Amitabh Mattoo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amitabh Mattoo | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 26 June 1962 |
| Occupations | Academic, public intellectual, author, |
| Website | https://www.amitabhmattoo.com |
Amitabh Mattoo (born 26 June 1962, Srinagar) is an Indian thinker and writer on modern and contemporary history, political science, and international relations.[1] He was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2009.[2] He is Dean of the School of International Studies, Chair & professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, honorary professor of international relations at the University of Melbourne and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia India Institute. On 27 May 2025, he was appointed to the first Chair of Excellence at the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington Until 19 June 2018, he served as Advisor to the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, with the status of a Cabinet Minister.[3] Amitabh Mattoo was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Jammu between the year 2002 to 2008 and he is known to be the youngest Vice Chancellor of a public university, then, to be appointed to that position in the history of independent India.
Mattoo is Deputy Chair of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies. He was the founding CEO of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne and served as Chairman of the governing board of Miranda House, University of Delhi, the highest-ranked women's college in India; earlier he had served as Chair of Kirori Mal College.[4] Mattoo was among the few non-alumni ever appointed to Chair governing bodies of colleges affiliated with Delhi University. He has also been a member of the Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing.[5] He was the youngest person to be appointed as vice chancellor of a public university in independent India during the year 2002.[6] Mattoo's advice on policy matters has been sought across political parties and across governments, including by Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh.[citation needed] Following the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution of India, he has offered a political roadmap for securing the future of Jammu and Kashmir.[7] He has been a persistent advocate of multiculturalism and of reconciliation between Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims.[8]
A son of the academic and writer Neerja Mattoo and the forester and civil servant Rajendra Kumar Mattoo, Amitabh received his early education at the Burn Hall School in Srinagar and then at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, following which he married Ajita, a member of the 1987 batch of the Indian Railway Accounts Service.[9] He qualified for the Indian Police Service in 1987 and then IAS in 1988 through the Combined Civil Services Examination, but pursued a career in academics. He went on to earn a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford, writing a history of the campaign for nuclear disarmament. He describes the ten days of youth that he spent in Tihar jail as part of student protests at JNU as a 'life-shaping experience'.[citation needed]
Mattoo comes from a well-known and progressive Kashmiri Pandit family of Srinagar, which never left the valley during the years of conflict. Before the land reforms in Jammu and Kashmir, his family was among the most influential feudal landlords, aristocrats and administrators in the region.[10] Examining the recent social history of his own ethnic group, Mattoo remarks:
Indeed, the intriguing history of the Kashmiri Pandit community is an anomaly in contemporary times that has privileged stories of ideological clashes, confronting cultures and competing nationalisms. Where else would you find an educated (with 100% literacy), mostly professional, materially successful, religiously liberal, politically flexible, totally non-violent, microscopic minority inhabiting one of the most conflicted and contested parts of the country? They lived, in retrospect, fairy-tale lives; and that charmed life turned into a nightmare in the 1990s.[8]
