Research
I work at the intersection of politics and public policy. I ask questions about knowledge production, AI, expertise, policy making, and right-wing mobilisation in the US, UK and India. Two key questions guide my research:
How do notions of expertise shift during moments of political and technological transformation?
How does this affect the power (material, institutional, and discursive) to produce legitimate knowledge and make key decisions around democratic futures?
a. AI expertise in public administration
This project develops the concept of epistemic infrastructure to analyse what artificial intelligence does to the knowledge-making functions of the modern state. When public authorities delegate decisions to opaque computational systems, the change is not only technical: it reorganises the conditions under which administrative action can be justified, contested, and scrutinised. The state continues to act, but the evidentiary basis for that action becomes harder to surface or challenge through conventional accountability routes.
Drawing on case studies from public administration in the United Kingdom, the project explores how AI adoption produces a distinctive form of justificatory opacity - one that sits awkwardly within legal frameworks built around legible, articulable reasons. A parallel strand examines parliamentary oversight, asking whether existing scrutiny mechanisms are conceptually as well as procedurally adequate to machine-learning-led governance.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2026. Epistemic Infrastructure: AI Adoption, Administrative Knowledge, and the Accountability Gap in UK Governance. Under Review.
The UK’s Big Pitch: AI Innovation Over Accountability, Tech Policy Press, January 2025
b. Digital Public Infrastructure and the state
This project investigates the political and institutional dimensions of digital public infrastructure (DPI) in India, with particular attention to how large-scale technical programmes acquire significance beyond their administrative functions. It explores how DPI intersects with processes of state-building, expert authority, and ideological formation domestically and how those entanglements travel, or are selectively stripped away, as the model is promoted internationally. One strand examines how individually technocratic programmes acquire significance beyond their administrative functions through their assembly with political framing and institutional networks. Another asks what it means for a governance model to be exported: which elements are rendered transferable, which are occluded, and what the asymmetries of that transfer reveal about the relationship between digital infrastructure, sovereignty, and development discourse.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2025. The Stack and the State: India’s Digital Governance Model as Technopolitical Power. Indian Politics and Policy, 5(3), 211-236.
AI Agents and the Next Layer of India’s Digital Infrastructure, Tech Policy Press, March 2026
India’s Digital Infrastructure Is Going Global. What Kind of Power Is It Building?, Tech Policy Press, July 2025
c. Elite experts and ideologies of governance
My book, The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises(Cambridge University Press, May 2024), explores how notions of expertise change as ideological and political transformation take place. I examine the evolution of a shifting network of experts and elites, interrogating what is considered to be expertise in the context of governance. Through a study of Indian think tanks, political consulting firms, and policy research organisations, this project confronts a negotiation between technocracy and populism: should society be governed by the “experts”, or by the “people”? While previous scholarship tends to view technocracy and populism as contradictory forces, I find they have emerged as two complementary forms of ethno-nationalist legitimacy in India.
On one hand, populist politics uses emotionally resonant narratives to make ethno-nationalist policy digestible through an appeal to the majority, attempting to build a rigid national identity with a focus on class, culture, and religion. On the other, technocratic policy making, by claiming to have no culture and pursuing a techno-rationalist approach to policy priorities, works to neutralise charges of hyper-nationalism. Hence, the latter can be used in the service of the former, lending credibility to claims of a grand ethno-nationalist future. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement. At its core, this work is motivated by a desire to make sense of how political and policy elites have gradually normalised Hindu supremacy. I examine the: a) mechanics of the process (for example, think tanks, consulting firms, IT cells, government advisory groups, political parties) and b) the emergent multiple discourses they form. These findings are based on semi-structured interviews with over fifty politicians, policy makers, government officials, consultants, and other socially anointed intellectuals, several years of participant observation (between 2016-2020) in three prominent New Delhi think tanks, and discourse and documentary analysis.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2024. The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises. Cambridge University Press: New York.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2022. The Double-Sidedness of Hindutva: Inside the BJP’s think tanks. Journal of Political Ideologies, 28(1), 121–141.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2021. The New Experts: Populism, Technocracy, and the Politics of Expertise in Contemporary India”. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 52(4), 653–677.
Sajjanhar, Anuradha. 2021. The Emergence of Political Consulting. Economic and Political Weekly 56(44).