The New India

The New India is the unforgettable account of the struggle between modern forces and ancient ideas to shape the young country's destiny. It reveals a picture of a nation on the precipice of dramatic change.

'Remarkable... fascinating... brilliant' Guardian

Based on six years of detailed research and on-the-ground reporting, the book builds - authoritatively, vividly, indelibly - to become the story of post-colonial India. Using hundreds of interviews, and letters, diary entries, Partition-era police reports, and an astonishing range of sources, Bhatia shows how history plays a recurring role in the present: in politics, in the minds of citizens, in notions of justice and corruption.

Bhatia examines the connections between the Delhi riots of 2020 and the emergence of nineteenth-century revolutionary secret societies, the rise of Hindu nationalism, whose early advocates drew lessons from Hitler and Mussolini, the political use of misinformation and religious targeting, and the Hindu fundamentalist ideology that sparked the creation of the world's largest biometric project. As Bhatia shows, the evolution of this citizen database, in the hands of the BJP, now threatens to deny vast numbers of India's 200 million Muslims their Indian citizenship. Electorates in democracies used to choose their government. Now, in India, the government is choosing its electorate.

India has rarely been seen as in The New India, a monumental work of narrative reportage that illuminates the ways in which a supremacist ideology remade the country over decades, resulting in the prodigious rise of Narendra Modi, and forcing many to ask what they truly understood about their neighbours and themselves.

This meticulously researched book is an unusual account of the dismantling of democracy in the world's most populous country. It is a portrait of how medieval religious sectarianism, modern majoritarianism, deepening poverty, all lashed together by the world's most ambitious data gathering project is driving India towards an alarming, unique model of authoritarianism. A serious subject, seriously addressed Arundhati Roy
Rahul Bhatia's The New India: The Unmaking of The World's Largest Democracy is an account of Hindu fascism from the inside, one with astounding resonances across all democracies currently threatened by fascism. It is one of the essential books for anyone interested in preserving democracy today Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works
Really important, superbly researched, very well written Peter Oborne, author of The Assault on Truth
The most important book on India for many years James Crabtree, author of Billionaire Raj
The New India is a tour de force, and it will be one of the defining books of the Modi era. Rahul Bhatia's astonishingly granular and deeply empathetic reporting reveals an India well on its way to being an authoritarian dystopia Samanth Subramanian
An important, timely and powerful account of India now. Rahul Bhatia's book is both rigorously reported and very readable. Highly recommended Jason Burke
This meticulously researched book is an unusual account of the dismantling of democracy in the world's most populous country. It is a portrait of how medieval religious sectarianism, modern majoritarianism, deepening poverty, all lashed together by the world's most ambitious data gathering project is driving India towards an alarming, unique model of authoritarianism. A serious subject, seriously addressed Arundhati Roy
Rahul Bhatia's The New India: The Unmaking of The World's Largest Democracy is an account of Hindu fascism from the inside, one with astounding resonances across all democracies currently threatened by fascism. It is one of the essential books for anyone interested in preserving democracy today Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works
Really important, superbly researched, very well written Peter Oborne, author of The Assault on Truth
The most important book on India for many years James Crabtree, author of Billionaire Raj
The New India is a tour de force, and it will be one of the defining books of the Modi era. Rahul Bhatia's astonishingly granular and deeply empathetic reporting reveals an India well on its way to being an authoritarian dystopia Samanth Subramanian
An important, timely and powerful account of India now. Rahul Bhatia's book is both rigorously reported and very readable. Highly recommended Jason Burke

Rahul Bhatia is an award-winning Indian writer and journalist based in Mumbai, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, Guardian Long Reads, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Quartz, GQ India and the Wall Street Journal. His profiles and cultural features for The Caravan magazine in India have been anthologised, and his technology investigations are studied at Stanford and other universities. He was on the Reuters global investigations team, where he focused on religion, business, and technology in India under Narendra Modi. He mentors writers and journalists as part of the "South Asia Speaks" collective, and was a co-founder of the Peepli Project, a journalism nonprofit. A former art director, Rahul Bhatia graduated in communication design from Pratt Institute, New York.

He tweets @rahulabhatia, where he has 14,000 followers.

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