Professor Rochana Bajpai (2024)

Book time with Rochana Bajpai: Office hours

Rochana Bajpai is Professor of Politics. Her research interests are in liberalism and minority rights, constitution-making, political representation, comparative political thought, political ideologies, and modern Indian politics. She is currently Principal Investigator of Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Rochana’s book Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (Oxford University Press, 2011, paperback 2016, sixth impression), offered the first systematic analysis of the Indian Constituent Assembly debates (1946-49) on group differentiated rights, focussing on religious and caste minorities. Her publications address questions of constitution-making and pluralism, social justice and affirmative action, descriptive representation and democracy, democratic authoritarianism, liberal ideas in post-colonial contexts, and inter-disciplinary methods in political theory. Rochana is a founding member of the SOAS Centre for Comparative Political Thought and a co-convenor of the London Comparative Political Thought Research Group.

Rochana holds a B.A. in Political Science from the M.S. University of Baroda, India; an M.A. in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; an M.Phil and a D.Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford. She joined SOAS in 2006. Rochana has held fellowships at Balliol College, St. Anne’s College and Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and at Chatham House (OSUN Senior Research Fellowship