Talk by Aniket Aga (Geography, University at Buffalo, SUNY)

Environmental regulation was among the chief reasons for the secular discrediting of the second Congress-led federal government under Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in India (2009–14) and the electoral victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This talk closely examines the politics of regulation in the environment ministry during the controversial tenure of the Congress-party leader Jayanthi Natarajan. By specifically examining negotiations around expert-panel reports, I argue that such reports serve both as policy manoeuvres and as a key form of knowledge in and for democracy. Because expert panels' reports embody state-sanctioned knowledge, they are critical vehicles for both the making and unmaking of democratic pressures, on the one hand, and constitutive of state topology, on the other. Ultimately, I suggest that diagnosing heterogeneous forms of knowledge and their negotiation is critical to advancing our conceptions of states and democracies, and key to analyzing how and when democracies collapse into authoritarian regimes.

Aniket Aga teaches at the Department of Geography, SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). His research lies at the intersection of science and technology, development, and democracy. He collaborates with journalists and activists and has published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Article14, among others.