the scope of this essay. Let me just say this is not a dramatic story, nor a story with a perfect ending. This story would need to weave many plots. In terms of individuals, the story would focus on the extraordinary institutional imagination and judgment of Dhirubhai and the selfless role of V.B. Singh, who found himself in the Director’s chair at this crucial juncture. In terms of collective effort, the story would include the rise of Sarai and Lokniti programmes.

The story may pause in 2001 when the Centre got the Ford Foundation endowment that enabled it to recover from its financial difficulties. It might record that the Centre nearly missed it. No matter how the story is told, the Centre was lucky to have survived this period.

 

Let me focus on a small slice of the larger story that I am fit and happy to recall – the story of the revival of empirical research in elections, and the beginning of the Lokniti programme. Although my appointment at the Centre was in the area of political theory, I had already begun moving away from what was conventionally regarded as political theory. I began to see political theory as a skill that needed to be applied to make sense of contemporary Indian politics. I had already developed an interest in elections, had written about the 1989 and the 1991 parliamentary elections, and had conducted a crude exit poll in the Chandigarh parliamentary constituency in 1991 with the help of my students at the Panjab University (beginner’s luck brought uncanny accuracy to this forecast). One of the attractions of my coming to the Centre was to use its vast databank.

The Centre’s Data Unit was at the time one of the three places (the others being the Election Commission, and the NDTV) that held a full archive of the official results for all Lok Sabha and assembly elections held in post-independent India. Besides, the Centre was, and still is, the only place that had a survey based databank of political behaviour, opinions and attitudes in India that went back to the mid-1960s. When I entered the Centre, the Data Unit was alive but not very active. V.B. Singh had ensured that the unit did not cease regular updating. Kanchan Malhotra’s dedicated and meticulous work had ensured that the data was high quality. Himanshu Bhattacharya, our computer wizard and the soul of our data operations today, had not yet joined the Centre, but it was a functioning unit. I wanted to use some of this data and revisit and update some of Kothari’s formulations on Indian politics.

After coming to the Centre, I realized that the task was not just one of using the existing data, but to collect and interpret fresh data as well. V.B. Singh had valiantly kept up the tradition of election studies by updating the data files of election outcomes, but the survey data archive urgently needed to be updated. The pioneering national surveys of 1967 and 1971 had not been followed up. Thankfully, those efforts had been meticulously documented and we had a fund of accumulated knowledge to draw upon. V.B. Singh was present at the Centre as the link to this storehouse of knowledge. We joined hands in reviving ‘election studies’ at the Centre, with the active encouragement and guidance of Dhirubhai.

 

We began by publishing a series of popular essays in Frontline on the state assembly elections held in 1993-94. The idea was to earn some money from these writings to subsidize scholarly case studies which were later published in the Economic and Political Weekly. The first experiment at reviving election surveys took place at the time of the Bihar assembly election of 1995. As we had no money or sponsors to carry out the survey, Dhirubhai found some funds from one of his projects and passed it on to us. Ashis Nandy accompanied me to some media organizations to see if money could be generated for the survey. More than the funds that we desperately needed and valued, this spirit of collegiality strengthened my bond with the Centre. The pre-poll survey in Bihar proved the efficacy of a small but random sample over impressionistic media readings. Everyone thought that Lalu Yadav was on his way out while our survey saw him comfortably ahead. This was noticed by some discerning observers like Harish Khare and S.P. Singh and we gained some legitimacy for our efforts.

The next step was a study of the Lok Sabha election in 1996. The basic idea was to revive the National Election Study series that was abandoned after 1971. But this could not be just an upscaling of the state election studies that we had done so far. It required rethinking the research design, reworking the research team and developing a new strategy to finance these studies. We began preparing for the 1996 election about a year ahead and held a workshop, followed by a national seminar in December 1995 to deliberate on the proposed study. The group gathered under the banner of Lokchintan. This was the beginning of what was to become the Lokniti programme of the Centre in 1997, thanks to one of the many farsighted suggestions from Dhirubhai that the various election related projects be merged into this ongoing research programme.

 

The first generation of National Election Study in 1967 and 1997 had left a robust research design for us. It involved face-to-face interviews with a national representative sample of about 4000 voters randomly selected from electoral rolls. The interview used elections as a window to ask a wide range of questions to do with voting behaviour, opinions about current issues, as also long-term questions about political attitudes and values. We stuck to these basics and made some minor changes to begin the second generation of the NES. The sample was enlarged to about 9000 to achieve an adequate sample for some big states. The mode of asking the key questions about voting was changed, using a dummy ‘secret’ ballot. A series of qualitative studies were carried out to supplement the survey.

Unfortunately, the qualitative studies had a miserable completion rate and we had to drop that experiment. But the information gained from the survey component of NES 1996 became the basis for new formulations about the deepening of democracy. The NES was now perhaps the largest and richest data sources of democratic politics anywhere in the world. From then on it became a regular series. NES 1998 and NES 1999 followed the same design, which was upscaled in NES 2004 to inaugurate the third generation of NES based studies.

 

The second generation of National Election Study required drawing in a nationwide community of scholars. Earlier, the national election surveys were carried out from the CSDS; investigators and supervisors were trained at the CSDS and sent all over the country. This approach was not going to work, given the scale of the new NES. Our team at the Centre had expanded to include Sanjay Kumar who joined as a research assistant but soon made a place for himself to join the faculty. Much of the survey work done by Lokniti (for which I get undue credit) has rested on his dependable shoulders. But our team at the Centre was nothing compared to the formidable team that worked on the surveys in the 1960s and early 1970s. The nature of politics had changed and understanding the ‘national’ required an understanding of state level politics, for which our team was not equipped. Therefore V.B. (Singh) and I set about travelling throughout the country to identify potential collaborators.

This was not easy. Most political scientists considered survey research and election studies low-brow. Survey research was seen to be methodologically naive, politically conservative and an ethnocentric enterprise, and not without reason. A valid academic critique was, however, reinforced by some not so valid reasons to oppose surveys: numerophobia, methodological illiteracy, ideological certitudes, fear of the unknown and a hidden distrust of the public have contributed to the hostile reception of survey research in India. Therefore, it was hard to persuade the better, academically rigorous, political scientists to join this venture; we did not succeed in many cases.

Our initial meetings for designing NES went into long methodological and philosophical debates. I remember the incisive critiques offered by Professor T.R. Sharma, my former supervisor from Panjab University and Professor Apurba Baruah from NEHU. This handicap proved to be an asset in the long run. It meant that a critique of survey research was internalized by this new collective, saving us from a blind imitation of North American science of politics. What has appeared as a lack of ‘rigour’ and ‘sophistication’ to our survey research colleagues abroad is, at least in part, a conscious academic decision not to follow the established global template of election studies and public opinion research.

 

Building a community of scholars was perhaps the most significant achievement of Lokniti. What began as a one-time collaboration for NES 1996 turned into a regular network and the core of an institution, the Lokniti programme at the Centre. The network has, over the years, comprised anywhere between two to four dozen scholars, mostly university based academics, across the country. In the absence of any professional association or competing networks, Lokniti acquired a certain presence in the world of political science. Some of the relationships established then have matured from professional collaboration to intellectual companionship and personal friendships. For me, personally, some of these relationships, specially the friendship with Suhas Palshikar, have been sources of intellectual nourishment and personal strength.

 

We were fortunate in meeting colleagues who could take on institutional responsibilities. The late Professor Pradeep Kumar enthusiastically owned up this enterprise and took over survey training and coordination in several states. Peter deSouza was an unusual theorist who agreed to align himself with this initiative. After some years of working together, we succeeded in persuading him to shift from Goa University to the CSDS and take over the leadership at Lokniti (till we lost him to the IIAS, Shimla). We did not succeed in persuading Professor Palshikar to relocate to Delhi, but he too agreed to share the administrative responsibilities of Lokniti, first as the National Coordinator of the Lokniti network and then as Director of the Lokniti programme at the Centre. Sandeep Shastri, one of the original members of the collective based in Bangalore, has been the National Coordinator after Suhas Palshikar. I cannot possibly name many more Lokniti colleagues here, but the way all of them owned Lokniti has been the real strength of this enterprise.

At 17 years, Lokniti is perhaps the longest running collaborative research network in the Indian social sciences. Besides the good fortune of attracting talented and selfless academics, the organizational durability of Lokniti can be attributed to two innovations. It demonstrated that a national network need not be Delhi based. The network headquarters moved first to Pune and then to Bangalore and in the process became more efficient. It also demonstrated that institutions can outgrow their founders. When Lokniti was instituted, I was its Director, the National Coordinator of its network and the Principal Investigator of its flagship NES. By 2009, Suhas Palshikar was its Director, Sandeep Shastri was National Coordinator and Sanjay Kumar the Director of NES.

 

Finally, we had to rethink the earlier practice of funding such surveys which cost a lot of money. One option was to get a large grant from a foreign funder. The Centre had used this route in the past, but we ruled it out. It was not because foreign funders could interfere with the findings or the design of academic research; there was nothing in the Centre’s experience to indicate that. The real fear was that research of this kind could impact domestic politics and easily be delegitimized on this ground. We also formalized some other rules: that we would not work for any interested party and undertake any confidential research. We have stuck to these rules, though we have accepted foreign funding for some international and comparative research. These rules have made our life difficult but saved us from many a pitfall.

The other option was to approach official Indian agencies like the ICSSR. But the procedures followed by these agencies were so cumbersome that we were disappointed. We applied to the ICSSR for NES 1996, with support from the then Chairman, Professor Ram Reddy. The application went through several committees, everyone supported our proposal, and yet the Council could not take a decision till a few weeks before the elections. The beauty of working in a place like the CSDS was that we could go ahead with preparations without any funding commitment.

This is when we decided to approach the media. N. Ravi, then the Editor of The Hindu, sent us a swift response and within a couple of days agreed to give us the amount that the ICSSR could not decide upon for months. We, in turn, agreed to do a pre-poll survey and make projections for the likely outcome of the elections. As luck would have it, we were also approached by Doordarshan to conduct India’s first televised exit poll for a national election. And then the ICSSR too agreed to support our post-poll survey. We thus had an embarrassment of riches.

 

The surveys were well received by the media, our beginners luck continued with the exit poll and the post-poll survey became the cover story of India Today in the 50th year of independence. And then it became a pattern. For every parliamentary and every major assembly election, we got one leading media group to sponsor our survey. The sponsor changed every now and then, till we entered into a stable relationship with CNN-IBN from 2005. We were lucky to work with enlightened editors like Aroon Purie, N. Ram, Prannoy Roy and Rajdeep Sardesai and did not face any situation that would compromise our professionalism.

Getting the media to sponsor social science research was an unusual experiment. It freed us from the vagaries of academic funding and also gave our work visibility, perhaps more than we deserved. With it came hostile criticism and envy, perhaps more than we deserved. The downside was that it focused attention on one small aspect of our research – forecasting electoral outcomes. Forecasting Indian elections, much like forecasting the Indian monsoon, is a complex and intellectually fascinating task. I have had a technical interest in this question. At the same time, we did not want our collective research to be evaluated by this one test of the accuracy of projections based on the survey.

Notwithstanding all the health warnings, these estimates were seen to be forecasts and evaluated as such. Given that the reception of these projections was marked by suspicion and ignorance, I too was convinced that we needed to exit forecasting. But we had to do surveys to keep our data files updated and growing, which required regular funds, and that forced us to stay with forecasting. It was only in 2009 that we finally got out of making seats forecasts. In early 2012, I announced my final retirement from election projections of any kind.

 

Once Lokniti was successfully institutionalized, it became the platform for other related initiatives. There was a growing realization that the Indian data needed to be placed in comparative perspective. Lokniti has been involved in an initiative called Globalbarometer that seeks to integrate survey research in different parts of the world, especially the global South. Lokniti was also the headquarters of the first ever comparative survey of political opinions and attitudes in the five countries of South Asia. The findings were published as a Report on the State of Democracy in South Asia. Given the institutional flexibility at the Centre, we used this platform for some activities that were not directly related to Lokniti.

For a very long time the Indian Languages Programme of the Centre was located within and funded by Lokniti. Abhay Dube’s dynamism and dedication turned the Centre into one of the most productive sites on social science in the Indian languages. The Centre today has more social scientists who work in Hindi than any other institution. Even when they – and this includes me – do not prioritize their work in Hindi, the Indian languages programme has become something of a trail blazer in the Indian social sciences.

In a similar way, Lokniti incubated the school textbook experiment. When Suhas Palshikar and I were invited to supervise the preparation of political science textbooks by NCERT, we faced a serious problem. The NCERT gave us intellectual freedom and the liberty to constitute our committees, but the rules did not allow any research support. We could not draw upon the talent of young colleagues who needed to work full time on the textbooks. We could, however, draw upon Lokniti resources and managed to generate research support for textbook writing by making temporary appointments in Lokniti. The research for these books (including the now famous cartoons!) was supported by Lokniti. I cannot imagine any other place that would allow such flexibility.

 

Lokniti today is very different from what it was 17 years ago. Its data archives have expanded vastly with survey data on all the parliamentary and assembly elections held during this period. More importantly, its data is more acceptable and frequently utilized by scholars within and outside Lokniti. It is less common today to advance empirical generalizations about Indian politics without evidence. There is a growing community of younger scholars, often trained at the Lokniti Summer School, who can make better use of the data than Lokniti founders like me can. The intellectual agenda of Lokniti has shifted from the study of elections to democratic politics in general, and now includes a study of comparative state politics. It is true that we have not yet done justice to our motto of doing ‘empirically grounded, theoretically oriented research’, for we have not been sufficiently attentive to advancing generalizations, especially some middle level generalizations. We did get overwhelmed with data collection at the cost of analysis and writing. And surely, our data analysis could do with much greater sophistication. At the same time, Lokniti, along with other programmes and initiatives, may have helped the Centre to make the transition from a difficult situation to where it is today.

 

The Centre I work in today is very different from the CSDS I entered twenty years ago. It is no longer a close knit family of thought, though there is still a family resemblance in what various members of the faculty think and write. There is considerable intellectual and political diversity today, much more than ever before. The first generation was vary of ideologies and Marxism was a taboo. Now the faculty has scholars who draw upon, among others, the Marxist, democratic-socialist, subalternist and Ambedkar-Phule traditions. The faculty today draws on a much wider circle of life-worlds than was the case with intellectuals in the past. An institution that never appointed a woman to a regular faculty position for the first three decades now has nearly one-third women on its faculty. There are colleagues who come from small towns and outside the charmed circle of upper class, upper caste Hindus that Indian intellectuals have traditionally come from.

Programmes play an important role in the collective life of the Centre. I have already spoken about Lokniti. Sarai played no less an important role in the institutional revival of the Centre. Initially there were some questions about whether the thematic and activities of Sarai would fit into the Centre. Over the years, Sarai has demonstrated its intellectual and organizational worth. Colleagues at Sarai brought in new thematics like media studies, urban studies and environmental history, while reinterpreting the earlier tradition of cultural studies. This was in conversation with a different intellectual lineage and related to newer intellectual currents in the academia. It brought in new forms of activities such as cinema, exhibitions and started innovative schemes like the Small Grant Fellowship. Above all, the Sarai programme opened the Centre to a new generation of scholars and students, making it into one of the most happening places in the intellectual landscape of the city. Sarai helped the Centre tide over its financial difficulties, as did Lokniti, but more than anything else Sarai helped the Centre halt its ageing process.

 

The Centre always had disciplinary and methodological diversity; of late the proportion of those who deploy the historical method and draw upon philosophy and literature has gone up substantially. The vibrant Indian Languages Programme has ensured that this is not an English-only place. When the Hindi journal gets launched, it will be a milestone in the history of the Centre. The older Centre did not have an institutionalized way to connect to students and younger scholars. The teaching programme has connected the Centre to the next generation of practitioners of social science and humanities and thus bridged a big vacuum in its institutional history. Faculty meetings take place regularly and major decisions are taken by committees. Financial difficulties have persisted but the accounts are in order and we are not staring at an impending financial crisis. Many young social scientists now look at the CSDS as a place they aspire to be in.

Since great institutions are built on an ongoing conversation, let me end this happy story by listing some concerns that I have raised with my colleagues. Intellectual diversification at the Centre has seen it lean more towards the humanities end of the social sciences than before. There are good reasons and global parallels for this shift. At the same time, I am concerned about the extent to which this shift is mandated by the changes in our social and political reality. In particular, I worry about the marginalization of the study of ‘mainstream’ politics, once a mainstay of the Centre, to a point where it might become sub-critical. The Centre maintained a careful balance between the academic and the intellectual. Of late, the balance has shifted more towards the academic, understood in the narrow sense of the term. I worry about the weakening of the Centre’s linkages with the world of social movements and political action as compared to the past.

Finally, the Centre maintained its distinct position in the world of ideas, not just because it refused to follow the global academic establishment, but also because it refused to follow the dominant ways of rebelling against the establishment. Although the spirit of ‘swaraj in ideas’ continues to inform the work of many colleagues, I wonder sometimes if we are taking sufficient precautions to guard against templates of protest that travel from North America. I have asked these questions of my colleagues. Their answers assure me that I am not the only one thinking about these questions, that there are better and subtler ways of answering these questions than those that come to my mind. Yet, this is a conversation that must go on, for great institutions like the CSDS are but an institutional expression of such conversations.