CPR Perspectives - Interview With Neelanjan Sircar - CPR

5/6/24, 3:29 PM CPR Perspectives: Interview with Neelanjan Sircar - CPR
CPR Perspectives: Interview with Neelanjan Sircar

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October 3, 2023
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Neelanjan Sircar
October 3, 2023
https://cprindia.org/cpr-perspectives-interview-with-neelanjan-sircar/ 1/9
This month on CPR Perspectives — our flagship interview series commemorating the
Centre for Policy Research’s 50th anniversary — we bring you a conversation with
Neelanjan Sircar, a Senior Fellow at CPR, who has brought a combination of data
analysis and qualitative research to a wide range of subjects including India’s political
economy, urbanisation and climate change.
Following degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics, Sircar received a PhD in

political science from Columbia University and then carried out research at the University
of Pennsylvania’s Centre for the Advanced Study of India before making his way to CPR.
At CPR, Sircar was instrumental in setting up the Politics Initiative, which provides high-
quality research of India’s political economy from a non-partisan lens, helping us build
nuanced models of why voters make their choices and how political parties operate within
the broader system.
He is also co-editor of Colossus; The Anatomy of Delhi, a volume that seeks to unpack
the complexity of India’s national capital region, building on a survey of the city that could
serve as a model for other sampling efforts across the country. Sircar has also led CPR’s
project to evaluate the welfare delivery systems of the Andhra Pradesh government.
In this conversation with Sircar, we spoke about making the move from applied
mathematics to the policy world, what convinced him to come work in India and why the
approach that undergirds CPR’s Politics Initiative is important. We also spoke about
building frameworks and tools that other researchers can replicate, why scholars can
benefit from working with governments and why it is important to look beyond India when
considering complex research questions.
You can listen to the entire conversation as a podcast here, or read the whole transcript
now.
And if you missed our previous interviews, read our conversations with Partha
Mukhopadhyay, Navroz Dubash, Avani Kapur, K P Krishnan, Mukta Naik and D Shyam
Babu.
__
(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).
Let’s start at the very beginning and get a sense of how you made your way into
the policy world.
I very much stumbled into policy. I had a degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics. I
was working in startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was not too happy with the
business environment and there was a lot of fluctuation in the economy back then. So I
went back for postgraduate studies. At that time I only had a Math background. So I
actually learned Statistics only after I joined postgraduate study and started a PhD in
Political Science in New York at Columbia University. Initially, I was actually interested in
income inequality, mainly in Western Europe and it’s only a couple of years into my PhD
that I switched to thinking about India more seriously. And then one thing led to another. I
became interested in a certain set of policy questions and political questions, did a post-
doctoral fellowship at the University Of Pennsylvania at the Center for Advanced Study of
India (CASI), and then from there I found my way to CPR.
How did you go from looking at Maths and Economics to politics?
There was certainly always an intellectual interest. I, like many others, was interested in
economic problems. And yet so many people look at the questions purely in a technical
manner and so much of what is unsaid is that it is actually a political, policy decision. And
so starting to think a little bit about the intersection between policy decisions, economic
decisions and political realities is something that really started to make me think about
whether I should go on and study Mathematics or Economics. It’s very natural for
somebody like me who had an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Berkeley to go
on and do a PhD in Economics. But when push came to shove I didn’t think that
Economics would serve my interest. I thought Political Science would serve me better.
Did you face pushback in making that switch? Was it a straightforward choice for
you or was it something that you laboured over?
I laboured over it quite a bit. At the time of applying for my Ph.D., I was considering
programmes in Statistics, Sociology and Political Science. I was interested in a number of
social science disciplines and I was interested in what was happening in Applied Statistics
at the time and what would sort of merge the two. One of the challenges that economists
have traditionally faced and continue to face, but it’s been mitigated somewhat, is that
many of the modern developments in Applied Statistics have yet to find their way into
economics. Particularly at the time that I entered my PhD, there were exciting new tools
that were being used in the analysis of social behaviour and political behaviour that hadn’t
quite found their way into economics yet. So that made it particularly attractive to join a
PhD in Political Science.
And similarly, what made you make that switch from looking at Europe to thinking
about India?
The first couple of years in the PhD, I was doing very very abstract work. I was interested
in questions of how capitalism is changing, how economic structures are changing and I
wanted something that was a lot more relatable to the average person. At Columbia, I met
Milan Vaishnav who is well known now and was a couple of years ahead of me. Actually
he was studying Latin American politics at the time. So neither of us were engaged in
South Asia. We were both sent to work at CSDS in Delhi in 2007.
At that point, I saw a different world. I saw a number of important empirical and theoretical
questions that needed to be investigated and like Milan, I also very quickly switched my
focus to India. Today we have many Political Economy scholars focused on India, but at
that time it hadn’t quite come to the point that it has today. So there were a lot of
questions to ask. It was an exciting time and an exciting place to investigate very very
different questions.
This wasn’t a ninety-degree turn away from the Applied Mathematics that you
studied earlier. You built on those approaches as you moved towards Political
Science and towards India.
Anybody who very closely looks at my work over the last fifteen years will see a sort of
evolution. At the time of my PhD, my earliest paper was a very abstract paper on Network
Theory. The second used new ideas in statistical estimation. And my final paper was
actually what ended up becoming the most influential for me, which was thinking about
how family networks in West Bengal changed people’s political preferences in the 2011
election when Mamata Banerjee first came to power.
I was shifting from this very abstract framework to a much more grounded framework.
The idea that animated my entire thesis at the time was how ideas of personal networks
and social networks affect the ideas of politics and economics. That’s still something that
flows through a lot of my work, thinking about networks and thinking about space, but I
would like to think in a far more applied and grounded way than fifteen years ago.
Once the PhD was done, tell us about how you then eventually made your way to
India and CPR.
I had very little interest in staying in academia. I had always imagined that I would go into
the corporate world. But I knew that once you start in the corporate world, you’re very
unlikely to come back to academia. I had spoken to Devesh Kapur who at that point was
the head of CASI at the University of Pennsylvania. He said that if you’re interested in
working on India, we should see if we can do some things together. I spent two years at
CASI and it was absolutely fundamental in my shift towards studying policy and my
understanding of India. In the middle of my time at CASI, I started two projects which I
think would evolve into the things that I’m still working on today.
One was that, during my time at CASI, the 2014 election happened and Modi was elected
to power. I did a number of analyses that were statistics-based and numbers-based
around the 2014 election and those became somewhat influential in the universe of
studying elections. That created a wing of research in which we tried to understand how
the voter behaves in India.
The second project that I started at CASI was a study of urban space in general, but the
National Capital Region (NCR) in Delhi in particular. That research work would eventually
become my first book co-edited with Sanjoy Chakravorty, which is called Colossus: The
Anatomy of Delhi. It’s essentially a social study of Delhi. In many ways, my couple of
years in CASI set my agenda for the next several years.
While I was there, I became much more interested in all things India and I met with
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who at that point was the head of CPR. I’ll always remember what
he told me. I was considering what to do next and he said ‘You can go into the working
world, you can stay in the US. You probably won’t make as much money if you go to
India. But the one thing I can guarantee is that if you go and you take it seriously, your
marginal value in the Indian context is greater than it would be if you just joined the
corporate world.’ And it’s something that stuck with me. I mean those are the kinds of
things you want to hear. So then I said let me try it and in August 2015, I ended up at
CPR.
Just to expand on that a little bit for listeners to get a sense of what he was saying,
what did he mean?
The imagination of what would happen when I came is that we would be able to apply
some of the Applied Statistics questions that I had already started working on and some
of the understanding that I had of politics and policy in the Indian context. Some of the
theoretical traditions I was drawing on were quite different than what existed in India at
the time. The other thing that I became known for within CPR is that I was studying
political behaviour and voting behaviour but not from the standpoint of having a
predetermined ideological position or predisposition to one party, but more trying to
understand the structural elements of politics. That’s what would eventually become the
Politics Initiative.
Indeed, and the point being that often your impact when working in a corporate
space is much more specific whereas in India it could be more wide-ranging. Still,
is there a part of you that still wants to go see what it’s like in the corporate world?
I mean every time you look at your bank balance every one of us wonders whether we
should look at the corporate world. But other than that I am very satisfied with the choice
that I made. It was an unorthodox choice. It was not in the standard playbook that
somebody who had been studying in the West would come back to India and take up a
position in policy and political science. Of course, it had been done before. I’m certainly
not the first, but the scale of people coming back to India was very very low and there
was a very small number of us. We all knew each other. Numbers would increase as
many of these new colleges and institutions came into being.
What I have been able to be a part of, in my last eight years in India and the different
sorts of movement and different pieces of intellectual growth I’ve been a part of, certainly
would not have happened if I stayed in a corporate setting but it also wouldn’t have
happened had I stayed in the US or gone to Europe in an academic setting. The pace of
intellectual growth and the intellectual shifts over the last decade in India is extraordinary.
And unless you take part in it firsthand you don’t see what is possible here.
As you made your way to CPR, let’s look at these two strains emerging out of your
projects at CASI separately. Tell us about the work on politics.
I came to India in August 2015. The Bihar state election was just around the corner. I had
a few months to sort of figure out what I wanted to do and so just a month later, in late
September I went to Bihar with my colleague who was at CPR at the time, Ashish Ranjan.
And we were working alongside Bhanu Joshi who was also at that time at CPR. The three
of us formed a group and despite my reputation as an applied stats researcher, my own
view is that you really can’t study politics in India and you really cannot study the voter
unless the vast majority of your work is qualitative in nature. You can look at the data that
you’ll get from some survey or from election results. But you can’t make sense of it unless
you really spend a lot of time on the ground.
And so I spent about six weeks in Bihar and went to every district. I spent a fair amount of
time and developed a set of techniques. People look at our qualitative work sometimes
and the reports that have come out of the work that we’ve done and it looks like we’re just
kind of wandering around but nothing could be further from the truth. What we’re actually
doing is that we’re trying to put together data sources in the background — of previous
election results and demographics. We are trying to essentially figure out what places we
want to visit to understand how certain communities vote or how certain competitive seats
might vote. When we aggregate it together, we develop a picture of what’s happening in
the state.
The process of how it became a major initiative is also a bit of an accident. What
happened at that time is that a lot of newspapers were going through an aggressive
stretch of cuts to what they call stringers. Basically, people who are district-level and
specialised journalists, and very knowledgeable, were suddenly gone. So overnight a lot
of the newspapers lost a lot of their local knowledge. I had actually written for The Hindu
for various other things and at that time I got a call from the person who was coordinating
the elections coverage, who would eventually become the main editor of the newspaper
saying ‘would you consider as a part of your own work just writing a couple of pieces for
us because we don’t have anyone to write on Bihar?’
So we did that and having academic-oriented people writing in the newspaper turned out
to be quite popular. Having people making reference to theory and numbers turned out to
be quite popular. And by sheer dumb luck that was an election where all of the electoral
polls predicted a sweep for the BJP. And we were quite steadfast in saying that is not
what we’re seeing on the ground. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite and it turned out that
we were right and the polls were wrong. And so overnight, due to a series of historical
accidents this kind of work got a lot of notice, as well as the academic method behind it.
So, after one or two more elections of working like this, it became what is today known as
the Politics Initiative. Of course today, it’s led by Rahul Verma who’s ended up taking it
even further and doing amazing work.
You mentioned earlier that approaching political science from this non-partisan
view was a key point. Could you tell me about why it was different from what came
before?
There is a strange problem we have in the study of electoral politics in India. The most
fertile time we actually have is the period before the Emergency. A huge number of
people were writing about the ‘Congress System,’ about the various ways in which voters
make decisions, and about how caste and elections intersect. But partially because of the
kind of activism that happened around the Emergency, and partially because some of the
scholars became less interested in elections post-Emergency, we have much less of that
work now. It gets revived somewhat on television, oddly enough. Prannoy Roy and
Yogendra Yadav do extraordinary work to bring electoral analysis back into the
consciousness. I had done work with Yogendra Yadav during my PhD, and had met many
of these people before I joined CPR.
That was formative for me in thinking about where things had to go. Still, the demands of
television media would require a certain kind of masala in analysing elections. The kind of
structural elements – when do voters care about their caste? When are voters being
strategic? At what point do voters care about an economic benefit? At what point do they
care about religion? – these are dry structural questions that have fundamental impacts
on electoral outcomes. Once we got the green light to start investigating these sorts of
things and we saw that there was a genuine readership for this, we began to realise that
there was really an opportunity for what I call this unbiased nonpartisan method of
analysing elections.
Taking up the TV point. You’re often taking your work to TV and into newspapers,
whereas many academics prefer the confines of the academy. Is that a deliberate
effort you’ve made, or do you like that sort of writing?
If I’m being brutally honest, I do not like doing television and even newspapers can be
challenging just because of the timelines. I enjoy writing for newspapers, but it’s not the
way that academics typically work. But early on, I understood that these different forms of
media are themselves another form of academic communication today. There are
academics who reach out to me and want to know about voting behaviour, want to think
about political behaviour in India on the basis of having seen me on NDTV or having read
me in the Hindustan Times. Now you know I can point them to an academic paper but it is
true that if you make relatively academic arguments perhaps in a 10-second version
rather than an article version, it does have a reach even among scholars.
Had I just been writing academic papers, a very narrow set of people would have been
my constituents, my readership and I wouldn’t have to engage more broadly with other
scholarly people. That changes once you start engaging with the media and given that I
was in a nascent space, the set of people I was speaking to purely in academic terms is
actually very small and some of this cross-fertilization with journalists [was beneficial].
Many journalists are doing very very good technical work in newspapers and doing this
kind of analysis across India. Many of the young scholars who, in their PhDs, are doing
this kind of work and doing it perhaps better than I ever could have but a lot of it comes
from just the pure exposure that media gives. And I have to give credit to many of these
media outfits for their willingness to give space to people like us so that we are read by
our broader audience.
So you set up the Politics Initiative, which Rahul is now running. You continue to
do work on the subject, from writing papers like the Politics of Vishwas to looking
at other questions about how voters decide. Where does your work on Indian
elections and politics stand today? What are the questions occupying your
thinking?
I think the big prize for me always was and continues to be what I mentioned, which is
that we don’t have the kind of broad sweep analysis that we require on Indian politics
post-Emergency. It’s quite strange right? Much of what even academics cite in the post-
Emergency are one-off articles. The Politics of Vishwas might be one. Or Second
Democratic Upsurge by Yogendra Yadav might be another. But these are just articles.
There are no book length treatments. There’s no go-to text for a postgraduate seminar on
the kind of political development that you have in the 1980s and onwards. What we do
have is very good investigations of the rise of Hindu nationalism, Mandal politics, or what
happened to the Congress Party. But those are all separate lines of inquiry and what I
always try to sort of encourage people to think more about is that whatever your line of
inquiry was, many of these parties that came up in the 1990s look very similar. They have
a charismatic leader at the top, they are often family-controlled. It might be a caste-based
party. It might be a Congress breakaway. But they all look very similar and we had a huge
proliferation of these parties in the 1990s.
So, we know that there are certain structural elements that are looking quite common
from the 1990s onward in Indian politics. Some parts of it we’re starting to get bothered
by. We also have seen a rise of criminality, we’ve seen a rise of cash in politics. What is
driving all of these things? Is there a common story? Is there a common way in which we
can characterise what was happening in the Indian political system in the 1990s and
perhaps the changes have taken place today? These are the questions that continue to
animate my work and I think that where my thinking has gone is to take some of these
earlier investigations of the Indian voter along with the more abstract notions of religion
and politics, the Modi Voter, etc., and try to actually now build a larger theory of what are
the kinds of parties that are formed in the Indian system: How much inter-party
democracy do they have? How do they appeal to the voter? And how might we
characterise the overall equilibrium in the Indian party system? This is what animates me
today.
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5/6/24, 3:29 PM CPR Perspectives: Interview with Neelanjan Sircar - CPR

CPR Perspectives: Interview with Neelanjan Sircar

Following degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics, Sircar received a PhD in

(This transcript has been edited for length and clarity).

How did you go from looking at Maths and Economics to politics?

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