Kamal Mitra Chenoy

Kamal Aron Mitra Chenoy was an Indian political scientist, teacher and human rights activist who spent most of his working life at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. A professor at the university's School of International Studies, he was known for his writing and commentary on political theory, Indian politics, international relations and human rights, and for his outspoken defence of secularism. He died in Delhi on Saturday 10 October 2026 at the age of 75.

Chenoy was born on 3 December 1950. As a student at JNU he was active in campus politics and served as vice-president of the JNU Students' Union in 1978 and 1979. He went on to teach at the university, becoming a professor and chair of the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory in the School of International Studies. He also taught at the Indira Gandhi National Open University in New Delhi and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. He was a member of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and wrote widely for Indian and international journals as a political commentator.

For about 40 years Chenoy was associated with the Communist Party of India, serving on its national and central councils. In January 2014 he left the party and joined the Aam Aadmi Party, saying that a new political alternative was needed to combat communalism. He was a vocal critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party and of the Narendra Modi government, and in 2017 the Ministry of Human Resource Development questioned him over remarks he had made to international media about Indian foreign policy and the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Much of his public work concerned human rights. He took part in fact-finding work on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the 2002 violence in Gujarat, and conflicts and rights concerns in Manipur, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Kashmir, and in 2002 he spoke at a hearing on Gujarat before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. His books include Maoists and Other Armed Conflicts (2010), written with his wife, the international relations scholar Anuradha Mitra Chenoy, The Rise of Big Business in India (2015) and Demonetization: The Biggest Scam (2016).

In a tribute published by The Wire after his death, he was remembered as a professor, debater and protester who had grown frail in his last years and had been living with Alzheimer's disease. The cause of his death was not stated in the first reports. Colleagues and former students recalled a teacher who carried his arguments from the lecture hall to the street.