SLR Interviews Ankita Pandey | Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India

SLR editors Arya Harishankar and Hiranya Gupta sat down with Dr. Ankita Pandey to discuss her new book ‘Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India’ (Cambridge University Press 2026). Through the interview, they discuss several aspects of the book, including its origins, its theorisation of allyship as a form of politics in its own right, the politics of amplification, the role of memory and documentation, fact-finding work as a form of "left legalism", contemporary activism, and the question of positionality. Dr. Ankita Pandey is an Associate Professor, Political Science, at O.P. Jindal Global University, and a Research Associate at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. More details about the book can be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... The interview has been transcribed and published on the SLR Forum. Part I: https://forum.nls.ac.in/slr-forum-blo... Part II: https://forum.nls.ac.in/slr-forum-blo...