Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
A recent opinion piece in the Stanford Daily critiqued the Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC) as well as their annual India conference, which took place this Sunday. The author criticizes many of the speakers individually, including those who have previously spoken at Stanford at the invitation of other groups and departments. The author concludes that those who SIPEC brings “represent a narrow class of political, corporate and technocratic elites whose perspectives do not reflect the full diversity of experiences and political opinions within India.”
I have been associated with SIPEC since its founding in 2021 and believe that some background is warranted. At the time, a group of students felt that Stanford was not providing enough opportunity to engage with the policies, the politics and economics of India. They had a point. There were no classes dedicated to the study of India’s political economy and few opportunities for students to engage with senior Indian thinkers or members of the Indian diaspora.
The gap is not for lack of interest. As of the 2024-25 academic year, more than 450 Stanford students are Indian citizens; many more are of Indian origin or are simply curious about one of the largest countries on earth. After all, India is a country whose foreign policy, technology sector and diaspora touch nearly every corner of American public life. And yet when SIPEC’s founders surveyed the landscape in 2021, they found that Stanford — a university that prides itself on engaging with the world’s most pressing challenges — had almost nothing to offer on the subject. The students wanted more and created a club suited to their tastes.
There is no denying that SIPEC focuses on attracting a specific set of India’s elite for their events and conferences. This is to be expected: a student group should have the freedom to choose whichever speakers they want to hear from. And even though I may not agree with all that is said at their events, I find value in engaging with their programming.
Other student groups have emerged to provide a counter-perspective to what SIPEC offers. Two years ago, students who wanted to learn more about India-Pakistan relations had to create their own class to do so. They then organized an Indo-Pak Dosti Conference in March of this year, an event where some speakers harshly criticized prevailing Indian government views. And this is exactly how a healthy intellectual culture should work — not by demanding that any single student group represent the full diversity on a given issue, but by allowing a plurality of groups to each pursue their own perspectives. I have also learned from Indo-Pak Dosti’s events and am proud to participate in their programming as well.
But at a deeper level, we need to recognize that SIPEC and Indo-Pak Dosti share a common origin. Students want to know more about contemporary India, and Stanford has not kept pace. The contrast with peer institutions is stark. Princeton’s Chadha Center for Global India, Penn’s Center for the Advanced Study of India, UCSD’s 21st Century India Center and Berkeley’s Center on Contemporary India all offer dedicated courses, research fellowships and public programming on Indian politics, economics and society. These are not fringe programs — they are treated as core scholarly infrastructure with dedicated faculty and resources. Stanford’s absence from this landscape is an anomaly — an increasingly embarrassing one as India’s global importance grows.
If there is someone to blame in this story, it is not a student group. Student groups should have the flexibility to invite the speakers that they want to hear from. SIPEC chooses who they want, and other student groups pop up to provide alternate viewpoints. They are functioning in the way that they should. But student groups also have their limitations. They cannot and should not be expected to provide a full-scale intellectual hub for a country as large, as important and as diverse as India. It is long past time for Stanford to build a scholarly program dedicated to the study of contemporary India.