Jatin Aggarwal is a Ph.D. student and current co-president of Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC).
In a time when public debate is increasingly shaped by ideological silos, student institutions have a responsibility to do something harder than take easy positions: create spaces where disagreement can be serious, informed and constructive.
That is the spirit in which the Stanford India Policy and Economics Club (SIPEC) was created. SIPEC exists to inspire dialogue and action that takes both the United States and India forward. We aim to help the next generation of leaders engage with one of the most consequential bilateral relationships of the 21st century, both at Stanford and beyond.
The question “Who does SIPEC represent?” misunderstands the organization’s purpose. SIPEC does not exist to support a political party or to endorse every choice of every invited speaker by imposing ideological purity tests on complex discussions. We believe that progress requires a forum where criticism is informed, arguments are tested and people with different viewpoints can engage one another seriously. We believe that students should encounter arguments they agree with and arguments they do not. Crucially, we believe that Stanford should be a place where our countries are considered with intellectual honesty, rather than reduced to caricatures and media echo chambers.
The U.S. and India are two deeply diverse democracies with complex histories, shared interests and real disagreements. The U.S.-India relationship includes cooperation in technology, defense, education, health care, climate, entrepreneurship and people-to-people ties. It also includes legitimate debates around democracy, culture, development and geopolitics. Over the last five years, our annual programming has consistently reflected the changes occurring in both countries and a desire to work for the collective betterment of both societies.
When we hosted Dr. S. Somanath, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, the conversation revolved around science, institution-building and the Indian dream—his personal journey to leading one of the world’s most respected scientific organizations through non-elite educational and professional pathways. His story, like many others we have featured, challenged the notion that leadership in science, technology and public life is confined to the “upper-caste, technocratic and economically privileged.” We hosted Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho to discuss his journey from a small village in India to building a globally successful technology company, and his decision to return and invest in rural India. The conversation focused on building innovation ecosystems outside traditional metropolitan centers.
Following the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir in April 2025, we hosted a series of conversations, including with Hoover Institution fellows and former ambassador and expert on Pakistan, Dinkar P. Srivastava, to confront uncomfortable questions of terrorism and India-Pakistan relations beyond simple platitudes of peace.
We have engaged in conversations on development, sustainability and healthcare. Discussions with speakers such as Anil Jha (former chief of Coal India Limited) on India’s coal-based economy and Anshul Gujarathi on eco-ventures reflected the reality that India’s development choices cannot be understood through simplistic binaries. Dr. Dhananjay Sagdeo moderated a discussion about his work serving tribal populations in South India and being the first doctor to identify sickle cell anemia in this region. We see that energy security, climate responsibility, economic growth and social welfare must be considered together. To reduce nuanced discussions to narrow ideological labels of “technocrat” or “economic actor” ignores the substantive work being done by these individuals and the real-world challenges they address.
SIPEC has never limited itself to one political tradition. Our platforms through the year have included voices from the state governments of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Telangana; representatives from the Aam Aadmi Party, formerly in power in Delhi; the Samajwadi Party, formerly in power in Uttar Pradesh; as well as representatives from both the BJP and Congress. At the Stanford India Conference, political panels engaged with questions of urban governance, welfare politics, federalism, public service delivery and the future of democratic institutions. We aim to expose the Stanford community to the complexity of Indian public life and to show how policy ideas can be exchanged across states, parties and perspectives, even when such engagement is elsewhere reduced to being “sufficiently non-confrontational.”
Beyond policy discussions, the conference featured a diverse range of practitioners across fields such as public health, social impact, technology, wildlife conservation and entrepreneurship. These included Amoghavarsha JS, Grammy Award-winning wildlife filmmaker and photographer; Param Iyer, key architect of the Swacch Bharat Mission, which helped achieve 100% rural sanitation coverage in India and Milli Seth and who founded the Saloni Heart Foundation to expand access to pediatric cardiac care following the loss of her daughter to congenital heart disease. We formed long-term partnerships with Pratham USA and The/Nudge Foundation, who spoke about how technology can strengthen human systems, from offline AI tools in regional Indian languages that support teachers in advancing student literacy and numeracy, to digital platforms improving rural livelihoods and scalable poverty alleviation.
Crucially, these conversations are situated within the context of Stanford’s institutional privilege and are intended to leverage the expertise, interests and experiences of its academic community. We do not pretend that India will be transformed by discussions in Stanford classrooms, whether those concern geopolitics and technology, or the “humanistic questions” favored in academic performances. We created the Innovate For U.S.-India Ideathon and launched the SIPEC fellowship to take these conversations from the Stanford India Conference into the real world. Through partnerships with NGOs and other organizations working across the U.S.-India corridor, we seek to connect students with practical problems, implementation challenges and the communities these efforts ultimately serve.
The U.S.–India relationship will continue to face hard questions. There will be disagreements over policy, values, trade, security, climate, technology and democracy. SIPEC’s role is to create the conditions for thoughtful engagement across it. That is, in essence, what SIPEC represents — a commitment to serious dialogue, intellectual pluralism and a deeper understanding of the future of U.S.-India relations.