Malevolent Republic
After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru’s diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India, the first major democracy to fall to demagogic populism in the twenty-first century, is racing to a point of no return.
Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion. Anti Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream. Religious minorities live in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle.
In this highly acclaimed critique of post-Independence India from Nehru to Narendra Modi, revised and expanded with a new chapter, K.S. Komireddi charts the dismaying course of the world’s largest democracy. He argues that the missteps of the nation’s founders, the mistakes of Nehru, the betrayals of his daughter and her sons, the anti-democratic fetish for technocracy carried to extremes by Manmohan Singh—all of them prepared the way for Modi’s march to absolute power. If secularists fail to wrest the republic from Hindu supremacists, Komireddi argues, India may go the way of Yugoslavia and collapse under the burden of sinister ethno-religious nationalism. A gripping short history of modern India, Malevolent Republic is also a passionate plea for India’s reclamation.
K.S. (Kapil Satish) Komireddi is an essayist, author, and journalist. He was born in India, and educated there and in England. His commentary, criticism, and journalism—from South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—appear, among other leading publications, in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, The Spectator, the Daily Mail, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Foreign Policy and the Jewish Chronicle. A columnist for The Print and a panellist on Monocle Radio, Komireddi appears frequently on ABC, CBC, the BBC and CNN, among others, to discuss international affairs. He lives in India, and this is his first book.