Dr. Christophe Jaffrelot is the Research Director at CNRS and teaches South Asian Politics and History at Sciences Po (Paris), Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute (London) and Global Scholar at Princeton University. He has been visiting professor at Columbia University, Yale University and Johns Hopkins University. Arguably one of the world’s most respected writers on Indian society and politics, his publications include The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, and Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste. His latest book is The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience. He has also co-edited with Laurent Gayer, Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalization.

Dr. Jaffrelot will be conducting the talk through the context of his recent book – “The Pakistan Padadox”. The book essentially maps out the creation of the Pakistani state by the elite Urdu-speaking Muslims through its history of external and internal conflicts that range from struggles with its neighbors to organized separatist movements.

He further details the authoritarian rule of the military establishment and the fragility of the rule of law as evidenced through the country’s volatile political history leading up to its present state.

A brief description of the book from its Amazon page is as follows:
The idea of Pakistan stands riddled with tensions. Initiated by a small group of elite Urdu-speaking Muslims who envisioned a unified Islamic state, today Pakistan suffers the divisive forces of various separatist movements and religious fundamentalism. A small entrenched elite continue to dominate the country’s corridors of power, and democratic forces and legal institutions remain weak. But despite these seemingly insurmountable problems, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan continues to endure. Pakistan Paradox is the definitive history of democracy in Pakistan, and its survival despite ethnic strife, Islamism and deepseated elitism. This edition focuses on three kinds of tensions that are as old as Pakistan itself. The tension between the unitary definition of the nation inherited from Jinnah and centrifugal ethnic forces; between civilians and army officers who are not always in favour of or against democracy; and between the Islamists and those who define Islam only as a cultural identity marker.

The event is a part of The Dean’s Lecture Series at Habib University and is being curated by Dr. Nauman Naqvi – Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities. Dr. Naqvi’s thought and work ranging across anthropology, history, literature and philosophy, is centrally concerned with retrieving the universal from vernacular experience and forms of knowledge, a dimension of universality that has been shackled and buried under colonialism and modernity.

At Habib University, Dr. Naqvi is committed to the institutionalization of a core curriculum program that will combine the histories of both regional and Western humanities and social thought to produce the most strenuous universalism in the students of Habib. He is also involved in the production of state-of-the-art curricula for Habib University’s programs in Social Development and Policy, and Communication Studies and Design, that respond to the local and regional inheritance, practice and realities, and that anticipate the emerging horizon and landscape of these fields.
Habib University is committed to promoting research and discourse on the critical challenges facing Pakistan, as well as to offering opportunities for global exposure to students, scholars and the public from all over Pakistan.