Shikha dalmia biography of martin henderson

Shikha Dalmia, a writer and journalist, is the founder of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and of The UnPopulist , an editorial partner of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. And I have a sense of your backstory, but I've never really had you tell it to me.

So you really were a member of the libertarian movement for a long time. You were a journalist at Reason Magazine and lived in that kind of libertarian world. What drew you to libertarianism originally? Shikha Dalmia : I grew up in India, went to college there, and actually worked there as a reporter when Indira Gandhi was assassinated.

India at that time was pre-liberalization, so it was very much in the thrall of a sort of Fabian socialist framework of central planning.

Shikha dalmia biography of martin henderson: Yascha Mounk and Shikha Dalmia discuss

Even though Indira Gandhi had made it her campaign pledge over and over again to eradicate poverty, it was nowhere close to doing that. And India was also a very traditional society at that time. Those two things, the traditionalism of India and the socialism of India, didn't quite work with my rebelliousness.