Students on a Floating Rock 009: Decolonization, Oppression, and the Geopolitics of India

On today’s episode we have Dr. Ajay Parasram, Associate Professor of International Development Studies and History at Dalhousie University, joining our guest hosts Chelsea Klassen, CHASI lead researcher, and Navjot Kaur, CHASI research assistant. He joined us to talk about how Indian politics intersect with themes in his primary work, the impact of protest movements, and the future of development in India.

UFV’s School of Social Justice and Global Stewardship/GDS program welcomed Dr. Parasram in February 2026 for his lecture, “​​Another ‘Walt’ Is Possible: Pluriversal Sovereignty and Decolonial Development” and we had the pleasure of hosting him for this podcast recording during his time at UFV.

Students on a Floating Rock is available to stream on your favourite podcast services — including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music/Audible, and more.

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TRANSCRIPT

Students on a Floating Rock voice-over 0:00
From UFV’s changemaking hub, this is Students on a Floating Rock, a student-run podcast dedicated to—

Regan Smith 0:07
—um, I actually think I can take it from here.

Students on a Floating Rock voice-over 0:10
Umm, okay.

Regan Smith 0:11
So if I had to describe it, then it’s basically engaging with changemakers to learn about the skills and mindsets needed to navigate these horrific times on this floating rock, also known as Earth.

Chelsea Klassen 0:25
Okay. My name is Chelsea Klassen, and I’m the lead researcher at CHASI. So I’m joined today by Dr. Ajay Parasram, who is the Associate Professor of International Development Studies, History and Political Sciences at Dalhousie University. He is a multi generational, transnational byproduct of British colonialism. His background connects South Asia, the Caribbean and North America, Mi’kma’ki. And he teaches at Dalhousie University in the departments of International Development Studies, History, and is cross appointed in Political Science. He has a PhD in Political Science with specializations in International Relations, Comparative Politics and Political Economy for from Carleton University.

Chelsea Klassen 1:08
And we’re really lucky today to be joined by our research assistant from CHASI, Navjot Kaur, and so I’m going to hand it over to Navjot, who’s going to be asking Dr. Parasram some of our questions for today.

Navjot Kaur 1:23
Thank you so much for handing over this to me. And welcome to Dr. Parasram. I loved your talk on the day you were speaking in the hall. And so my first question, and I remember we had a conversation about India and politics after our program review, my question is like, how does your work intersect with the politics in India?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 1:51
Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for the invitation and for the question. I should start by prefacing that the majority of my work is really about 19th century Sri Lanka. So while I’m a passionate observer of you know, all of South Asia, that’s really where my main expertise lays. But I have also done some work, particularly with my colleague, Professor Nissim Mannathukkaren, on the relationship between caste supremacy in India and white supremacy in Canada, and kind of how it shares some common links.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 2:28
So you know, intersections of race and caste and gender, sexuality, these sorts of issues as they transpire in India. And then, more generally, with respects to Indian Studies, the geopolitics colonial state formation. So again, in the kind of 19th century, late colonial and early post colonial period tends to be my main area. But you know, India is one of the most important geopolitical entities in the whole planet. So everyone has to be paying relatively close attention to what’s happening there.

Navjot Kaur 2:53
As you said, India is like a geopolitically, like a really large identity in terms of international relations. So in a lot of my classes, I’ve been hearing this that India is the largest democracy in the world. What are your thoughts on that statement?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 3:24
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I’m a little fatigued of constantly hearing about India being the largest democracy every time they have an election. But it’s true. I mean, it is statistically true. But oftentimes what what I always think about is like the reason why that’s a significant statement is really about how the borders of India exist today, because that gives us the kind of population. And of course, the bordering, the territorialization of the Indian state, is anything but, you know, a complete project, I would say. There’s so many fissures around the various borders and you know, the modern borders mirror very closely, just the last empire that happened to rule in the area and the conditions that led to partition are kind of all omnipresent, the various partitions, you know, at least the three, and then maybe we’ll be seeing further ones.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 4:16
So to me, I always think about, yes, it’s a big democracy, but maybe sometimes we overstate the inherent value of what democracy is. And I know that’s a kind of potentially loaded statement, but that’s not a reflection necessarily about India, but rather a reflection of the way that we look at democracy as being something that’s measured and contoured just by the act of casting a ballot, the actual lived experience of democracy requires a level of active citizenry that oftentimes gets punished by states when when citizens act democratically in a way that doesn’t jive with them. And I think that is as true in India as it is in the United States, or in Canada, where we see basically the decay of democratic institutions, certainly in the United States. But you know, that’s a subject for another time.

Navjot Kaur 5:12
As you mentioned about the caste and currently, India is facing a wave of casteism again, and like has moved away from the origins of the constitution of like. Indian constitution is written by someone from from the lowest caste of Hinduism, Dr. Ambedkar. So like, What’s your thoughts on that? Like how, like, that wave is suddenly again coming up and like, how, in the independence era of India, it was such an issue, and like how he emerged from that casteism and written the Constitution of India.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 5:51
I think the story, Dr. Ambedkar’s story, is such a powerful story of a person who comes, you know, from the most marginalized elements of society, and how, in spite of all of that oppression, and when you read the Annihilation of Caste, you can’t help but feel the rage when he describes the, you know, how dalit children were made, to if they were lucky enough to have water at school, you know, or how it would be poured from from a height, so that the upper caste people wouldn’t be sullied by physical touch and presence.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 6:27
It’s really it’s a thing that is in many ways unthinkable to people who are not already familiar with caste. So to come from that, I think one of the things that’s very powerful to me about Ambedkar’s story is how he demonstrates that that people have agency in spite of everything, and he was able to actually use and engage with a particular kind of British colonial modernity in order to twist things around and force space for the dalit community to get special accommodations.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 7:01
And honestly, like many of the so called heroes of Indian independence, like MK Gandhi, worked diligently to prevent him from accomplishing this, right? And this is something that we really don’t hear about much in the West, where we get this kind of simple story about Gandhi and hunger strikes and this and that. But the reality is, Gandhi worked hard to try to, even went on a on a fast unto death, to prevent special accommodations for dalits in the Constitution in the pre colonial ages.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 7:34
So again, you know, I’m not suggesting throw anything out of the history, but history is really important for understanding context. So when it is that Ambedkar helped to create the conditions, in spite of all of that for special accommodation, I think that’s a that’s a very sizable contribution. It really set India up constitutionally in a very good way. You know, one can change a law, but it takes significantly more effort to change the actual ingrained, endogamous kind of culture associated with the broader facilities.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 8:06
And we’ve seen this, I think, in some respects, through the history of caste, because even whole religions that were ostensibly created in part to reject caste has not been able to free themselves from caste. And caste replicates. And even in you know, whether we’re talking about Sikhism or Islam, universalist religions that are supposed to embrace people in their entirety as a reflection of the divine, and it’s just not there. I mean, and in Ambedkar’s story, we see this, right? He even considers a whole bunch of different religious faith traditions before eventually leading a mass conversion to Buddhism, which, anybody who pays attention to those 20th century knows that Buddhism is also not free from from all of this.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 8:51
So we see this constant process of revision, you know, in this bhakti tradition that goes all the way back to antiquity, of constant efforts to reform, but kind of always failing to accomplish true liberation, which would be, you know, full dalit agency and full inclusion. And this is why, I think, by the time to get back to your question, you know this, I don’t know if we can call it a resurgence or just a strengthening of kind of dalit persecution in the last 15 years or so is so pernicious because it is, on the one hand, you have like the rise of the BJP, which has historically sought to create a Hindu agenda, and a particular Hindu nationalist framing of rhe Indian Polity that in the early days actually sought to include dalit perspectives in some very limited and always hierarchical ways to now kind of creating the context where you know, as they have consolidated their rule, it allows for the upper caste domination to come more, even more, out into the open.

Navjot Kaur 10:03
So that’s like, kind of, really my next question that leads to about this, Sonum Wangchuk, yeah, like he was leading a protest for like, multiple years happening in Ladakh, and it’s like Indian China, like India shares its border with China. They wanted to get include in the sixth schedule of Indian constitution, which, like, give them a decision making power, like, for a local government, so that they and and that place had, like, a lot of tribal people population over there living so it’s like, kind of support the schedule, support the, so that they can get the power of like decision making in terms of local government, environmental decisions and like overall social issues. And Sonum was called as anti national because he was leading that protest and like, he’s being put into the jail because he let that, like, how does that outcome impact protests as a whole in India? And what are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 11:12
Well, I think you know, the story of Sonum Wangchuk is a really important one for so many different reasons, because before he was deemed an anti national, actually, BJP really loved him, you know, in part because he he was, you know, somewhat controversially okay with the constitutional annexation of Jammu and Kashmir. And I actually don’t fully understand why or how, but, but all of that, I think, can be put aside by the fact that you know what it is that he is representing is, as I understand it, a physical and principled assertion of the right to self determination of Indigenous people.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 11:51
And I don’t think that it is an accident that you know, the people in his state, in his community, only achieved Indigenous status formally, like through protests led by his father, you know, on a hunger strike in particular, which actually kind of created, Indira Gandhi. I was reading about it before I came here. I mean, I didn’t realize Indira Gandhi came and made an actual food offering as a way to try to say, look, we will give the tribal recognition that you seek.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 12:21
And for listeners in Canada, like they might find it strange that we’re using the word tribe and that sort of thing. It’s a constitutional issue in India, scheduled tribes and and castes, and this is still the terminology that that’s used in a legal context.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 12:37
But yeah, I think that what’s significant here is that here is a here is a man that has been such a mass innovator and made huge contributions to Indian culture and to Indian education, and was really a poster boy for maybe development even, like what is certainly his, his innovative approach to democratizing education was things that that helped him to attain, kind of like respect across regions and communities, but it’s only after the fact when, when I think the Indian government basically tried to assert their dominance, to remove the democratic accountabilities that were so hard fought that that he sort of became persona non grata, and this is where they start using this term of an anti national.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 13:24
And now we can debate, I think, I wouldn’t want to get caught up in the debate about whether or not he is anti national or not. I think especially with in light of your question about democracy, you are permitted to be anti national, you know, one owes no allegiance to a country and should not like I am opposed to all countries by virtue of them being countries right, my political disposition is is much more anarchic than it is, and this comes to me by virtue of spending, you know, a lifetime studying the violence of nation states, and particularly in a region like India and Southeast Asia, more generally, there is such a strong tradition of local, autonomous self rule, you know.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 14:08
It’s not an accident that the idea of self rule and swaraj that developed in this geographical region was almost always thinking about smaller scale projects in the south of India, even in spite of the existence of other higher Imperial forces, the main point of authority was always the panchayati, the kind of local village council. This is where even emperors would have to gain approval of people before they could actually go into war and do these other things.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 14:39
So I think, like there’s the Indian state, as it is ruled by today, BJP, yesterday, Congress. It doesn’t really matter, because these parameters, these institutions, are colonially contaminated. And I don’t say this to dismiss the significance of you know, uh, legislative assemblies. We live in a world where that is dictated by these democracies. I think they’re very, very important. But what we see all over the world, and here in particular, is that in the in the places where the logic of the nation state is less hardly consolidated, there we see much greater forms of expression, of autonomy and of sovereignty exercised in different ways.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 15:27
And I think this is what Wangchuk was speaking to when he rejected the idea that you can’t just come in and rough ride over our people and our right to have a say in how we’re governed. And the Indian state had no time for that, because disobedience from the Indian state, and this is where, like, the kind of fascistic tendencies of post colonial nationalism have to be brought into the limelight, you know. And I don’t think that for many of the founders of whether it’s India, Pakistan, whatever of the countries in the 1940s and 50s, they were not foreseeing the post colonial state to become settler colonial states.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 16:06
And I think this is what we’re seeing now in India, in situations like this, is that these former colonies, rather than mastering the politics of decolonization, are instead adopting the tools of colonization, and they’re deploying it against their own people. So if you tow the line and you’re a good national, then no problems. But if you are anti national, this discursive thing of the anti national, if you dare to assert your sovereignty, then you’re an enemy of the state and you have no rights.

Navjot Kaur 16:39
Wow, I loved your view on the whole anti national subject, and how you view the world as anarchy. And like you talked about, like the future and like the history of like local government. What do you think about the future of development and like politics and the change in India?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 17:05
You know, I think if we think of development in its purest form, the concept of change is probably the purest definition development at its core, studies change. It wants to understand change. Now historically, you were at my talk the other night, so, you know, historically, it was basically neocolonialism. It wasn’t even that neo, to be honest. It was, it was straight up colonial. But that’s not the entirety of development, and especially development as it comes to us from the Third World.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 17:35
And I use the term Third World very deliberately. India was essential to helping to frame this idea of the Third World in the 1950s in particular, where it is meant to be an alternative to the modular forms of state that we received from the Soviet Union communism, which was the second world and then capitalist first world, as exemplified by the United States at the time. So Third World internationalism is a really important concept.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 18:01
So, you know, to your question about what I think about the future of development and what it means in India, I mean small scale projects are, that promote autonomy, that help ordinary people express the full extent of their political subjectivity. You know, so, for example, some of the best cases that come to mind when I teach about development in India are like women-led panchayats and that, you know, with relatively small amounts of resources, are actually able to go in and challenge patriarchy and caste oppression, but on their own terms, in ways that that makes sense in the village, you know, in the village or communities or cities where they’re based. That’s just one potential example.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 18:44
But development oftentimes gets caught up in mega development projects like building big dams or something and trying to run to modernity. And I don’t think you know, obviously, as the one of the most important economies in the world, this is just where India is going. But it’s significant to think that India also had one of the more autarkic economies until 1991 so India, you know, it had it followed a fairly socialist agenda until relatively recently. And it was only under Manmohan Singh’s reforms as finance minister back then that we really started to see India kind of embracing this different role.

Navjot Kaur 19:25
As you mentioned, that the change and the development can come from an individual. It might be student, it might be women from any colour cast, and how your work connects to changemaking and how can like as an individual or as a student, we can engage in changemaking/development?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 19:49
Well, I think that the history of student activism, you know, in the Global South, but also elsewhere, gives us all the inspiration we need to talk about this sort of thing, you know, I was struck, always struck by, like, student uprisings, in then Burma, you know, or maybe not yet Burma, we were talking 1930s you know, these were situations of where the freedom fighters, in the context of, you know, impending Japanese and British imperialism, were able to carve out and articulate a movement for independence that was very, very significant. And even they then would oppose their own government too, which I think is another necessary aspect of freedom seeking people. And there’s really, you know, I forget that I don’t have the specifics in front of me now, but you know, some of the early student-led protests were met with such violent condemnation by the post colonial state.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 20:50
It’s comprised of some people who used to be student activists in this time, you know, and you know you had students like writing messages, political messages in blood as they died with their fingers on the wall. These are the things that young people and students have been historically willing to do, not just here, but, you know, in all kinds of other places, youth movements help to bring down and topple empires. You know, whether we’re talking about the formal engagement in military battle or different kinds of, like activism that happens, you know, I think about, like, the big one that we think about now is what happened in Bangladesh, you know, or that literally changed a regime that no one thought could ever be moved, that hadn’t been moved since independence in ’71.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 21:39
So students, it’s more than individual, individual agency like the essence is about, how do you fight injustice? And one of the things that students are able to bring that oftentimes adults, or older people anyway, have forgotten, is the idea that life is worth fighting for and quality of life is worth fighting for. And maybe it’s because people, as they get older, they get more feeble, or maybe they just get more encumbered with their material possessions. But one of the characteristics of being a young person is not having too many material encumbrance.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 22:17
So you know, whatever the reason you know, commitment to, you know, Bhagat Singh is another prime example of this. I think it’s quite important. So Bhagat Singh, for the listeners who are unfamiliar, was one of the Indian revolutionary leaders from the Punjab region in India, famously killed by the British along with some other comrades at the young age of 23, years old, but one of the last things that he did before he died was he wrote to the Punjabi Students Association, and he tried to remind them that it was their obligation for a fight for revolution, and that this was in many ways a student issue, because when you go to university, whether you’re in university or not, or you’re young person, what you’re fighting for is the integrity of the world, you know. And I think that in South Asia, there is a strong tradition of this, even at like [Jawaharlal Nehru University] and other places now, like the way in which students are themselves, sometimes considered to be anti nationals, needs to be taken seriously. And there’s such a, I remember last time I was on the JNU campus just being struck by, like, the beautiful artwork and, like, you know, political messaging that happens there. I always tell my students here in Canada, actually, if you guys think you know student activism, you have to go to Asia and see what, what students are up to down there. Yeah.

Chelsea Klassen 23:41
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Ajay Parasram for joining us today. We really appreciated this important talk. And you know, for me, learning more about India and politics, and I really appreciate it, you know, fighting for the integrity of our future, which is so, so critically important for you know, our students to hear and for all of us to hear so thank you so much for your time. Do you have any last words for us today?

Dr. Ajay Parasram 24:09
Jai Bhim.

Chelsea Klassen 24:12
Thank you.

Dr. Ajay Parasram 24:13
Thank you so much.