This lecture tries to unpack the idea of political consensus in the Indian context. A  ‘political consensus’ may be conceptualized as a tacit, unwritten, and implied arrangement that is deliberately worked out by competing political actors and groups to facilitate the smooth functioning of the state in a democratic set up.  Discussing a few crucial moments of Indian democracy, this lecture highlights the changing nature of political discourse in post-2010 India. This exploration, it is argued, might help us to make sense of the ways in which a specific set of ideas--nation, nationalism and the role of the state--are given certain acceptable interpretations, especially in the realm of electoral politics.

This talk will be moderated by Prof Bishnu N Mohapatra, Professor of Politics, SIAS, Krea University. 

Hilal Ahmed is Professor at CSDS, New Delhi. He works on political Islam, Indian democracy, and politics of symbols in South Asia. He is associated with the Lokniti programme of the CSDS. He is the author of Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation (Routledge 2014) A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin, 2024), Allah Naam ki Siyasat (Setu Prakashan, 2023), Siyasi Muslims: A story of Political Islam in India (Penguin-Random House, New Delhi, 2019) and Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in contemporary India (With Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, Bloomsbury, 2019) He has edited Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (With Peter R deSouza, and Sanjeer Alam, Routledge, 2021), Rethinking Muslim Personal Law: Issues, Debates and Reforms (with R. K. Mishra & K. N. Jehangir, Routledge, 2022) and Sudipta Kaviraj: A Reader (Hindi, Setu Prakashan, 2023). Ahmed was one of the Principal Investigators (with Sanjeer Alam and Nazima Parveen) for the project Rethinking Affirmative Action for Muslims in Contemporary India (USIPI-CDPP 2025).