OBITUARY : Rajni Kothari

Brought up in Burma, and educated at LSE (London School of Economics), Rajni Kothari belonged to a generation which ran high on an idealism inspired by Indian socialism – Nehruvian or later. He is remembered as an institution builder and as a politically active public intellectual. Moreover, he endeavoured to bring the government closer to the people by bringing together on one platform activists, intellectuals, politicians, journalists and policy makers to debate and discuss agendas through journals like Seminar and Lokayan. What ran constant throughout his enterprise was the idea of democracy, first in its descriptive-celebratory mode, and then in a critical and apprehensively hopeful mode.