Rahul Bhatia

The book has its first review in the US, and I’m happy to say it’s a very good one. I wondered if American reviewers would find echoes of their own struggles with extremism in the book, and if they would look at the century-old project of turning India into a Hindu state and see how a possible radicalisation of their own population would occur. I was thrilled to see exactly this aspect of the book highlighted in the first review, in Washington Monthly.

For Americans, The New India will resonate. India and the United States are very different countries with unique political dynamics; India, for example, does not have the same amount of polarization. But many of the forces that Bhatia describes are also found here. The New India, then, is both a chronicle and a cautionary tale: an illustration of how easily societies can be poisoned.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the close reading of India’s politics, and the role disinformation plays in creating an atmosphere of suspicion. He read it, and I’m so relieved he picked up the relevance of certain narrative strands and connections between them in the book. For example, the 1920s idea that Hindus were under attack is tightly wound with the kind of misinformation people receive on their phones in 2024.

This notion—that Hindus are under attack by Muslims—is present throughout Indian politics. It is propagated by many of the country’s leaders, who seek to whip up the population into an anti-minority frenzy that they can use to maintain power. Truth, Bhatia notes, is a weak obstacle to these aims. Ethnic entrepreneurs can almost always find anecdotes that inspire enough fear to overcome the broader factual picture. Muslims, for example, are not any more violent than Hindus. They do not aspire to displace India’s overwhelmingly large Hindu population. But revanchists are skilled at finding anecdotes in which a Muslim did attack a Hindu, and then amplifying these stories across the entire nation.

Such actors, of course, also succeed by spreading outright disinformation. Hindu nationalists, Bhatia writes, are adroit at “creating an atmosphere of suspicion through the publication and repetition of rumours and suggestions”: that Muslims engage in ritualistic animal slaughter, that they are intolerant of other religions, that they are marrying and forcibly converting thousands of Hindu women. By constricting the free press, the BJP has made it hard to dispel these rumors. In India, most major media outlets are dependent, at least to an extent, on advertising by the government or companies close to it. The BJP is thus able to bring journalists in line simply by threatening their finances.

Overall, while the months after the book’s release have been a strange combination of expectation and a somewhat empty sensation (I think the exhaustion of the last decade is catching up pretty quickly), along comes a review like this and I’m just surprised that someone read the book so closely. It’s genuinely weird for me: I wrote the book, and want people to read it, but braced myself that no one would.

That said, buy the book here.