Rajeev Bhargava has been at the Centre since 2005 and is currently the director of its newly launched Institute of Indian Thought. He was the Director of the centre from 2007-2014. He has been a Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (1980-2005), and between 2001 and 2005 was Head, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. Bhargava did his BA in economics from the University of Delhi, and MPhil and DPhil from Oxford University. He has also been a Fellow at Harvard University, University of Bristol, Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, and the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He has also been Distinguished Resident Scholar, Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University, and Asia Chair at Sciences Po, Paris. He is Honorary Fellow, Balliol College, Oxford and currently a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of social justice, ACU, Sydney.

Bhargava’s publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010) and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010). His edited works are Secularism and Its Critics (1998) and Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (2008). Bhargava is on the advisory board of several national and international institutions, and was a consultant for the UNDP report on cultural liberty.