Saharanwas is a village in the Rewari district of Haryana, in the dry, agrarian belt of the state’s south. When Yogendra Yadav was born there on 5 September 1963, the district was still part of Punjab; Haryana would be carved out three years later. The household he was born into was unusual for a village of that period in one specific respect: it was a family of teachers. His grandfather taught, and his father was a professor of economics. An academic vocation was therefore not something Yadav discovered in spite of his origins but something he inherited from them.

One detail of his early life has become well known because he has spoken of it himself. He was given the name Salim at birth, and it was changed to Yogendra when he was around five, after the name drew mockery at school. It is a small biographical fact that has often been read as emblematic of the questions of identity and belonging that later ran through his professional work.

The making of a political scientist

Yadav took his bachelor’s degree from the University of Rajasthan, a master’s from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and an MPhil from Panjab University in Chandigarh. He began teaching political science at Panjab University in 1985 and remained there until 1993. From the mid-1990s his base shifted to Delhi and to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, the research institution with which his name became most closely linked. He was a Senior Fellow there from 2004 to 2016.

His most consequential institutional work was the building of Lokniti. He was founder-convenor of the Lokniti network from 1995 to 2002 and founder-director, from 1997 to 2003, of the CSDS research programme on comparative democracy that grew out of it. Lokniti assembled a nationwide community of academics capable of running large, methodologically consistent surveys of Indian voters — the National Election Studies. Before this, generalisations about how Indians voted often rested on impression, anecdote and the reporting of a handful of constituencies. Lokniti replaced that with data gathered systematically across states, languages and social groups, and it made the resulting datasets available to other scholars. The effect on the discipline was substantial: a generation of research on caste, class, religion, gender and regional variation in Indian voting behaviour rests on that foundation.

Reading the Indian voter

From 1996 Yadav also became a familiar presence on Indian television during election seasons, first on Doordarshan and later on private news channels, explaining survey findings and forecasting outcomes. The role made him one of the country’s best-known psephologists, a word that entered common Indian usage largely through this period of televised election coverage. His approach on air was recognisably that of a researcher: he distinguished between what the data showed and what it did not, discussed sampling and margins of error in plain Hindi and English, and was willing to say when a forecast had been wrong.

Alongside the polling he developed an analytical account of Indian democracy after the late 1980s, arguing that the period was marked by a widening of participation, in which turnout and political assertion rose fastest among groups previously at the margins of the system. That framework — often summarised in the literature as a second democratic upsurge — became a standard reference point in scholarship on Indian politics, discussed and contested by other researchers in the ordinary way of academic argument.

Books, journals and textbooks

Yadav has written and edited widely. His essays on Indian democracy were collected in Making Sense of Indian Democracy (2020). He co-edited the comparative volume State of Democracy in South Asia (2008), Electoral Politics in Indian States (2009), and worked with Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz on Crafting State-Nations, a comparative study of how multinational societies hold together. He has served on the editorial board of the European Journal of Political Research and has edited Hindi-language publications and anthologies, part of a sustained effort to conduct serious political argument in Indian languages rather than only in English.

Perhaps his widest-reaching contribution to public understanding came through school education. He was chief advisor for the NCERT Democratic Politics textbooks introduced in 2006, part of a curriculum reform that moved civics teaching away from the memorisation of constitutional articles towards the study of how democratic institutions actually behave. Those books have been read by millions of Indian schoolchildren.

Public roles

Yadav has held several public appointments and has been active in civic life. He was a member of the National Advisory Council working group on implementation of the Right to Education Act in 2010, and a member of the University Grants Commission from July 2011 to September 2013. He joined the Aam Aadmi Party in 2012, served on its national executive, contested the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Gurgaon without success, and left the party in 2015. He subsequently co-founded Swaraj Abhiyan and, in 2016, the political organisation Swaraj India, of which he became founding national president. He founded the Jai Kisan Andolan, which works on farmers’ issues including indebtedness, crop prices and compensation, and has been associated with farmers’ movement coordination and with the civic initiative Bharat Jodo Abhiyan.

His academic work has been recognised with the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Development Studies in 2008 and, in 2009, the Global South Solidarity Award of the International Political Science Association.

An assessment

Yadav’s public activity has been the subject of vigorous political disagreement, as is inevitable for anyone who moves from the academy into contested public life. His scholarly contribution, however, is separable from that argument and is broadly acknowledged. He helped build the survey infrastructure through which India studies its own elections; he made technical findings intelligible to a mass audience without dumbing them down; he insisted that political science in India be written in Indian languages as well as English; and he shaped how a generation of schoolchildren first encountered the idea of democracy. From a teacher’s household in Saharanwas came a scholar who made the Indian voter a subject of serious, systematic study.