About this webinar

Most global indices rank democracies on a single scale, and India increasingly finds itself labelled an "electoral autocracy" by Western scholars. But what if the instrument is as worthy of examination as the subject it measures?

In this webinar, sociologist Prof. Salvatore Babones (University of Sydney) presents the argument at the heart of his 2025 book Dharma Democracy. Rather than accepting headline rankings at face value, Babones drills down indicator by indicator to reconstruct how India built and sustained a functioning democracy - the first in the developing world - under conditions that most theories predicted would fail.

His thesis is deliberately challenging: that India's democratic stability is rooted not in spite of its cultural and civilisational fabric, but in part because of it. He examines the role of Indian civil society, revisits the birth of Indian democracy in 1947, and engages with thinkers from Swami Vivekananda to the Bhagavad Gita alongside contemporary quantitative data.

This is not a settled conclusion but a serious, evidence-based provocation. We invite participants to engage critically — to test the argument, raise objections, and explore what India's experience means for how we think about democracy, culture, and political community more broadly.

Why Udaya is hosting this

At Udaya, we believe dharmic thought has something substantive to offer contemporary debates on leadership, society, and governance. This conversation sits squarely at that intersection: a rigorous, comparative examination of how cultural foundations and democratic institutions interact — explored honestly, with room for disagreement.

About the speaker

Salvatore Babones is a quantitative comparative sociologist at the University of Sydney and Executive Director of the Indian Century Roundtable. His research focuses on the political sociology of democracy, and he is the author or editor of fourteen books. Dharma Democracy (Connor Court, 2025) is his most recent work.

Format

A presentation by Prof. Babones followed by an open Q&A and discussion.