George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government Presents 

Modi's India: A Wounded Civilization

with Siddharth Varadarajan (Founding Editor, The Wire)

Moderated by Bassam Haddad

Cosponsored by the Arab Studies Institute and Mercatus Center 

Narendra Modi has been India's Prime Minister for eight years and in this period, almost every metric of consequence for its people – political, social, economic and cultural – has worsened, often sharply. What happens next?

Featuring

Siddharth Varadarajan is Founding-Editor of The Wire. Started in 2015, The Wire is India's largest independent digital news and analysis platform with a reputation for investigative reporting and incisive coverage of events in India. In 2021, The Wire received the Free Media Pioneer Award from the International Press Institute in Vienna. Varadarajan was earlier Editor of The Hindu, a newspaper that has the second-highest circulation among India's English dailies. As a reporter, he has covered nuclear issues, NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia as well as the conflict in Kashmir and the destruction of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage by the Taliban. He is the author of the book, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (Penguin, 2002) and co-author of Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2013). Varadarajan has taught at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.

Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding the Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).