Daily Briefing Current Affairs

Why Public Intellectuals Matter in Present-Day India

The essay, published as India continues to debate accountability in the conduct of national examinations and the health of its democratic institutions, revives the idea of the "public intellectual" - a term with roots in the 1890s Dreyfus Affair in France - to ask why India's own intellectual class has grown quiet at a moment the author considers unusually consequential and whether the vacuum they have left is being filled…