num_pages: 244
description: INDIA IS AN IMPROBABLE NATION. Under Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party India has undergone the most total transformation since 1991. The invisible threads Nehru said held together an improbable union divided by language religion and ethnicity have snapped under the burden of Modis Hindu-supremacist rule. In this blistering critique of post-Independence India from Nehru to Modi K.S. Komireddi charts the unsound course of Indian its cowardly concessions to the Hindu right convenient distortions of Indias past and demeaning bribes to Indias minorities. He argues that the missteps of the nations founders the mistakes of Nehru the betrayals of his daughter and her sons the anti-democratic fetish for technocracy inaugurated by Narasimha Rao and carried to the extremes by Manmohan Singhall of them laid down the road on which Hindu nationalists rode to absolute power. Hindu bigotry ennobled under Modi as a healthy form of self-assertion has reopened old fissures that threaten to devour Indias hard-won unity. Yet bad times have also smashed the citizenly complacency that brought India to this point. There are multitudes who now realise how extraordinary and brave the idea of India was to begin with; there is a resurgent struggle against its extinction and the assertion of new voices to wrest the republic from the forces of religious majoritarianism. A short history of the modern Indian nation Malevolent Republic is also an impassioned plea for Indias reclamation.
language: English
title: Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India
publisher: Context