The Moral Ambiguity of Religion in the Constitution

About the Speaker

Professor Rajeev Bhargava is one of India’s foremost political theorists and an internationally respected scholar of secularism, constitutionalism, and political theory. Born in 1954, he was educated in Delhi and at the University of Oxford. He is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, and is the former Director of both CSDS (2007–2014) and its Parekh Institute of Indian Thought. Professor Bhargava has taught at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has held visiting professorships and fellowships at leading institutions across the world, including Harvard University, the University of Bristol, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He has also served as a Distinguished Resident Scholar at Columbia University, Asia Chair at Sciences Po, and Berggruen Fellow at Stanford, Tsinghua, and New York University. Most recently, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leipzig and is currently an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. His scholarship on individualism, religion, and secular democracy is widely acclaimed and his major works include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010). He has also edited several influential volumes, including Secularism and Its Critics, Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, and Politics, Ethics and the Self: Re-reading Hind Swaraj. In recent years, he has also become a prominent public intellectual through his regular contributions to The Hindu.