A CONVERSATION BETWEEN RAHUL VERMA AND RICHA BANSAL
Listen to the full CPR podcast, ThoughtSpace (above) featuring Fellow, Rahul Verma, where he discusses his new book, ‘Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India’, co-authored with Pradeep K Chhibber.

The book challenges the contemporary and common view that party politics in India is bereft of ideology and develops a new approach to how ideology is defined in a multi-ethnic country like India. Using survey data from the Indian National Election Studies (NES) and other studies along with evidence drawn from the Constituent Assembly debates, it shows that Indian electoral politics, as represented by political parties, their members, and their voters, is in fact marked by deep ideological cleavages, with parties, party members, and voters taking distinct positions on statism and recognition.

The link to the book can be found here.

A review of the book by C P Bhambhri in the Business Standard can be accessed here.

Rahul Verma discussed findings of his book in an episode of The Seen and the Unseen podcast with Amit Varma. Listen to the podcast here.

About the authors

Rahul Verma is Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Delhi. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and his doctoral dissertation examines the historical roots of elite persistence in contemporary Indian politics. His research interest includes voting behavior, party politics, political violence, and media. He is a regular columnist for various news platforms and has published papers in Asian Survey, Economic and Political Weekly, and Studies in Indian Politics.

Pradeep K Chhibber is Professor of Political Science and Indo-American Community Chair for India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he is currently the Director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley. He has published widely on the party politics of India, party systems, and religion and politics.