Feyaad Allie won the award for a dissertation entitled "Power, Exclusion, and Identity: The Politics of Muslim Marginalization in India," completed at the Stanford University.

CISA is delighted to announce Feyaad Allie as the winner for the 2023 Sardar Patel Award (which honors the best doctoral dissertation on any aspect of modern India in any U.S. University or academic institution) for his dissertation, ‘Power, Exclusion, and Identity: The Politics of Muslim Marginalization in India’, done at the Stanford University. Please join us in congratulating him for this exciting and inspiring work! He will share his work at an award ceremony at UCLA on Saturday, October 12, at 4pm in Royce 306.

Please RSVP here

Program: 
4:00pm: Welcome, coffee and snacks
4:30pm: Winner talk and Q&A
5:45pm: End

Abstract:

What are the causes and consequences of the political exclusion of marginalized groups? This dissertation studies this question by focusing on the over 200 million Muslims in India, the world’s largest democracy. Over the past several decades, India has progressed in the political inclusion of several marginalized groups, including Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and women. However, Muslims have experienced no measurable progress and their political and socio-economic condition has deteriorated. Indian Muslims further represent an understudied type of marginalized group: those who do not have institutional protections to help them gain political power. This dissertation studies the origins of the political exclusion of Indian Muslims, when they can break out of this exclusion, and why—even when they break out—they cannot sustain political power. I propose a framework to understand the causes and consequences of Muslim representation that considers how changes among elites and voters from the dominant and marginalized groups can help account for the contours of Muslim political representation in India. First, I theorize that structural factors, political incentives, and party characteristics help explain where, when, and through which parties Muslims can gain representation. Second, I challenge the conventional wisdom that power begets power by arguing that when a Muslim comes to power, it can lead to a representation trap where they have a lower likelihood of subsequently winning. I argue that this process is driven by uniting Hindus and dividing Muslims. I test the argument using descriptive and causal analysis of election data across India, an original in-person survey of nearly 5000 Hindu and Muslim voters that contribute to natural and survey experiments, and 150 elite and voter interviews during a combined eight months of in-depth fieldwork. By providing a comprehensive story of Muslim marginalization in India, this project contributes to our understanding of political representation, identity politics, and democracy. 

Bio:

Feyaad Allie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research centers on democracy, identity, and intergroup relations with a regional focus on South Asia, primarily India. Feyaad studies the challenges to creating an inclusive political system in multi-ethnic societies. He is working on a book project based on his doctoral dissertation that examines the causes and consequences of political representation in India, with Indian Muslims as the primary case. In other work, he focuses on the drivers of majority-minority tensions and political party responses to majoritarianism. Feyaad’s research is mixed-methods in nature, drawing on administrative data, original surveys, and in-depth elite and voter interviews during fieldwork. He has received several awards for his research, including the Gabriel A. Almond Award (2024) for the best dissertation in comparative politics and the Sage Best Paper Award (2023) from the APSA Comparative Politics section. Feyaad received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College.