Rahul Bhatia’s new book began from bewilderment: He wanted to know what was happening to the people he loved.
In the opening pages of “The New India,” Bhatia recalls how one relative went from being an affable goofball to angrily disparaging Muslims as “less than human.” Another relative transformed from an apolitical humanist into someone who insisted that India needed a “benevolent dictator.” An aunt started calling Muslims “savages.” Bhatia was startled by such vitriol. He had been taught that secularism and equality were the bedrock of India’s mainstream political culture. “Our elders had raised us with values that they had abandoned themselves.”
Bhatia, a journalist based in Mumbai, set out to learn more about the virulent strain of Hindu nationalism that has swept through India in the last decade. The result is this kaleidoscopic account of “the unmaking of the world’s largest democracy” since Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.
Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when Hindu mobs took murderous revenge on Muslims for a train fire that killed Hindu pilgrims. Over the course of nearly three months, more than a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslims. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) were accused of negligence and even complicity. One horrified federal official called it a “state-sponsored massacre.” Since then, Modi’s ascent to the country’s highest office has given national license to sectarian violence.
Considering the urgency of Bhatia’s subject, it’s only appropriate that he brings a multitude of methods to bear in “The New India.” The book showcases his skills as an investigative journalist and memoirist, an intellectual and storyteller. He was stunned when the people he knew started to resuscitate centuries-old disputes and spout venomous slurs about Muslims. “This unfamiliar country had begun to justify even murder if the occasion demanded it,” he writes. He needed to find “where the poison was coming from.”
To that end, Bhatia interviewed victims of violence and its perpetrators, as well as journalists and police officers. He details the spectacular growth of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., the militant Hindu nationalist group that was founded in 1925; the B.J.P. is its political arm. In 1939, the leader of the R.S.S. wrote approvingly of Hitler’s treatment of Jews: “Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
“The New India” chronicles how this radical, supremacist movement — one that is emphatically at odds with India’s post-independence commitment to religious pluralism — has been so successful. Shortly after independence, the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, warned a friend of the danger posed by “reactionary and bigoted Hindus”: “If these people had their way, neither you nor I would have a tolerable existence.” Over the decades, the R.S.S. gained power through a potent combination of grievance-mongering and determined organizing. “I still don’t know how an ideology this stupid came to dominate us,” a historian of the R.S.S. told Bhatia. “It’s amazing.”
Technology, Bhatia argues, now offers new mechanisms for domination. In an extended section on the government’s push for a national digital identification program, he warns that its ostensible purpose — to curb corruption and improve the delivery of welfare benefits — could be used to “deliver oppression more efficiently.”
Bhatia’s arguments here are intriguing, albeit notional. But they connect to one of the book’s major themes: how everyday experiences have shaped Indian politics. He suggests that technological optimism is fueled by political frustration; people place their hopes in smooth and speedy tools instead of the friction-filled realm of justice and rights.
Something similar might be said for the appeal of authoritarianism. “A hard country made it tempting to dream of easier paths,” Bhatia writes, “of instant justice, of what citizens would do if they were prime minister for one day, the corruption that technology would solve, of all the change only a strong leader could bring.”
The national identification project is also linked to tensions around questions of citizenship, of who gets recognized and protected by the state. In 2019, Modi’s government announced a law granting citizenship to persecuted minorities from nearby countries — except for Muslims. Running through “The New India” is the story of Nisar, a Muslim man in Delhi who was almost killed in the ensuing riots. He was rescued by the sudden intervention of a Hindu neighbor: “He couldn’t explain why the man he knew had chosen to save him. It made no sense to him. Nothing about that day made sense to him.”
For two years, Nisar waited to testify in court about what he saw. Bhatia talked to him regularly, and as the months dragged on, Nisar resisted despair, even as people tried to threaten or bribe him into silence. His clothing business suffered as he visited the court every time he was summoned. To Bhatia, such painstaking dedication stood out: “I came to see Nisar as special because he was unyielding to convenience and pragmatism.”
Bhatia’s book ends before this year’s national election, when Modi and the B.J.P. eked out a narrow win with diminished support. But destruction is swift, while rebuilding takes time. Nisar’s efforts — slow, arduous, cumbersome — are the opposite of efficient. “It’s like something has come and uprooted a tree,” he told Bhatia. “It takes years for a tree to grow again.”
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