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Sardar Patel Dissertation Award for Yale professor
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 25 May 2011, 00:13 IST |
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Bangalore: A Yale University professor, Tariq Thachil has been honored with the 2010 Sardar Patel Dissertation Award during an event on May 14 at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Covel Commons. A grant of $10,000 has been bestowed upon him for his extensive work on the function of social services provided to lower caste voters during elections.
The award was presented by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, chairman of the Sardar Patel Dissertation Award Evaluation Committee and director of the Center for India and South Asia. The event was structured by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia and The Friends of Sardar Patel Award Association.
The Sardar Patel Award was instituted in the year 2000, and grants $10,000 annually to dissertation authors by the Friends of the Sardar Patel Association. The award is administered by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia.
Tariq Thachil is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, a Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and a Faculty Affiliate of the South Asian Studies Council. His research focuses on political parties and party-voter linkages, social movements, ethnic politics, and South Asian politics. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the Government Department at Cornell University, New York in 2009.
His dissertation examines how religious nationalists in India use social services to expand their electoral base among the poor, and was awarded the 2010 Gabriel A. Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics by the American Political Science Association.
His research, which has appeared in Comparative Politics and Contemporary South Asia, has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Lafeber Collaborative Research initiative, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell. He was awarded the Walter Lafeber Prize for teaching excellence at Cornell, and has taught seminars on social movements in India, and development in South Asia at Yale.
Thachil had performed broad field research and surveyed more than 5,000 lower caste voters across 17 major states. He indicated that he conducted extensive interviews with BJP and rival politicians, as well as observed 'the grassroots activities of Hindu nationalists' over a 13-month period. He maintained that his studies have revealed that a service strategy generated pragmatic voting for the BJP, but not ideological support for the Hindutva.