Co-founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Chhokar spent a good two decades on IIMA campus, from 1985, mainly as professor of Organisational Behaviour.

Known for his calm demeanor and unfailing love for bird watching, the passing of Professor Jagdeep S Chhokar on the campus of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIMA) early Friday left his peers shocked with many trying to come to terms to the fact of “him not being there”.

Co-founder of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), Chhokar spent a good two decades on IIMA campus, from 1985, mainly as professor of Organisational Behaviour.

Prof G Raghuram, who joined IIMA as faculty soon after Prof Chhokar, worked closely with him on several transport projects. A Special Class Railway Apprentice (SCRA) from the Technical School in Jamalpur Bihar, Raghuram says, he was “known for his sense of humour and casualness”. Chhokar spent a lot of time interacting with colleagues in the faculty lounge, he adds.

The Jamalpur school would later be called the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (IRIMEE).

“Though he viewed himself more as an Organisational Behaviour academician, his broader interest was in the transport domain and particularly safety which he believed has a lot to do with behavioural issues. He also wrote papers on safety in transport,” Prof G Raghuram told The Indian Express.

“Looking at my interest in railways, he would say a railway man is trying to get out of railways and a non-railway man trying to get into railways,” Raghuram said.

After he started the ADR in 1999 with around six to eight IIMA faculty members, including Prof Trilochan Sastry who later became the dean of the IIM Bangalore, Chhokar, an advocate for electoral reforms, armed himself with a bachelor’s degree in law at Gujarat university in 2005.

“He would attend law classes in the evening, with no intention of practicing but to have a better ability to engage with lawyers,” Professor Raghuram said.

Meanwhile, on the IIMA faculty social media groups, Chhokar’s demise generated a lot of outpour. “We were seeing him doing things… watching him on TV…being very active and suddenly he is not there,” one of the faculty members said on the condition of anonymity.

“He was a very calm and a nice person making him equally popular with the faculty and the students,” Professor Vijay Sherry Chand, former chair at IIMA’s Ravi J Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation (RJMCEI), told The Indian Express.

Professor Chand joined the IIMA in 1993 and retired in 2023.

“He had vast knowledge of birds and could easily identify Indian birds. Our common interest for birds brought us closer and this was followed by many interactions,” Professor Chand told The Indian Express, adding that he was “a very caring person”. “He would regularly visit me in the hospital after I was admitted for six months,” he said.

Professor Chhokar remained the IIMA dean (2001-02) and briefly director in-charge (July-Sep 2002) before Professor Bakul Dholakia took over as the director in October 2002.

“The group that founded ADR was formed while Chhokar was still at IIMA and the genesis of the work took place at IIMA though the form it took might not have been anticipated and was shaped later,” another retired faculty member told The Indian Express, sharing the journey of the ADR.

The group won several notable cases in the Supreme Court and takes credit for initiatives like “Voter’s Right to Know”.

His wife Kiran is also a member and trustee of ADR and was a programme director at the Centre For Environment Education in Ahmedabad till 2012.

In 2001, Chhokar was certified as an ornithologist by the Bombay Natural History Society ( BNHS). Post retirement, Professor Chhokar was associated with Aajeevika Bureau for over a decade, working on internal migration related issues.