Hindus for Human Rights Welcomes Harsh Mander to Our Advisory Board

Renowned human rights defender, writer, peace worker, and public intellectual Harsh Mander joins HfHR’s Advisory Board, bringing decades of moral leadership in the struggle for justice, dignity, and pluralism in India.

Hindus for Human Rights is honored to welcome Harsh Mander to our Advisory Board.

Harsh Mander

For decades, Harsh Mander has been one of India’s most courageous and consistent voices for justice. As a human rights and peace worker, writer, columnist, researcher, and teacher, his life’s work has centered the dignity of communities pushed to the margins by poverty, exclusion, hate violence, and state indifference.

Harsh is Chairperson of the Centre for Equity Studies, which works on public policy and law for justice and the rights of disadvantaged communities. In response to rising hate violence and lynching, he leads Karwan e Mohabbat, or the Caravan of Love, a national initiative for atonement, solidarity, healing, conscience, and justice.

His work has long embodied the values that guide HfHR: compassion as public ethics, solidarity across religious and social difference, and an unwavering commitment to the equal dignity of every human being.

Harsh has also made major contributions to social rights and public accountability in India. As a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s National Advisory Council from 2010 to 2012, he helped draft social rights legislation, including the National Food Security Bill. He served for twelve years as Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court of India in the Right to Food case, investigating starvation deaths and reviewing the implementation of policies to advance the right to food and nutrition across several states.

His legal and public interventions have addressed some of the most urgent questions facing India: hunger, homelessness, communal violence, detention, migration, and the criminalization of poverty. His petition to decriminalize beggary helped end the treatment of begging as a crime after nearly a century. His work in the Supreme Court contributed to the reopening of more than 2,000 cases related to the Gujarat violence of 2002 that had been closed without trial. His interventions also helped establish homeless shelters as a legal duty for state governments.

A prolific author, Harsh has written 30 books, including Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India, Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India, Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle against Hunger, and Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State That Failed Its People: India’s Covid Tragedy. Across his writing, he has insisted that the moral measure of a society lies in how it treats those made most vulnerable.

Harsh’s leadership has been recognized internationally. He was awarded the inaugural Human Rights Award by Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2022, was included by the Peace Research Institute Oslo in its 2022 shortlist of people recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of York in 2024.

At a time when India’s pluralist and constitutional promises face deep strain, Harsh Mander’s voice is indispensable. His joining HfHR’s Advisory Board strengthens our work for a Hinduism rooted not in domination or exclusion, but in justice, compassion, accountability, and shared humanity.

We are deeply grateful to Harsh for walking with us in this work.