The fundamentals here are not hard to grasp: the earth is warming at an alarming rate thanks to our prodigious appetite for fossil fuels. What follows, then, is not climate denialism, but a reminder that the green transition has a class system. At its upper reaches everything is agreeably frictionless. From the edgier neighborhoods of Western chancelleries, its future can look positively convivial: solar panels on the roof, an electric car at the curb, an oat cortado in hand and a bottle of pét-nat chilling for later. Consumption becomes cleaner, the carbon footprint contracts, and modern life proceeds much as before, only with improved appliances. At Davos, the same transformation is rendered in the more desultory language of targets and taxonomies. Yet it is somewhere farther down the class pyramid that the gigawatts are actually made. There, at the bottom of the pecking order, the lower orders drill tunnels, pour concrete, mine copper, string transmission cables, drive trucks in interminable nocturnal capers, and climb inside power stations when rivers rise.

Decarbonization appears in prospectuses bedecked in green; but the labor behind it remains blue-collar. Émile Zola, whose coal mining opus Germinal (1885) ends with miners drowning underground, would have instantly recognized the arrangement. Nearly a century and a half since its publication, the fuel has changed and the carbon ledger has improved, but the laborer is still in the tunnel.

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In Nepal last week came a grim illustration of this new class divide. On 26 August, near the Tibetan frontier, a sizeable chunk of Himalayan ice detached itself from the mountainside, plunging with such violence that the impact seismically registered on the Richter scale. Rock, ice, water, boulders, and pulverized mountain were funneled through Nepal and Tibet, where, in scarcely half an hour, the swollen Trishuli River began consuming the valley around it. Roads disappeared, then bridges, and helicopters were obliged to perform duties ordinarily entrusted to highways. An impressive rescue operation managed to save 11,800 people, even as over a thousand perished, with a further 4,500 missing.

Farther down the valley, a rather more hopeless story was unfolding. A dozen hydropower projects were struck, and, at the time of writing, around 900 workers remain unaccounted for. Reports say that 500 of them are still in tunnels, awaiting rescue. Indian specialists have joined Nepali soldiers, while China has sent drones and DNA-testing kits. Meanwhile, some 700 megawatts of generating capacity, roughly a tenth of the national total, has been lost. Nepal has spent two decades transitioning to clean energy, in the main by turning Himalayan water into electricity. It is a bleak irony that the men building this green future have now been buried under it.

For Kathmandu, hydropower was never simply an environmental policy. The dream long pre-dated the climate transition. In 1966, the Nepali engineer Hari Man Shrestha, armed with a Moscow doctorate, calculated that the torrents tumbling off the Himalayas contained some 83,000MW of theoretical generating capacity. Later estimates reckoned roughly half of it commercially exploitable. Here was an intoxicating proposition for a poor, landlocked country with few conventional energy resources and an energy-hungry giant to its south. So it was that in 1992, the government formally opened hydropower to private and foreign capital, explicitly envisaging electricity for export. A power-trade agreement with India duly followed five years later. By the following decade, politicians and developers were talking of Nepal as the “hydropower battery of South Asia.”

As it was, for decades, the battery remained uncharged. As late as last year, Nepal’s installed capacity was roughly 3,400MW, still a fraction of the old 42,000MW dream. Now, however, the dams are going up quickly. India has agreed to buy as much as 10,000MW over a decade, while Nepali electricity already travels through the Indian grid to Bangladesh.

This was no minor achievement for a small nation, wedged between two capricious giants, chronically deficient in merchandise exports, and accustomed to its best workers emigrating to more hospitable economies. Clean energy was a ticket out of poverty and dependency. The rivers promised electricity and reindustrialization, foreign exchange and domestic jobs. Some of the more utopian Nepalese mandarins even imagined that, after sufficient megawatts, the old hierarchy of landlord and peasant would give way to the more benign modern compact of engineer and technician. In short, the green transition was industrial policy, foreign policy, and class conciliation all rolled into one.

The latter, in particular, was a big deal. Nepal has spent the past generation accomplishing political revolutions rather more efficiently than economic ones. The Maoist insurgency began in 1996 among the impoverished populations of the western hills, where feudalism was still very much a lived reality; by the time the guns fell quiet a decade later, some 17,000 people were dead. The Maoists finally entered government in 2008, abolishing the 240-year-old Shah monarchy and installing their former guerrilla commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his revolutionary sobriquet Prachanda, “the Fierce One” – as prime minister.

Republican Nepal had its achievements. Extreme poverty fell precipitously — the share of Nepalis living below the World Bank’s $3-a-day poverty line falling from 22% in 2011 to 3% in 2023. Caste discrimination was outlawed, representation widened and public services improved. Nepal also developed an Italianate — or dare one now say, British — appetite for changing governments. By 2024, there had been fourteen prime ministers in about as many years. Meanwhile, far-Left factions multiplied with a fecundity to rival Marx (father of seven). Maoists joined Marxist-Leninists; Marxist-Leninists embraced their centrist enemies of old, discovering the novel attractions of cabinet office. At one point, the country counted 25 different communist parties — all very People’s Front of Judea versus Judean People’s Front. As the Nepali political scientist Krishna Khanal observed: “Ironically, there are no communists in Nepal even with an abundance of Communist parties.” With the revolution over, the new political caste settled into the more temperate business of coalition arithmetic, familiar enough to any observer of the South Asian scene.

For all these Communists, however, the lower orders remained obstinately lower. Nepal had abolished its king, survived a civil war, and installed former revolutionaries in the Singha Durbar, Kathmandu’s neoclassical seat of power. But what failed to materialize was sufficient productive work for the working classes in whose name all this had taken place. Capitalism here appeared with peculiarly Nepali characteristics: the country’s most dependable export is its own proletariat. After a decade-long People’s War, the people are still obliged to go look further afield for work: at the 2021 census, 2.2 million Nepalis were living abroad, representing around 7.5% of the population. Remittances — money that foreign-based workers send back home — still supply around a quarter of GDP and reach well over half of households. Youth unemployment has hovered above 20%; many find work in the black market. The IMF calls the resulting dispensation a “low-trust, low-investment equilibrium.” Put less decorously, Nepal cannot employ enough of its people, so they leave at a rate of roughly 1,700 per day to earn poverty wages building stadiums in the Gulf and operating factories in Malaysia, which they then send home to their pensionless families. Hydropower was meant to break this cycle. If the Maoists had failed to emancipate Nepal’s proletariat, perhaps the megawatt would.

This is not an appealing social contract and something eventually had to give. It did so last September, when Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli — of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) — decided to ban 26 social-media platforms. Nepal’s Gen Z had spent years unemployed or watching friends depart, while the offspring of Communist grandees displayed designer handbags and holiday snaps. On 8 September, security forces opened fire on protestors marching on parliament, killing nineteen in the first crackdown. The people of Kathmandu answered the following day with riots and attacks on politicians’ homes. By the time the upheaval subsided, at least 76 people were dead, and some 2,300 injured. Oli duly resigned. Having successively tried kings and communists, Nepal plumped for a rapper. Balendra “Balen” Shah — engineer, hip-hop artist, independent mayor of Kathmandu, scourge of illegal buildings, and habitual wearer of dark glasses — had spent his musical career rapping about corruption and unemployment. He cannily declined the interim premiership, waited for elections and, in March, demolished the septuagenarian Oli in his Jhapa-5 constituency. His Rastriya Swatantra Party duly swept parliament.

Six months later, the rapper-ruler has inherited a disaster, and, with it, an uncomfortable lesson in political economy. Contrary to liberal assumptions, decarbonization does not abolish class relations merely by altering the fuel. To be sure, a dam may emit less carbon than a coal-fired power station; yet it still has owners, creditors, contractors, engineers, and laborers, and they do not share its attendant dangers equally. It is Nepal’s hydropower proletariat who drill and blast through unstable Himalayan rock, working underground among explosives and sleeping beside the river systems being harnessed for Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese electricity.

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Shah has responded vigorously enough, mobilizing the army and hospitals while accepting Sino-Indian assistance. His government has also, understandably, reached for the language of climate justice, seeking compensation from the richer, heavier-emitting powers for the costs of a catastrophe Nepal did vanishingly little to cause. Yet the workers entombed in Nepal’s hydropower tunnels expose a less convenient injustice: the fault line runs through Nepalese society as well as between Nepal and the carbon-rich West.

The green transition promises to transcend carbon. But, as Nepal shows, it cannot quite transcend class. As trillions are poured into dams, grids, batteries, mines, and transmission lines, the old question of who profits, and who is placed in harm’s way, merely acquires new terrains.

The independent producers who now generate roughly two-thirds of Nepal’s hydroelectricity are the toast of the Kathmandu financial press. Their workers understandably occupy the less photogenic end of the boom. At the Tanahun project, a 2025 study found barely two-thirds observing adequate safety practices, amid reports of electric shocks, musculoskeletal disorders, and skin disease. Meanwhile, at Upper Tamakoshi, injuries were significantly more common among men working inside the tunnels than among those above ground. None of this, of course, caused last week’s glacial collapse. Yet once a warming and geologically unstable mountain range becomes a workplace, natural hazard acquires a class dimension: someone must be sent underground; some regulation decides what protections follow him there; and some state authority must possess the machinery to retrieve him when the mountain moves.

Marx, whose ideas have enjoyed a rather eventful afterlife in the Himalayas, would have found 21st century Nepal a familiar place. His account of commodity fetishism turned on the way relations between people come to assume the appearance of relations between things. It followed that the finished commodity confronts us as an object complete in itself, while the social relations, not to mention the labor that produced it, recede from view. Something similar afflicts the modern imagination when it comes to clean energy. We see the turbine, the solar panel, the electric car. Less visible, however, are the Congolese cobalt miner, Chilean copper worker, Chinese solar-factory hand, and Nepali tunneler beneath the Trishuli — until, that is, disaster strikes, making the class relations concealed inside the innocent abstraction of the “green transition” suddenly impossible to miss.

The latest object of cathexis for India’s unhappy youth is the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Its prospects, non-existent as they are, matter less than its provenance. The CJP is not an Indian eccentricity but the latest expression of a wider Gen-Z convulsion. Across the Global South, from the students who felled Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh to their coevals in Nepal, Kenya, and Madagascar, a generation trapped between economic stagnation and digital overstimulation has discovered the pleasures of rebellion. Yet rebellion is easier to summon than purpose. For every movement that matures into a political force, dozens dissolve into little more than a collective tantrum conducted through hashtags and megaphones. The significance of the CJP lies less in anything it is likely to achieve than in what it reveals about the poverty of the political imagination of a generation coming of age amid pervasive unemployment, institutional sclerosis, and digital hyperconnectivity.

The story begins with a meme. In May, Chief Justice Surya Kant, during a hearing concerning fraudulent professional credentials, remarked en passant that unemployed young people drifting into journalism and activism resembled cockroaches. The entomological insult ricocheted across the Indian internet. Within 24 hours, the CJP was born. Its mascot was the eponymous cockroach, smartly besuited; its slogan “the voice of the lazy and unemployed”; its natural habitat, the teeming meme swamps of the Indian internet. Within days, the movement had amassed millions of followers, transforming an offhand judicial insult into a political identity.

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The architect of this improbable insurgency is Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old sometime comms man from Maharashtra and now, by his own telling, another superannuated recruit to the ranks of India’s educated unemployed. Dipke read journalism in Pune before moving to Boston University to pursue a master’s degree in public relations. Before discovering fame as India’s chief cockroach, he did time in the digital trenches, helping develop the populist Aam Aadmi Party’s meme-driven social media operation. By his own account, the CJP began as a Kafkaesque half-joke. Within days, however, a satirical website hastily assembled from Boston had become the toast of Indian newsrooms.

The CJP’s runaway success owes much to its status as an empty signifier: it possesses not so much an ideology as a vibe. In this respect, the party is very much a product of Dipke’s intellectual formation in PR. It is anti-establishment without being systematically anti-capitalist, oppositional without being programmatically Left-wing, and youthful without being especially radical. Its rhetoric revolves around a familiar omnium gatherum of grievances among educated urban Indians: joblessness, corruption, the persistence of political nepo dynasties, and the sense that the country’s gerontocratic political class has ceased to speak the language of younger generations. The movement’s genius lies in its ability to convert these diffuse frustrations into a collective identity. To call oneself a cockroach is at once an act of self-deprecation and solidarity.

The grievances animating students are, to be sure, far from imaginary. India produces millions of graduates each year while struggling to generate enough sensible employment to absorb them. Millions of young Indians enter university expecting social mobility, only to emerge as the immiserated caput mortuum of the credential economy: examined, certified, and yet no closer to the prosperity they were promised. Public recruitment examinations, meanwhile, are routinely engulfed by allegations of paper leaks and malpractice. Last year’s controversy over the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) — the fiercely competitive examination that serves as the principal gateway to medical education for more than two million Indian students each year — became a national scandal after allegations of leaked question papers and irregular scoring procedures cast doubt on the integrity of the process.

The broader crisis of educational credentialism is impossible to miss: ever more degrees chasing ever fewer opportunities. It is hardly surprising that the CJP struck a chord with this generation, giving it a carapace beneath which to nurse its dashed hopes and accumulated disappointments.

Yet what remains striking is how little substance accompanies the symbolism. The movement has flirted with demands ranging from education reform and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to judicial independence, safeguards against voter disenfranchisement, stronger anti-defection laws, and greater representation for women in political office. Taken individually, these are not unreasonable demands. The problem is that they amount less to a political program than to a catalog of civic frustrations.

The movement possesses grievances in abundance, enemies in plenty, and memes beyond counting. What it lacks is any coherent account of power, class, or institutions — the very stuff of politics. One searches in vain for a theory of the state, a vision of economic and cultural transformation, or even a stable hierarchy of priorities. Does it have anything to say about caste, the deepest hierarchy in Indian society? About confessional violence and Hindu vigilantism? About a political economy built on an extraordinarily narrow tax base and a state too fiscally weak, and too unwilling, to provide adequate healthcare and education? The CJP knows what it dislikes; it is far less clear about what it wants.

There is a long history to such movements. India’s cockroaches belong to a familiar global species: the anti-political protest movement. Its natural habitat is not the factory floor or the party branch meeting but the social media feed and, occasionally, the street. It thrives on symbolism, irony, and virality. It excels at expressing discontent while remaining conspicuously reluctant to define what should replace the existing order. One can trace its lineage through the Occupy movement that sprang up after the Crash, whose ecumenical language of the “99%” captured widespread anger at inequality but, precisely for that reason, struggled to convert protest into durable political organization. It appeared again in the movements of Spain’s indignados and France’s gilets jaunes, whose denunciations of an austeritarian political class resonated with millions but proved more adept at rejecting the system than articulating a coherent alternative.

What unites these disparate episodes is not a shared ideology but a shared style — a sophisticated repertoire of symbolic resistance. The CJP is perhaps the most Indian expression yet of this broader tendency. There is a certain irony here, for India has no shortage of traditions of radical politics. The 20th century produced movements whose ambitions were nothing if not grand. Nehruvian socialists sought to remake society through planning, dams, steel plants, and new cities. Naxalite guerrillas, meanwhile, took up arms in pursuit of land redistribution. Student radicals once debated Mao and Marx with a seriousness that now feels almost retro. For all their defects, India’s socialists and communists at least possessed a utopian conception of the future. Above all, they believed politics was about power. The meme movements de nos jours, by contrast, often appear content to remain permanently in the realm of gesture.

The CJP’s closest antecedents are therefore not the communist and socialist movements that once dominated India’s forests and campuses but a different lineage altogether: the great anti-political mobilizations organized around moral renewal rather than social transformation. The most important precedent is the JP Movement of the Seventies. Like the cockroaches, it emerged from genuine anger at corruption and misgovernment, mobilized students on an enormous scale, and presented itself as a revolt against a political class that had lost the plot. Yet Jayaprakash Narayan’s celebrated call for “Total Revolution” was, upon inspection, a remarkably nebulous doctrine. It was at once non-partisan and anti-Congress, hostile to Marxism yet willing to paralyze the administration, committed to direct democracy while proposing unelected “struggle committees” to police elected representatives. At times Narayan gestured towards collective ownership; elsewhere he dismissed land redistribution and collectivization as impractical. The inconsistencies in the event mattered little. Narayan himself was unusually candid about this, remarking at one point that what was needed was “the end of all ideologies.”

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A similar story unfolded four decades later with India Against Corruption. Anna Hazare, a kind of JP redivivus, channeled widespread disgust with graft and elite privilege in the 2010s. Once again, the promise was not a new political vision but a cleansing of public life. The movement presented itself as standing above conventional politics, transcending the stale divisions of Left and Right. The immediate result was the birth of the Aam Aadmi Party. The broader consequence, however, was a further delegitimization of the political class and the strengthening of authoritarian Hindu nationalism. As experience elsewhere has repeatedly shown, from the Five Star Movement in Italy to Lava Jato in Brazil, anti-corruption anti-politics often ends by clearing the ground for the far-Right. Meloni, Bolsonaro, and Modi are all, after a fashion, beneficiaries of the populist, anti-political movements that preceded them.

Gandhi himself was, in many respects, the original anti-political politician. His Olympian moral authority rested on an obsession with a peculiarly unhinged conception of non-violence that left him all too ready to sidestep questions of class. Faced with demands for land reform, he preferred conciliation to expropriation; confronted with caste, he sought to soften rather than abolish it. He chipped away at the enormities of untouchability while leaving much of the broader architecture of hierarchy intact, and urged landlords to behave a bit more nicely towards peasants rather than advocating their removal as a class.

The CJP belongs squarely within this desultory tradition. Properly speaking, Dipke is one of Gandhi’s bastard heirs. His party’s politics are less ideological than therapeutic. Society is imagined not as a terrain of competing interests but as the victim of elite incompetence and indifference. The remedy is therefore not economic redistribution but moral renewal. In this sense, the movement possesses an elective affinity with conservatism. For all its youthful rhetoric and anti-establishment posture, it leaves many of the deepest structures of Indian society curiously untouched.

This would matter less were India not simultaneously home to people engaged in rather more consequential forms of dissent. While the CJP dominates headlines and timelines, there remain students, journalists, academics, and organizers whose encounters with the state have been anything but playful. Theirs is not the politics of memes but the politics of consequence, where the price of opposition is measured not in likes and reposts but in years lost to courts, prisons, and legal limbo.

Consider Umar Khalid, the former student leader who has spent years incarcerated under anti-terror legislation. Or Sharjeel Imam, arrested after speeches critical of the Modi government. Or those caught up in the Bhima Koregaon prosecutions: the scholar Anand Teltumbde, the trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, the poet Varavara Rao, among many others.

Yet public attention is finite, and absurd, algorithm-friendly spectacle perforce has a tendency to monopolize it. The CJP thus embodies a wider paradox. It is at once a protest against political failure and a symptom of it. Most likely, it will disappear as quickly as it arrived, joining the ever-expanding graveyard of internet phenomena that briefly convinced journalists they had glimpsed the future. Dipke may think otherwise. But I suspect it will take more than a few memes — and considerably more than a cockroach — to break the hegemony of Hindu nationalism.

Given the breadth and depth of this relationship, it is astonishing that India not only did not express disapproval of the bombing of Iran. For a considerable time, it refused even to acknowledge it. Nor did it make a sound when the head of a friendly sovereign state was murdered along with his family. India remained silent, too, when a children’s hospital named after Mahatma Gandhi, and located on a street bearing his name, was blown up. This puzzling muteness wasn’t just a departure from India’s long tradition of solidarity with the developing world. It was also an abdication of the de facto leadership of a large segment of the non-Western world thrust upon India by its presidency of BRICS. Every other founding member — Russia, China and Brazil — quickly denounced the war. India alone seemed to be condoning it with silence.

Then, on 4 March, an unarmed Iranian frigate sailing home after participating in a maritime exercise convened by the President of India was torpedoed by the Americans in the Indian Ocean — an area to which India claims to provide security. Yet India couldn’t muster the nerve to say a word in response. It was tiny Sri Lanka, one-50th India’s size, that activated its navy to rescue the Iranian vessel’s stricken sailors. By then, more than 80 had been killed. Colombo withstood intense American pressure to preserve and repatriate the bodies of the dead. Veterans of the Indian Navy were appalled.

When Narendra Modi — who had concluded a visit to Israel hours before the first bombs were dropped on Iran — did come around to speaking about the sanctity of sovereignty, it was in relation to the Gulf monarchies. About Iran’s trampled sovereignty, he again said nothing. The upshot was a public outcry in India at what looked like a squalid surrender to the US and Israel by a country with a long record of standing up for its interests and professed beliefs. Ordinary Indians flooded the Iranian embassy to sign the condolence book for Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Iranian mission was compelled to open a bank account to receive charitable donations from the public.

It is the sight of this outpouring of grief and comradeship that prompted Modi eventually to dispatch a senior bureaucrat to the Iranian embassy to record India’s condolences. But by then the Iranians had clearly had enough. While Tehran took great pains to display its gratitude to India and Indians, it refused to make any special concessions to Modi. When the Indian premier finally opened channels of communication with the Iranian leadership, Tehran allowed the passage of two Indian-flagged ships carrying LNG — a fraction of India’s daily needs. The message to Modi was clear: no privileges would be granted to India. New Delhi would have to negotiate the passage of every single vessel, and Iran would decide on a case-by-case basis. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, received public assurances of support from the Islamic Republic.

To liken Modi’s behavior to India’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine is to overlook the fact that New Delhi formally recognized the gravity of that conflict. Modi even traveled to Ukraine, and issued a public warning to Putin about the perils of making this an “era of war”. His silence on Iran is singular, and there are two reasons for it.

The first is Modi himself.

His failure to oppose the war is self-serving. Over the past decade, Modi has erected the most formidable cult of personality in the democratic world. He is the only living leader with a stadium named for him; in 2021, India’s space agency catapulted a satellite carrying his photo into space; children in state schools are forced to celebrate his birthday; villages are obliged to endure his radio broadcasts.

India’s former vice president once introduced a resolution in parliament proclaiming Modi “god’s gift to India”. Another minister hailed the “Modi Era” as the consummation of a 450-year-old prophecy.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s digital warriors, meanwhile, have toiled for years circulating fake photos of Modi surrounded by world leaders seeking his counsel or watching his speeches. They have gulled voters with absurd lies, such as the one claiming Modi was adjudged the “best prime minister” on Earth by UNESCO. The government has burned billions of rupees on public jamborees wherever Modi has gone — from Wembley Stadium to Madison Square Garden. And virtually every major news organization in India has amplified the claim that Modi is Vishwaguru: teacher to the world. The falsehoods of his sycophants have had a crazed effect on Modi himself. Last year, he told a worshipful journalist that his birth was not a “biological” event. He was supposedly sent down by some celestial force.

Nothing would threaten Modi’s meticulously crafted self-image — the globally admired messiah dispatched by god to save India from its “anti-national” Anglophone elites — more than a glib putdown from Trump. A direct insult would make Modi, a strongman, the object of derision at home. Fearing this, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid his American counterpart over the past year. Last October, he even stayed away from the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, an otherwise important event, so as not to run into Trump there. Trump, not to put too fine a point on it, terrifies Modi.

This turn of events was unexpected. In Trump’s first term, Modi expended tremendous energy cultivating the American President. Modi called him “Doland, my friend”; hugged him ebulliently; and even held a rally with him, before adoring Indian-Americans, in which he effectively endorsed Trump’s re-election. There was nothing he would not do for his dear Doland. During Covid-19, Modi agreed to give away precious stocks of essential Indian medicine to the US after a phone call from Trump. He mounted an extravagant spectacle for Trump in his home state of Gujarat, and, ignoring deadly religious riots in Delhi, hosted a lavish banquet for his American guest in the Indian capital.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, pro-Modi Indian televangelists erupted with triumphalism and schadenfreude. They declared that with Modi’s friend back in the White House, India’s adversaries were on notice and rhapsodized about the “electric” chemistry between the two men. Modi’s supporters were encouraged to believe that Trump would squeeze New Delhi’s enemies and accelerate India’s rise.

He did the opposite. Last year, when India went to war with Pakistan, Trump inserted himself into the conflict on the side of Pakistan — heralding himself as the peacemaker and demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishment. The ceasefire, according to New Delhi, happened because Pakistan, whose military runways were cratered by India’s bombing campaign, implored its rival to stop. India’s military establishment therefore found the suggestion that Trump brokered the truce offensive, but the country’s political leadership was too timid to push back.

Trump has since repeated dozens of times the claim that he forced India and Pakistan to halt the war by threatening them with tariffs. Impatient to secure a trade deal that would grant Washington access to the most protected areas of India’s economy, he then proceeded to pronounce India’s economy “dead” and slap a 50% tariff on its exports to the United States. The levy devastated parts of the Indian economy, but Modi still didn’t react. Since India is governed by a cult, the government’s priority is to protect the cult’s master. India’s interests are secondary. Now, Trump wants demonstrations of obedience, and Modi is willing to perform national seppuku to propitiate him.

The second, supposedly respectable, reason for Modi’s unwillingness to dissent from Washington, according to his apologists in the Indian establishment anyway, is that India needs the United States to counter China. Modi’s acolytes have convinced themselves that India, aided by Washington, is destined to replace China as America’s preferred manufacturing base. Trump’s emissaries have made it plain that they have no intention of helping India realize this goal. Still, New Delhi persists with the belief that the United States is its indispensable partner. In its equation, there is no future in which India can find a modus vivendi for peaceful coexistence with Beijing. Rather than engage in intense dialogue with its neighbor next door, India’s only option apparently is to become a frontline state in Washington’s effort to contain China’s rise.

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The problem with this argument is that the one party undeterred by this grand partnership is its intended target: China. Six years ago, the People’s Liberation Army seized Indian territory in Ladakh. Modi’s initial response was to go on television and claim that there were no Chinese incursions into Indian territory — even as dozens of Indian soldiers lay dead. Then, in a belated act of retaliation, Delhi introduced curbs on Chinese investments into India. But now, as a direct result of the economic difficulties into which Trump’s tariffs have plunged the country, those barriers have been removed and India is again courting Chinese investment.

In other words, then, India’s subservience to the US is as undignified as it is strategically incoherent. Its most concrete achievement is the decimation of India’s credibility in the non-Western world. Once regarded as a model of autonomy by Africa and Asia, it is now viewed as a poodle of Washington.

That, of course, still leaves unexplained India’s strange deference to Israel.

India’s embrace of Tel Aviv, which began before Modi appeared on the scene, has now become damaging. The wielders of power in New Delhi have concluded that Israel is a reliable exporter of technology and a viable destination for blue-collar workers for whom Modi has been unable to create jobs at home. Beyond this basic calculus, though, the relationship is wholly ideological. It is animated by the Hindu-nationalist reverence for a state that has battled and survived against Muslim nemeses. Israel was quick to intuit Modi’s great weakness — susceptibility to flattery — and exploit it skillfully. The Knesset recently awarded the Indian prime minister a wholly made-up prize.

Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters in India are united more than anything else by a profound hatred of Muslims, and they see in Israel a beau ideal. As the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz once put it, “Relations between Israel and India tend to grow stronger… when India experiences a rightward shift in anti-Muslim public opinion or in leadership”. As Israeli atrocities mounted in Gaza, the IDF’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders outside Israel were to be found in India. Last week, India imposed a roundabout ban on the screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab, an Oscar-nominated docudrama about a Palestinian girl murdered by the IDF that can lawfully be screened in Israel, on the grounds that it would “break up” India-Israel relations.

No decent Israeli can see this as a compliment. And no decent Indian can regard a friendship fueled by bigotry as a worthy cause. Beyond Hindu nationalists, Israel has no real champions in India. Two decades ago, virtually every side in India was willing more or less to work with Israel — some openly, others clandestinely. Today, however, Israel is so completely identified with the BJP that, when Modi is gone, the next government is bound to push it away.

Yet even before a political decoupling can occur, a more visceral detachment is being forced by the burdens imposed by the economic reality. The consequences of the Israeli-American war against Iran have reached India. As a poor, developing country, India is heavily dependent on imports for its most essential energy needs. More than 60% of the liquefied petroleum gas that powers Indian kitchens, as well as nearly 90% of its crude imports, come from the Persian Gulf. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is thus a body blow to India. Airlines have introduced a fuel surcharge, farmers face the prospect of fertilizer shortages just as demand rises ahead of the planting season, while restaurants everywhere are trimming their menus or closing altogether. All the while, the lengthy lines outside gas distribution terminals evoke Ceaușescu’s Romania; at least two men have died so far in the interminable wait to refill their canisters. An exodus from town to village, redolent of the horrifying mass flight in the bleakest days of the pandemic, has begun.

On Monday, more than two weeks after the war commenced, Modi made a statement in parliament in which he told Indians to brace for a Covid-like challenge. It’s a spine-chilling thought. The pandemic was the worst humanitarian catastrophe in republican India’s history: hospitals ran without oxygen, crematoriums ran out of wood to burn the dead, bodies floated in the Ganges. Modi used the horror to solicit tax-deductible donations for an opaque trust established, he said, for the purpose of aiding “the poorest of the poor”. With a brazenness that would have made Papa Doc Duvalier blush, he christened the fund “PM CARES”.

Nearly a billion dollars flowed into it in the first week. But where has all that money gone? That question is impossible to answer because PM CARES, structured as a private trust, cannot be reviewed by the state auditor. The flagrancy of the enterprise catches the breath: while his counterparts abroad panicked and pleaded with their people, Modi cashed out. That the Indian prime minister has again invoked that horror should therefore terrify us all. Certainly, he did not equip India for this crisis: the country has oil reserves for just 10 days. And the lesson of Covid is that the prime minister — who has a habit of disappearing from view in difficult times — will not help.

Given its sheer size and human scale, India may be on its way to becoming the largest single non-hostile casualty of the war in West Asia. For all its preening proclamations of its own rise and importance on the world stage, Modi’s “New India” proved too inconsequential to influence the warmakers — and too weak, craven, and self-woundingly stupid to be spared the war’s effects.

The head of the self-help group, a quietly authoritative woman called Manasa, explained that the village gives out interest-free loans with the aim of breaking the stranglehold of the money-lenders. One woman had borrowed 15,000 rupees — around £130 — to open a canteen that caters to pilgrims visiting the local temple; all that circumambulation is hungry work. I asked the woman with the headscarf how many Muslims live in the village. “Eighteen,” she replied, before assuring me that the Shia mourning month of Muharram is observed here with the same punctiliousness as the Hindu festivals of Diwali and Dussehra.

When I asked the women to rate the local government, all eyes turned to the sarpanch, or council president, a handsome, well-groomed man. It turned out that the panchayat scored well for improving the water supply — a rare feat in this increasingly arid part of the country — and for the village primary school, which offers a good education in Telugu and English. But the roads! “There aren’t any,” sighed one woman, by which she meant that the narrow tracks which wind between the houses get washed away by the monsoon. With a flourish, the sarpanch announced that the village would have a new road “within three months”. On this happy note, the meeting broke up and we adjourned for selfies.

As a student of Hindi in the Nineties and then as a reporter at India Today, the country’s biggest news magazine, I was in awe of India’s federal constitution and its ability to keep the country whole despite the proliferation of ethnic groups, religions and languages. The states were organized along linguistic lines; over the course of the second half of the 20th century, through the addition of new states, autonomous councils in tribal areas, and the panchayats themselves, democracy set down roots so strong that no Hindu-Muslim riot or separatist movement seemed capable of tearing them up. For all the prevalence of poverty and injustice, the crust of corruption and nepotism that grew around the “natural” party of government, the Congress, and a tradition of political assassinations that took the lives of the country’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi, and two Congress prime ministers, Indira Gandhi (no relation) and her son Rajiv, surely Bill Clinton was justified in 1994 in describing India as “one of the world’s greatest experiments in multi-cultural democracy”.

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The face of this democracy belonged to T.N. Seshan. A gloomy south Indian with a taste for Hindu philosophy, Seshan was appointed chief election commissioner in 1990, a time of spiraling “booth-capturing” — the practice by armed groups of seizing polling booths in order to stuff ballot boxes — and intimidation of lower castes to stop them exercising their franchise. On Seshan’s watch, booth-capturing plummeted, while in the run-up to the 1996 general election, he had some 300,000 known villains preventively detained. Seshan’s probity made him as famous as the national cricket captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, and the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both Muslims, of course — along with the chief justice, Aziz Mushabber Ahmadi, and the future president, Abdul Kalam. Here, it was argued, was the advantage that secular India enjoyed over its estranged sibling, sectarian Pakistan, where elections, as Seshan liked to say, lacked integrity.

And yet, even in its golden age, as Prem Shankar Jha, a former prime ministerial adviser, reminded me when I visited him recently in Delhi, democracy was failing to give its citizens “economic security, the rule of law, and speedy, affordable justice”. These failings prompted the emergence of “an alternative model of nationhood that despised… religious pluralism”, advocating instead “a hard Hindu nation-state”.

Advance warning came on 6 December 1992, when a mob of Hindu zealots tore down a mosque that had been built on the site — according to Hindu tradition — of the birthplace of the god Ram in the city of Ayodhya. As the lodger of a Brahmin numismatist and her daughter 140 miles away in Varanasi, I was kept indoors by my nervous hosts who taught me how to make chappatis while gangs roamed the city looking for people to lynch. Further south, Bombay, India’s most diverse and cosmopolitan city, descended into religious bloodletting that claimed the lives of 1,200 people, most of them Muslim.

Ayodhya brought violent Hindu chauvinism into the mainstream. It gave an emerging nationalist politician called Narendra Modi, who in 2002 became chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, license to sit on his hands while more than 1,000 Gujaratis — two thirds of them Muslim — were killed in a communal firestorm in the same year.

In 2014, Modi became prime minister. Since then, he has striven to turn secular, multi-lingual India into a Hindu supremacist state whose lingua franca is no longer English, but Hindi — a north Indian tongue rejected by many in the south — and defined by its enmity for Pakistan, against which it fought a short, inconclusive war this spring. In 2019, Modi fulfilled a long-cherished nationalist dream by ending the autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, had enjoyed since independence. And last year, he inaugurated a huge temple complex on the site of the demolished mosque at Ayodhya before a crowd of billionaires, cricketers, politicians and actors. Shah Rukh Khan was nowhere to be seen.

My research in India this autumn took me to Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Mumbai (as Bombay was renamed in 1995), Madhya Pradesh and the southern city of Chennai. During the Diwali holidays I was in Orchha, a once-sleepy town in Madhya Pradesh that has over the past decade or so become a popular destination for visitors to the town’s Ram temple; on the day I was there, the streets were full of double-decker buses debouching jovial pilgrims and stalls selling temple oil and marigold garlands. According to KPMG India, religious tourism accounts for more than 60% of travel in the country and by 2028 will be worth $59 billion. At Khajuraho, also in Madhya Pradesh, I visited 10th-century Hindu temples famed for their carved depictions of lovemaking inaccessible to the umbrella-legged. That India’s medieval Muslim invaders included spirited iconoclasts was evidenced by the fact that perhaps a fifth of the temples’ sandstone figures had been beheaded.

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All the while, as my Hindi came back, chatting to people in fields, markets, temples, trains and rickshaws, I was reminded insistently of two things. The first is that the failure of the old India to provide “economic security, the rule of law and speedy, affordable justice” is being perpetuated by the new India under Modi. The second is that, while their efforts may have yet to bear fruit in the panchayats of Andhra Pradesh, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are diligently undermining democracy while turning the country’s 200 million Muslims from partners in a collective endeavor to a polluting enemy within.

For all Modi’s claims to be moving swiftly towards a “Developed India”, and the high-profile investments that have been made by tech firms such as Foxconn, the world’s biggest iPhone producer, the average growth rate in recent years of less than 6% is far short of the 10% that China achieved when its economy took flight between 1980 and 2015. So precarious is life for urban laborers, and so filthy the air they breathe — eight of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India — that many of the farm workers I met in Madhya Pradesh had returned to their villages after abortive moves to the city. Rather than take the government’s claims to have all but eradicated poverty at face value, Subhash Chandra Garg, the former top official at the finance ministry, presented me with a comparison of average per capita incomes. “In 2024, it was $13,660 in China and $83,660 in the US. In India it was $2,650.” He winced. “We’re 140th in the world.”

In the old days of socialist central planning, government statistics could be trusted. No longer. According to Reuters, 37 out of 50 independent economists disbelieve the official unemployment rate of 5.6%; alternative estimates range as high as 35%. More than half the population — which currently stands at 1.47 billion and is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in the early 2060s — is under 25, and each year between seven and eight million people enter a jobs market that cannot accommodate them. Stagnant wages and private sector lay-offs only heighten the allure of a job for life in public service — no matter how lowly the role. In 2024, 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for jobs as road sweepers and rubbish collectors in the state of Haryana. In the same year, Indian Railways received 19 million applications for 64,000 vacancies. As Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, the IT minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, told me, “the demographic situation is beginning to swamp us”.

Economic worries need a scapegoat. Addressing a large rally before this month’s assembly elections in the poor, populous state of Bihar, Modi inveighed against Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh. The previous month, Medha Kulkarni, a senior BJP politician in the state of Maharashtra, led a delegation to sprinkle cow urine on a patch of ground where Muslim women had been spotted praying, thereby purifying it. Also in October, Pragya Thakur, a former BJP member of parliament, who was once arrested on suspicion of involvement in a wave of bombings against Muslims — she was freed for lack of evidence — proffered stern advice to any Hindu whose daughter has the temerity to fall in love with a Muslim. “If our daughter does not obey us,” she said, “if she goes to the house of a non-believer, spare no effort in breaking her legs.”

Long gone is the ecumenical India of the late president Abdul Kalam, whose father made a living by ferrying Hindu pilgrims to a popular shrine on his boat. As is the Bombay of the late musician Zakir Hussain, whose morning routine as a child in that once-tolerant city consisted of Muslim ghazals at home followed by ragas at a Hindu temple and mass at his Catholic school. It is hard to imagine another Muslim president, chief justice or national cricket captain in the world’s third-biggest Muslim country. When India’s Muslims are not being abominated, hectored or lynched, it is as if they do not exist at all: not in the speeches of Modi and his ministers, nor in the 12,000 schools catering to 32 million children that are administered by the BJP’s militant feeder organization, the RSS, nor in the numerous Hindu holidays whose observance, once a matter of personal preference, have been inked into the fabric of the state.

Most ominous of all, the Election Commission, citadel of T.N. Seshan, may have been captured by the government. In August Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s most prominent leader, gave a detailed press conference in which he substantiated longstanding suspicions that the BJP’s narrow victory in the 2024 general election was achieved fraudulently and in collusion with the commission. In the southern electoral ward of Mahadevapura, he said, some 40 party workers had spent six months sorting through mountains of voting records and turned up more than 100,000 “fake” votes that were cast by means of invalid addresses, invalid photos, bulk voters at one location, voters who had cast ballots at several different booths, and “first-time” voters in their sixties and seventies. “This is happening across the country,” Gandhi said. “There is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated.”

On 5 November, the day before the Bihar polls opened, he presented evidence for an even bigger “vote theft” in state elections held in Haryana last year, claiming that no fewer than 2.5 million votes — one in eight — were cast there illegally. Gandhi showed a photo of a hairdresser from Brazil that had been downloaded from the internet and appeared 22 times on the Haryana electoral rolls.

The Election Commission rejects Gandhi’s allegations, and has refused to hand over the electronic voting records that would enable the Congress — or anyone else — to conduct a nationwide audit of past elections. The Supreme Court has rejected petitions that it launch an investigation of its own. And in Bihar, the decisive defeat in November’s state assembly elections that Congress and its allies suffered at the hands of the ruling coalition, of which the BJP is a part, suggested that for voters the issue of vote theft isn’t as important as the state government’s promise to create 10 million jobs.

This is how democracies die. And while Modi’s contribution has of course been outstanding, Gandhi’s must also be acknowledged. The leader of the opposition is the son of Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Indira Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and the great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, a Congress president before independence. Far from nobly shouldering an inherited responsibility to save Indian democracy, the princeling is part of the problem. And yet neither he nor other members of the Gandhi clan will step away from the family firm, while no other party exists that can challenge the BJP nationally.

India’s last big spasm of communal violence came in the winter of 2019-2020 when Muslims in Delhi who were protesting against a discriminatory asylum law and measures to weed out “infiltrators” were attacked by Hindu zealots abetted by the police, leaving at least 54 dead. India has known periods of bigotry before, as the decapitated carvings at Khajuraho demonstrate, and recovered. For the moment, however, for India’s Muslims, it’s a question of keeping one’s head down and one’s sangfroid intact. Lunching at Bagdadi, a legendary Muslim-owned canteen in Mumbai, my eye was caught by the item “Beef Fry” on the antique menu board. When I remarked to the owner that eating beef is enough to get you killed in today’s India, he replied with a smile, “we keep the original menu board because our customers like it. But we haven’t served beef in years. It’s buffalo meat and we have the laboratory analysis to prove it.”

The Indians don’t complain as much about Donald Trump as the Europeans do; instead, they’ve treated his tariffs as a wake-up call to reduce their reliance on the US. I am writing this column from New Delhi, where I have met with senior Indian politicians and economists. The big theme here is India’s deeper integration into the Brics group and with the countries of south-east Asia. (Brics stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but the group has recently expanded to include five other countries, including Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.) This strategy is not entirely new: India was already doing business with Russia, which provides its oil and military hardware. And it will continue to do so. But the dial has certainly shifted.

Perhaps the most extraordinary shift is regarding India’s relationship with China. The two nations have long been engaged in a dispute over their unmarked border in the Himalayas. In 2020, 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died in clashes along the disputed border in the Galwan Valley in the northernmost part of India. Flights between the two countries were suspended when the Covid pandemic struck and were never resumed. Since then, relations appear to have improved. Last Thursday, India’s largest budget airline, IndiGo, announced it would restart daily flights between Kolkata and Guangzhou. During the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in early September, China’s president Xi Jinping and India’s prime minister Narendra Modi started to patch up their relationship. They agreed to deescalate their border conflict, and to strengthen trade and investment ties. They both have more to gain from co-operation than from conflict.

For a long time, the joke among Western diplomats was that India’s role in the Brics was to keep a watchful eye on Russia and China, and make sure that the two were not getting too close. If that indeed was the plan, it has proven little more than Western wishful thinking. Together, the Brics’ economies are already larger than America’s, Europe’s and Japan’s combined, if you measure their economies in purchasing power as the World Bank does. According to that metric, China and India are the world’s largest and third-largest economies respectively. Each year, they are growing larger relative to the West. Two years ago, Modi set a target for India to achieve developed-nation status by 2047, the centenary of the country’s independence. To achieve it, India would need to grow by 8% every year. It’s not quite there yet — but it’s growing fast.

I suspect that the folk in the US State Department and the Western foreign policy community are clinging on to statistics that measure the size of an economy in US dollars. According to that metric, the US is still top dog — and the combined West is far larger than the Brics. That metric has its economic merits, but it does not account for geopolitics. As part of its sanctions, the West cut Russia off from the dollar markets. China has capital controls. Dollars do not flow freely in and out of these countries. This is why you shouldn’t measure their economies in dollars, but in terms of what their local currencies buy. That’s what purchasing-power parity, or PPP, measures — the “bang for the buck”, in Russia’s case quite literally. The reason Western experts critically misjudged Russia’s capacity to build weapons and to sustain its war in Ukraine is because of their attachment to wrong statistics. If they had looked at PPP, they would have recognized Russia for what it really is: the fourth-largest economy in the world, larger than Germany and Japan.

In the West, delusions also persist about China’s strategy. I recently heard a former Biden administration official boasting about a conversation he had with President Xi, who assured him that China did not support Russia’s war against Ukraine. How could he be so credulous? Perhaps because virtually all geopolitical commentary in the West is deeply afflicted by confirmation bias. The South China Morning Post came closer to the truth when it quoted Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, telling a European official that China wants Russia to keep on fighting in Ukraine to prevent Washington shifting its focus to Beijing.

Through his trade policies, Trump has driven the Brics countries, and parts of the Global South, closer together. Before Trump’s second term, the US was everyone’s favorite trading partner. It had a huge economy, with a single market and no internal trade barriers. Trump’s tariffs changed the picture. My interlocutors in Delhi were all talking about how Asian countries could trade more with one another to replace the trade with America that is now lost.

They also want to reduce their reliance on the US dollar. This would be a very big deal. But it is easier said than done and will require time. You need a sophisticated financial infrastructure to do this. Currently, India and Brazil conduct most of their trade through US dollars as the vehicle currency, since the US has a mature financial infrastructure and deep capital markets. If they were to wean themselves off the US dollar, the Indians selling goods to Brazil would have to hold the money in the form of Brazilian reais. And the Brazilians would have to hold Indian rupees. This is not at present hugely convenient. But, with their sanctions and tariffs, Biden and Trump have encouraged the Brics countries to move toward trading in local currencies.

The Brics have already started to develop a payment system, Brics Pay, which is based on the same technology as cryptocurrencies. When it’s finally ready to be rolled out, it will make it easier, cheaper and faster for member countries to pay each other in their own currencies. The real appeal of Brics Pay, however, is that the more you can shift your invoicing into local currencies, the less vulnerable you become to US sanctions. In recent years, the US has used its dominance of global financial markets as a weapon to impose its political will on other countries — largely by threatening to cut off local banks from the US dollar markets. Even China is not immune to this. Right now, the US still enjoys what is known as an exorbitant privilege, but it is a privilege that depletes each time it is used.

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Where do the Europeans fit into this picture? The EU and India are currently negotiating a trade deal that is due to be wrapped up by the end of the year. A deal could help both parties to reduce their dependence on the US. Yet there are still big issues to be sorted out in the next round of talks later this month, including Indian duties on cars, and compliance with climate targets.

Even if the deal is agreed, I doubt it will be a game-changer for India. A trade deal with the EU could help India nudge up its growth rates a little. But real change will come from within. India’s bigger game is high tech, and AI will be a big driver of economic growth. European governments talk about AI as if it’s some kind of eccentric American thing. Meanwhile, the Indians have made concrete plans to use AI to improve the productivity of manufacturing. That’s where the future growth will come from. Intra-Asian trade will become more important, but we must not forget that large economies, such as the US or India, derive most of their growth internally. They are not as reliant on trade as European countries typically are.

Once India reduces its dependency on the US, it will not go back to the old days even if Trump is replaced by a Democrat. The US will remain an important power for a long time, with unmatched military strength. China will be the dominant power of the Eurasian continent, supported by Russia. India will play its own game. The Europeans will be stuck between those two systems. They have no strategy of their own to prosper in a world that is becoming less America-centric.

What perhaps left the deepest impression on me during my trip to India was the degree of strategic patience at play. Modi set his economic goal for 2047. China also thinks in terms of timelines way beyond policy horizons in the West. In his 2011 book On China, Henry Kissinger wrote about the Chinese premier: “When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai replied: ‘It is too early to tell.’” I always thought of Zhou Enlai’s comment as a joke about how the Chinese think. These days, I am no longer so sure. He might have been dead serious.

Offering Kurilla a friendly handshake — and Dan Caine, America’s top military officer, an invite to his Pakistani homeland — Field Marshal Asim Munir is clearly at home in the Land of the Free. In June, for instance, he enjoyed a two-hour private lunch with Donald Trump, while Islamabad has also nominated the President for the Nobel Peace Prize, describing him as a “genuine peacemaker” who’d soon bring peace to Iran and Gaza alike. Never mind that Tehran is bloodied and Rafah a wasteland: such shameless toadying has long been central to Pakistani foreign policy. 

After all, there have to be some advantages to sharing your four land borders with the continent’s great powers of India and China, alongside the pariah states of Iran and Afghanistan. And if our new geopolitical era is to be defined by multilateral deal-making, atomic brinkmanship and vaulting duplicity, Pakistan would appear to be extraordinarily well positioned. There is, perhaps, no nation on Earth better at playing one set of interests off against another — especially when it’s the only Muslim nuclear power, and enjoys a robust tradition of self-interested military leaders keen to consolidate their own power.  

Munir has so far proved himself adept at negotiating these difficult waters. When he’s not glad-handing in America, he basks in the afterglow of what is seen (in Pakistan at least) as a “triumph” over India, after the two countries seemed poised to enter full-scale conflict over the disputed territory of Kashmir earlier this year. Not one to waste an opportunity, Munir had initially used the 12-day war between Iran and Israel to consolidate Pakistan’s growing influence in the region and present itself as a useful and, if needs be, servile partner to the US.

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Certainly, Munir himself is keen to oblige. During his lunch at the White House, he presented himself as a trusted source of information on Iran, discussing rare-earth minerals and bitcoin mining contracts — and apparently receiving a MAGA hat for his troubles. Pakistanis know Iran “better than most,” Trump told reporters following the meeting. 

Pakistani officials were also in Washington in July, dangling lucrative mining contracts in front of American firms; promising to buy American cotton and soy; and vowing to devote 2000MW of electricity (a coal-fired power station’s worth) to bitcoin mining, the latter a flattering imitation of the Trump family’s own grand crypto scheme. Islamabad has also co-signed a “letter of intent” with Trump’s pet syndicate, World Liberty Financial, vowing to cooperate on blockchain and stablecoin adoption. 

The general idea is clearly to discourage US tariffs — not least given Pakistani factories produce many of the cheap consumables so beloved of American voters. And, it must be said, Islamabad has lately managed to get its tariff down to 19%: not ideal, but better than the 29% previously threatened. Either way, Pakistan knows better than most how to be a client state. If all this results in American investment, Munir will congratulate himself on having played a storming innings on a tough wicket.

Promoted to Field Marshal in May following the “triumph” over India, Munir has managed to promote himself from the depths of unpopularity to become his country’s ruler in all but name. As his frequent transatlantic trips imply, even the White House has played along: he’s now the go-to interlocutor in Washington, with Pakistan’s hapless civilian politicians left twiddling their thumbs. 

All this is part of a broader strategic plan. For if rekindling animosity against India, helped Munir consolidate his power, the Trump-led ceasefire — Modi’s government vehemently denies the idea of US intervention — has further established Pakistan’s aspirations of parity with India. That there would be the need for global mediation contradicts Indian assertions that they are the subcontinent’s hegemon, and it undermines New Delhi’s insistence that all issues with Pakistan, including Kashmir, can only be discussed bilaterally. 

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In many ways, this year’s India-Pakistan crisis foreshadowed the Israel-Iran conflict. In both Kashmir and Palestine, there are Muslim populations under the occupation of non-Muslim militaries. In both Kashmir and Palestine, jihadi proxies of Pakistan and Iran have sought to liberate these Muslim populations with attacks on civilians. In turn, India and Israel have both targeted military infrastructure in Pakistan and Iran that they deem to be existential threats. 

And while Israel’s war specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, prompting America’s involvement, it was similarly Pakistan’s possession of a nuclear arsenal that fast-tracked the American-negotiated ceasefire. To reiterate: Pakistan is the sole Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal — something its leaders have described explicitly as an “Islamic bomb”. For the past two months, Trump hasn’t failed to miss an opportunity to remind the world that he was the man who “stopped nuclear war”. 

Whether or not going nuclear was even remotely considered by Munir, the mere suggestion of escalation not only won Pakistan the ceasefire — but also focused American minds on Pakistan at a moment when it had progressively fallen under Chinese influence. 

China has invested heavily in Pakistani infrastructure in the past decades via its Belt and Road initiative, creating the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which gives Beijing vital access to Pakistani ports. However, it has done so in the face of increased resentment and symbolic attacks on Chinese targets, including a 2018 attack on its consulate in Karachi. China, for its part, has responded by micromanaging Pakistan, transforming the country into a de facto colony. 

Still, it was ironically Pakistan’s successful use of Chinese military equipment, shooting down two Indian fighter planes, that prompted the US return to the aid of Islamabad; in recent years, America has counted on Indian military strength as a counterbalance to China. This is precisely the sort of complicated balance of power that Pakistan is now poised to exploit, by playing American and Chinese interests off against one another to get the best deals out of the two competing world powers.

No less important to the US is the influence that Pakistan wields to its north. Pakistan is now a key part of the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition of Sunni states, orchestrated by Riyadh, whose aim is to counter the influence of Iran and its Shia allies in the region. Indeed, Pakistan has allowed Salafi jihadi proxies funded by Saudi Arabia to flourish in the region for decades.

This is why, as Israel and Iran clashed, Pakistan joined a host of Muslim countries in condemning the Jewish state, even as it prepared for the downfall of the Shia one. Pakistan was careful to distance itself from Tehran’s wishful claim that Pakistan would lend it military support against Israel — and went so far as to close the border with Iran to prove the point.

Field Marshal Munir will now be bracing for the call of duty. Should the collapse of the Islamist regime in Tehran throw the country into chaos, or should the existing regime fail to follow through with the updated nuclear agreement, it seems likely that the eager Pakistan army would be called into service at the behest of the Americans. The US won’t want the Islamist in Tehran to obtain a nuclear bomb with the connivance of the Islamist regime in Islamabad that already has one.

If there are contradictions inherent in all of this, Pakistan has form. After all, Islamabad famously took money from America to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, only to allow jihadist groups to run amok with its notorious “Good Taliban, Bad Taliban” strategy. This backfired, though, when the Afghan Taliban — the good one, as opposed to the bad one — was close to establishing official ties with Iran in the lead-up to the recent clashes. The Taliban regime in Kabul will now look to increase its own push for Trump’s recognition, offering to serve American interests in Iran. That, it goes without saying, would be a nightmare scenario for the Pakistani army.

Small wonder, then, that Pakistan is now attempting to position itself as a vital US partner in the region: a haven for crypto speculation, a mine of rare earth minerals, whatever the environmental or the human cost. But the West should be careful. For this is also a state that has harbored jihadis who launched attacks on American soil, has all but given up on democracy — and, a little over two months ago, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Even so, Pakistan’s attempts at flattery are working. If Trump does indeed win the Nobel Peace Prize, it would represent a significant victory for Pakistan, and a global recognition of the country’s triumph over India. It would also be the supreme vindication of Asim Munir’s playbook: why make peace when you can make deals?

Luckily, Indians did not take the bait. Tourists have continued to visit Kashmir, and there was no inter-religious violence in India. But New Delhi could scarcely be expected to tolerate what was the worst terror strike against its civilians since 2008, when Pakistani terrorists butchered their way through Mumbai for several days. The masterminds behind that atrocity remain free citizens in Pakistan, protected by its armed forces and intelligence agencies. “How much will India endure?” the Washington Post asked, almost two decades ago, in response to a series of Pakistan-backed terrorist assaults against India. At the time, India’s patience seemed Himalayan. The secular government that then ruled India, deeply invested in forging lasting peace with Pakistan through uninterrupted dialogue, withstood every act of aggression that sought to derail its economic progress and social cohesion.

India’s habits changed once Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who campaigned on the promise to punish Pakistan for its sponsorship of terror, was elected prime minister in 2014. Modi agreed with those who believed that possession of nuclear weapons should not grant Pakistan impunity to bleed India through its jihadist proxies. Still, Modi at first went out of his way to improve relations with Islamabad, making an unscheduled stop in Lahore in 2015 to deepen ties with its civilian leadership. Within days of his return to India, however, an airbase was hit by a terrorist raid. India’s effort to launch a joint investigation with Pakistan went nowhere. When another terrorist strike targeted an Indian army outpost later that year, Modi ordered military action against terrorist installations across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir between Pakistan and India. Three years later, in 2019, he authorized a second cross-frontier operation in response to another terrorist provocation.

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The magnitude of last month’s horror, however, meant that New Delhi had failed to establish deterrence and had to step up its response and heighten the costs for Pakistan. It therefore selected and struck targets not only inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but also in the province of Punjab, the nucleus of power in Pakistan. Yet, despite this being the largest aerial assault suffered by Pakistan since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, none of the country’s military installations were affected. Indeed, India consciously spared them, hoping to avoid escalating the crisis into a full-blown conflict. If this was the off-ramp embedded in India’s operation, Pakistan seems unwilling to take it. Islamabad has already vowed retaliation, and there has been severe shelling of civilian areas on the Indian side of the LOC in Kashmir. India, for its part, has ordered nationwide drills in preparation for incursions from across the border. Today, a swarm of Indian drones appeared in the skies above major Pakistani cities; one destroyed an air defense battery in Lahore, the capital of Punjab; another crashed in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani army. While reiterating that it is committed to “non-escalation”, New Delhi is also emphasizing that the ball is in Pakistan’s court: if Islamabad refuses to back down, India is willing to intensify its operations.

Will there be a war? India and Pakistan have pulled back from the brink in the past, most notably in 2001 when Pakistan-backed terrorists attempted to storm the Indian parliament. There is, moreover, an unspoken conviction on both sides that the other will honor this tradition. Such confidence, alas, is misplaced — as is the belief that nuclear weapons will never enter the equation. In 1999, the Pakistani army deployed atomic weapons against India but withdrew them under intense pressure from the United States. At the same time, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is dangerously vulnerable to seizure by rogue elements: at least half a dozen Pakistani nuclear facilities have weathered attacks by jihadis bred by its own armed forces to bleed India. AQ Khan, the metallurgist who built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb using blueprints he stole from civilian nuclear facilities in the West that once employed him, tried to sell nuclear technology on the black market to a long list of customers that included Iran and North Korea.

India’s conventional superiority may tempt Pakistan to deploy its weapon of last resort. For the event of war, Pakistan has produced tactical nuclear warheads to hurl at columns of Indian soldiers punching into its territory. Even without the use of nuclear weapons, a full-scale war, while devastating Pakistan, would leave India worse off. Islamabad would lose relatively less because it has so little to lose. Its politics are riven by corruption; its economy has imploded; and the country effectively survives on the benevolence of foreign lenders.

India, with all its problems, is marching ahead economically. Between 2012 and 2022, the country lifted 170 million people out of poverty. A war with Pakistan would squander the energies and resources it needs to improve the lives of its citizens. The journalist Fareed Zakaria once described Pakistan as a burglar who enters your house and threatens to blow his brains out on your most precious carpet if you don’t give him what he wants. Pakistan’s greatest weapon against India is its ability to frustrate its rival’s progress by bogging it down in a war it can ill afford.

India must therefore de-escalate this crisis — and not merely for its short-term prosperity. Avoiding further entanglement with Pakistan is equally vital for its future stability. The animosity between the two countries is a product of national ideologies that are irreconcilable: one regards itself as the authentic home of the subcontinent’s Muslims; the other sees itself, at least in theory, as the practitioner of a pluralistic secular nationalism that transcends religion. One nullifies the other, and the two can coexist only if they exist in isolation. This explains why the longest bouts of peace between the two nations occurred when they spurned each other. Like a divorced couple, both countries — especially Pakistan — need time apart to develop independent cultural identities. Sadly, to the detriment of their peoples, both countries have been in each other’s faces ever since the British left the subcontinent.

Invented to serve as a haven for India’s Muslim faithful, Pakistan has sought to legitimize its existence by remaking itself into a guardian of the faith. The people who make up Pakistan were, only a few generations ago, mostly lower-caste Hindus who converted — or were forced to convert — to Islam. But the state suppressed the pre-Islamic culture of the territories upon which it was grafted, and it glorified Arab Muslim figures from the past who had once pillaged, molested and murdered the forebears of modern-day Pakistanis.

Pakistan’s rulers invoked religion to unite its people against “Hindu India” almost from the moment of the state’s birth, dispatching “irregular” jihadists in 1947 — within weeks of India’s Partition — to annex Kashmir, which was then a sovereign kingdom. The Kashmiris, rather than surrender, fought back and sought India’s help to repel the invaders. After Kashmir’s accession to India, the state’s first democratically elected leader, Sheikh Abdullah, a wildly popular socialist, laid out the choices before Kashmiris. India’s commitment to “secular democracy based upon justice, freedom and equality,” he explained, negated the “argument that the Muslims of Kashmir cannot have security in India.” India’s constitution, Abdullah said, “has amply and finally repudiated the concept of a religious state, which is a throwback to medievalism.” Abdullah denounced Pakistan, a quasi-theocracy that had just waged a war to seize Kashmir, as “a feudal state” where “the appeal to religion constitutes a sentimental and a wrong approach.” But his rejection of Pakistan was also a reminder to New Delhi that secularism was the non-negotiable condition of Kashmir’s allegiance to India. Kashmiris, he said, “will never accept a principle which seeks to favor the interests of one religion or social group against another.”

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Will India and Pakistan go to war?

By Swift Centre Forecasters

Over the past decade, India has come close to becoming what Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, most feared: a Hindu Pakistan. The ongoing conflict with Pakistan appears to have reminded India’s current rulers of the value of Indian pluralism. New Delhi has gone out of its way to emphasize its composite nature. It even delegated the job of briefing the world about India’s military action to a female colonel who happens to be Muslim. If this confrontation with an explicitly ethno-religious state reminds Indians — and the Indian government — of the value of the religious, linguistic and cultural multiplicity at home, it will have been worth it.

But an India that is successful at holding together its diversity is regarded as a threat by Pakistan because it debunks its foundational logic that Muslims and Hindus are two immiscible nations that cannot live together. And so Pakistan perpetuates the harrowing memory of India’s Partition by keeping alive the conflict in Kashmir. Pakistan’s khaki-clad rulers do not care about the people of Kashmir — a fact they have demonstrated over and over by luring young Kashmiri men into terror training camps and returning them as human bombs. Neither does it care about Kashmir’s territory: in 1963, it ceded a portion of the state under its occupation to China. Its proclamations of Islamic solidarity, too, have its limits: for a state that endlessly denounces India, Israel and France for their treatment of Muslims, Pakistan is always happy to defend China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

India cannot fix any of this. The best it can hope to do is isolate itself from Pakistan. New Delhi must clearly prepare itself for Pakistan’s counter-reaction. But if and when Pakistan retaliates, rather than responding, India should be prepared to move on, pursuing the diplomatic isolation of Pakistan and enhancing domestic security. Complete detachment from Pakistan, combined with strengthened defense at home, is what India owes its people.

The killing of 26 civilians would be bad news anywhere in the world, but in Kashmir, it could be far worse. Tensions between the two nations have always been high, ever since they were split up in the partitioning of British India in 1947, but in recent years they have increased still further.

Kashmir is often at the centre of those tensions. Although formally part of India, it has been granted special, largely autonomous status since partition, but in 2019 India effectively ended that, leading Pakistan to downgrade diplomatic relations and suspend trade. 

Last week’s attacks have seemingly brought the two countries to the brink of conflict: India’s government accused Pakistan of supporting the attack, while Pakistan said it expected a retaliatory assault by Indian forces.

A war could have profound consequences. India is increasingly a manufacturing powerhouse; notably, it is the world’s largest supplier of generic pharmaceutical drugs. India also sits upstream of its neighbor in the huge Indus river system, which Pakistan relies on for its agriculture and energy generation: after the attacks, New Delhi suspended the 65-year-old Indus Water Treaty pledging not to limit water flows, raising fears that it could use water as a weapon. And, of course, both countries have nuclear weapons: an escalating conflict between the two could lead to history’s first nuclear exchange.

All that makes it vital to understand the likely outcomes of the attack. The Swift Centre, a not-for-profit which helps organisations improve their ability to predict and respond to the future, commissioned its global network of professional, award-winning forecasters to make rapid predictions of those outcomes. Specifically, the organisation’s forecasters looked at the chance of conflict itself; and then, if that conflict does happen, how likely a major escalation would be, the likely impacts on pharmaceutical exports, the Indus Water Treaty, and the risks of nuclear war.

Q1: Will the national military forces, militia, and/or law enforcement personnel of India and Pakistan engage in a lethal confrontation resulting in at least 100 uniformed casualties before May 15?

Average forecast: 8.5%, range 2% to 28%

The forecasters were first asked how likely they thought a significant conventional conflict was: specifically, a conflict causing at least 100 uniformed casualties between the two countries in the next two weeks.

They thought it was relatively unlikely, although not out of the question, and some thought the risk was significant.

Usually, forecasters start by trying to assess the base rate of such events: how often they happen in ordinary times, an initial position which can then be updated with new information. 

One of them noted that while tensions are high and occasional border disputes happen, large armed conflicts between official state forces are rare: “the 1999 Kargil Conflict was the last time that fatalities reached three digits. Before that, it was in 1990.”

There have been smaller skirmishes since then, but deaths have never gone beyond double figures. As a starting point, then, some forecasters thought that the base rate should be low: In the 35 years since 1990 there have been only two conflicts that would have counted, giving an annual base rate of less than 6%. Since the forecast only looks ahead two weeks, the base rate should be correspondingly lower.

Others thought that since some cross-border skirmishing has already begun, a better way to find a base rate would be looking at how many such skirmishes turn into larger conflicts. Since the last official war between the two countries in 1971, one forecaster counted six smaller conflicts, of which, they argued, only one – 1999 – unambiguously reached the threshold for today’s forecast, giving a per-incident base rate of about 15%. 

But India has unequivocally said it would respond, and Pakistan has begun moving troops into Kashmir. “Clearly this is the most significant crisis facing the two countries since 2019,” one said. Another argued that “India-Pakistan conflicts have generally been nothingburgers over the last few decades” but there are reasons to think that this time is different: levels of nationalism are extremely high in both countries, and animosity has been growing; Pakistan is in the grip of a long-running economic and social crisis, and war with India could boost its regime’s faltering legitimacy; and Israel’s attack on Hamas has provided precedent for major cross-border attacks in response to terrorism incidents. Also, the US, usually a broker between the two, appears not to be engaging.

On the other side of the ledger, two weeks is a very short time, and “nuclear deterrence, economic fragility, and third-party diplomatic pressure” all act as brakes on escalation, a forecaster argued.

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Q2. Will the total combined number of fatalities among the national military forces, militia, and/or law enforcement personnel of India and Pakistan exceed 1,000 before June 30, 2025?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 19% (range 3.6% to 35%)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 2.3% (range 0.5% to 8.5%)

The forecasters were also asked about the chance of a larger war breaking out this summer. Specifically they were asked the probability of it if the smaller 100-casualty conflict happened, and if it didn’t.

In short, they thought that if there weren’t 100 casualties by May 15, it was very unlikely (2.3% chance). Some went as high as 8.5%, but on the whole they thought that it is “really unlikely that there will be nothing for 15 days then something this huge.”

But if there are 100 or more casualties, then the probability of a serious war starts to get very worrying. One of the more optimistic forecasters said that even if the number is reached, “the goal of both sides will be to tamp down hostilities before they get out of control,” but others were far less sanguine: 100 casualties would imply “fierce and fraught” fighting, and emotions would be running high in both countries, increasing the chance of escalation. “If there are 100 or more fatalities in the next two weeks, then I see a one-in-three probability of reaching four digits by June 30.”

Q3. Will the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) between India and Pakistan, which governs the distribution of water from the Indus River basin, be fully reinstated by December 31st, 2025?

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 67% (range 40% to 98%)

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 22% (range 2.3% to 66%)

The IWT is a point of significant tension between India and Pakistan, as noted above. India’s cabinet announced on April 23, after the Kashmir attacks, that the treaty was “held in abeyance with immediate effect, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism.”

It’s the first time the treaty has ever been suspended since its 1960 introduction, including during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan wars and many smaller conflicts.

The forecasters therefore felt that assuming the skirmishing dies down before 100 deaths are reached, it is likely to be reinstated. However, if there is a significant conflict – as in the 100 deaths scenario – “it will be politically more difficult for both sides to reinstate the treaty before the end of the year,” one forecaster argued. 

One forecaster thought that India might see the conflict as a pretext to end a treaty which it no longer wants to abide by, “to claim more of the water for consumption and power generation.” A larger-scale attack makes that pretext stronger.

On the other hand, there does not seem to be provision in the treaty for either side to unilaterally exit, making the pretext weaker, and China – which controls the headwaters of the Indus and thus has leverage over India – would likely put pressure on New Delhi.

Some forecasters noted that the outcome is more likely to be symbolic than practical, since India probably does not have the capability to significantly alter the course of the Indus, but one argued that recent infrastructure improvements “provide the capacity to store the water on a massive scale, which allows India to more meaningfully leverage water as a weapon of war in the longer term.”

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Q4. What will be the total value, in USD, of pharmaceutical exports from India during the calendar year 2025?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: $29 billion (80% confidence interval: $22 billion to $34 billion)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: $31 billion (80% confidence interval: $24 billion to $35 billion)

India’s generic pharmaceuticals industry accounts for around one-25th of its total exports, and the sector has been growing at spectacular rates for the last several years. If a war halted or significantly reduced them, it would hurt both India’s economy and several countries’ medical supply stocks. 

The forecasters felt that even in the event of a conflict causing 100 or more casualties, the impact on Indian pharma was likely to be low. “Only a major, massively destructive full-blown war will significantly affect Indian pharmas and their exports,” one forecaster. 

Partly that is because Pakistan is only a small export market, while the US accounts for around $7 billion of the roughly $30 billion exported a year, and Washington would be unlikely to reduce those purchases as a result of a war.

One forecaster noted that two major Indian ports are in Gujarat, a state on the border with Pakistan, which might be a problem for exports should a war break out. But they also said that the bulk of pharmaceutical exports go through the port in Mumbai, further south and likely outside any naval conflict zones. They also said that the war would be unlikely to involve naval battles: “Air strikes and special forces/ground forces have been the preferred responses in previous conflicts.”

Several forecasters thought that a much more imminent threat to the Indian pharma sector was US tariffs.

Q5. Will either India or Pakistan use a nuclear weapon, including tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons, in the context of a military conflict between India and Pakistan?

If there are 100 or more uniformed casualties by May 15: 3.3% (range: 0% to 5%)

If there are fewer than 100 uniformed casualties by May 15: 1.6% (range: 0% to 1.4%)

Surely the question that weighs most heavily on people’s minds. Reassuringly, the forecasters felt that a nuclear war was unlikely even in the event of a significant conflict, although a one-in-30 chance is still worryingly high. “I just don’t think India and Pakistan want the current conflict to escalate,” one said, “and I can’t imagine either side wanting or planning to use a nuclear weapon first.” So unless the two sides misread each other’s intentions, or there’s some sort of accident – not impossible in a tense and volatile environment with two countries with poorly defined chains of command – then nuclear war is unlikely.

One raised the possibility of a “mad major” scenario, in which a local commander has launch control over tactical nuclear weapons and uses one to slow an enemy advance, but “while there is uncertainty over Pakistan’s safety mechanisms on nuclear weapons,” it does seem that the warheads are kept separate from launch vehicles, making such an outcome less likely.

Another forecaster argued that the “mad major” might not be necessary: Pakistani military doctrine explicitly envisages using tactical nuclear weapons if they are losing a conventional war. And its threshold of when to use nuclear weapons is “unclear and relatively uncommunicated”, meaning India’s efforts to fight a limited war against it could accidentally trigger it.

All that said, the forecasters all felt that in either scenario, nuclear escalation was an unlikely outcome. The two sides have had nuclear weapons for decades now, and even previous major conflicts, like 1999, did not lead to nuclear exchange. “The Kargil War has shown that it is possible to prevent nuclear escalation even at higher casualty levels in conventional conflict,” one said, although “a massive conventional escalation threatening the territorial status quo in Kashmir could indeed trigger a Pakistani nuclear reaction, even if only tactical.”

Emergency, which lately appeared in Indian cinemas, portrays the 21 months from June 1975 that Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled the country by decree. Citing rising political violence, and long-standing tensions with Pakistan, the Premier’s actions have been deeply controversial ever since. But if you know anything about Kangana Ranaut, you shouldn’t expect subtlety alongside your popcorn. For beyond producing, directing and starring in Emergency, the 38 year old is also a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

As a Hindu nationalist outfit, the BJP has always loathed Gandhi’s secular brand of politics. That’s clear enough from those billboards: Ranaut’s Indira practically snarls, a narcissistic demagogue as flames smolder ominously behind. Not that she’s alone. For decades, after all, politicians here have understood the immense power of the big screen, especially when so many Indians remain illiterate. Yet if Indira Gandhi’s own Indian National Congress exploited movies in the past, the BJP is doing something new, borrowing its links to the stars to dehumanize its foes — not just long-dead Gandhis, but many millions of Muslim citizens too, a strategy that could yet turn deadly.

Since independence, Indian politicians have reveled in the silver screen. The cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, the heyday of Congress rule, reflected Jawaharlal Nehru’s founding vision of socialist nation building. One classic example here is Ab Dilli Dur Nahi (“Now Delhi is Not Far Away”). Released in 1957, it follows a young boy who visits the capital to secure justice for his falsely imprisoned father, pleading his case to none other than Nehru himself. Other movies from this period invoke similar progressive pieties, lionizing ethnic minorities and assailing greedy landlords.

At the same time, Congress was happy to ban any movies it didn’t like. In 1975, for instance, it temporarily repressed Aandhi because it apparently drew on Gandhi’s relationship with her estranged husband. It’s a strategy that continued for as long as Congress was in power. In 2014, to give one example, it banned Kaum De Heere (“Gems of the Community”) because it allegedly glorified Gandhi’s killers. Gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards, in 1984, they claimed revenge for an attack by Indian troops on the Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine in Sikhism. Politically, if not ethically, such sensitivity makes sense. Indian politicians have for long understood that cinema can sway voters in their favor. Boasting a vibrant film industry even before independence from Britain, in 2023 the sector pulled in $1.3 billion, with the industry pumping out some 1,500 films a year.

Yet if Congress pulled the plug on films for political gain, and on releases they felt could spark communal strife, its BJP successors have embraced film far more aggressively. Over their decade dominating the country’s politics, indeed, what can only be described as Hindu nationalist propaganda has flooded Indian cinemas. It’s worth returning to Emergency here, with Ranaut using her film to effectively paraphrase Modi that Gandhi’s rule by decree “was a dark chapter” in the country’s history. Considering Gandhi used the Emergency to suppress a range of Hindu nationalist organizations, that antipathy makes sense.

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In truth, though, BJP-aligned films usually have a far bigger target in mind than the Gandhis: Muslims. It’s a history that runs deep. The BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), exists largely to undermine the Muslim presence in India, ever since its formation as a quasi-fascist organization back in 1925. Vinayak Savarkar, the group’s founder, carefully curated the idea of Indian freedom from the British Empire, even as he hoped to be free of Muslims too, envisaging a state where Hindus reigned supreme. Even today, leaders from both the BJP and RSS label Muslims as “terrorists” and “termites” — and just a few weeks ago, a BJP official in the southern state of Kerala told Muslims to “go to Pakistan” if they weren’t happy in India.

Certainly, these ideas are reflected in BJP-backed movies. A case in point is The Sabarmati Report. Released in November 2024, and produced tax-free after support by BJP officials, it covers an infamous 2002 pogrom in the northwestern state of Gujarat. The violence apparently started after an argument between Hindu pilgrims, returning from a shrine on the Sabarmati Express, and Muslim vendors at Godhra station. Even 22 years on, the details of what happened next remain murky. But what’s certain is that a fire started in one of the train’s carriages, killing 59, before vengeful Hindu mobs massacred over 1,000 random Muslims, raping and torturing as they went.

Watch the film, though, and you’ll get a rather different impression of what happened, with The Sabarmati Report bluntly blaming Muslims for the death of the pilgrims while ignoring the butchery that followed. Tellingly, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the slaughter — and was quick to praise the film, which earned almost 300 million Indian rupees. “It is good that this truth is coming out in a way that is accessible to everyone,” he wrote on X. “A fake narrative can only last so long — facts eventually prevail.” Statements like these unsurprisingly make India’s 170 million Muslims queasy, especially when Modi had the film screened at an auditorium in Parliament House, an event also featuring both the information and broadcasting minister and the defense minister.

And if victims and their families have little to cheer from The Sabarmati Report, films that cover the massacre more evenly have also been repressed. In January 2023, for instance, the BJP invoked emergency laws to block a BBC documentary examining Modi’s role during the riots. A month later, India’s Income Tax Department raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai, ultimately forcing the corporation to restructure its activities in the country. Feature films covering the pogrom have also faced legal challenges. That includes Kai Po Che, a 2013 movie that petitioners claimed unfairly blamed Hindus for the violence.

Nor, of course, is this simply a matter of a single film, or a single act of communal slaughter from many years ago. Rather, Modi and the BJP have developed close links with Bollywood to promote their jingoistic brand of Hinduism. As Kangana Ranaut hints, that begins with the stars themselves, with several backing the party in their public statements. And if it’s hard to know where ideology ends and professional expediency starts — Vicky Kaushal is just one of the actors to get big after playing a Hindu hero, with the rugged 36-year-old netting a National Film Award for his troubles — there are other links here too. That’s clear enough financially: several pro-BJP movies have received the same tax-free treatment as The Sabarmati Report. It helps, too, that Maharashtra, the home of Bollywood, is now under Hindu nationalist rule, with several stars recently attending the swearing-in ceremony of the state’s BJP president.

And if all this again speaks to the enduring power of cinema as a political tool in India, hardly surprising when 25% of people still can’t read and write, you equally get the sense that many films are best understood as telling one single story: Muslims are a danger to Indian life. One good example The Kashmir Files, which implausibly depicts the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus as a genocide systematically arranged Kashmiri Muslims, even though many actually fought to protect their Hindu neighbors. Article 370 covers similar themes, while The Kerala Story feels even more crass. Depicting Muslims as brutes intent on smuggling vulnerable Hindu girls into ISIS slavery, the film’s marketing initially suggested 32,000 women had suffered such a fate — until complaints forced the filmmakers to clarify that the blockbuster only compiled the “true stories of three young girls”.

Like with The Sabarmati Report, meanwhile, these movies have explicitly received the Modi mark of approval. And if that’s another reason for ambitious directors to stay on side — a good word from him can see box office takes soar — filmmakers have delved deeper into history to make their politics clear. One good example is the 2020 film Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Released during Modi’s second term, and set in the 17th century, it paints the subcontinent’s Muslim Mughal rulers as barbaric, bloodthirsty monsters, whose ultimate goal is the economic and political subjugation of Hindus.

Nor, of course, is cinema the only place that the BJP is flexing its anti-Muslim muscles. From its muzzling of journalists, to its lavish funding of friendly broadcasters, it’s little wonder Reporters Without Borders ranks India 159th for press freedom worldwide. The media, for its part, is happy to oblige its paymasters: in 2020 several Indian news channels blamed Muslims for Covid. Though they never questioned how the BJP’s faulty vaccine provision resulted in mounting deaths, they did promote conspiracy theories claiming Muslims were intentionally spreading the disease.

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Not, of course, that this matters simply for India’s spiraling international reputation. On the contrary, Modi’s usurpation of his country’s media is having a real-world impact on the safety of Muslims. In 2023 alone, India Hate Lab, a Washington DC-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, recorded 668 hate speech examples targeting Muslims. Even more striking, there’s suggestive evidence that calumny against Muslims in the cinema can have a practical impact on the streets. Admittedly, the line between media and violence is hard to trace explicitly, but it’s surely telling that 59 cases of communal violence were reported in India last year, a significant rise on the 32 from 2023. Other links are even more explicit. After the release of The Kashmir Files, anti-Muslim videos soon went viral on WhatsApp, with one exhorting Hindus to shoot the “traitors” in their midst. Muslims themselves are clearly worried too, with one opposition politician comparing The Kashmir Files to Nazi propaganda.

Together with other ominous signs — an amendment to India’s citizenship act, coupled with a national register of citizens, may leave millions of Indian Muslims liable to detention and deportation — and the future looks bleak. That’s especially when you examine upcoming releases in Indian cinemas. One example is Chhava. Scheduled for release next month, it features a Hindu hero (once again) decimating evil Muslim kings. If only by comparison, Emergency almost feels balanced.

Nationalists, for whom history is no more than an accoutrement of righteous vindication, have annexed their arguments. So it is that a fairly recondite debate turning on economies of old has acquired new geopolitical significance. Accordingly, a crude heuristic now has it that Frankopan is on Team China, and Dalrymple on Team India.

But they are, truth be told, on the same team. The presiding impulse of their respective books, The Silk Roads and The Golden Road — both on global trade — is to vanquish that old foe, seriously hobbled but not quite dead: Eurocentrism. Hence the emphasis on cultural diffusion, seen in the popular imagination as a set of Western bequests to a benighted East. Here, by contrast, the aim is to show that traffic was in great measure, though by no means entirely, in the reverse direction.

There is, of course, a difference in emphasis in their accounts — Frankopan being a Byzantinist, and Dalrymple an Indianist. Yet the world-historical objective is the same — guided, one surmises, by their similar intellectual formation. Born to a Dalmatian father and Swedish mother, Frankopan was fired by the lectures of Jonathan Shepard, a historian of the Byzantine world at Cambridge. His debut was an account of The First Crusade that swapped Latin for Greek sources, reversing the conventional gaze. Dalrymple, a Highland aristocrat, also passed through Cambridge before cutting his teeth as a travel writer, traversing the same subcontinental lands as some of his forebears. For both, then, there were strong biographical imperatives that militated against insularity. With such backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that they didn’t turn out to be little Englanders.

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This habit of mind was aligned to a historical sensibility. Born in 1965 and 1971, respectively, Dalrymple and Frankopan belong to the same cohort, coming of age as writers at a time when the British reading public was happily devouring 1,000-page tomes on, say, the French and Russian Revolutions. It was an age when doorstopper histories sold like air-fryer cookbooks, which is to say an age that lent itself easily to public-facing history. Happily, it was also an age relatively innocent of precarious contracts and pretentious postmodernism; pecuniary considerations and the stylistic dictates of the academy would prevent many from scaling the heights of public intellectualdom in a later age. Dalrymple took up the cudgels for popular history with a quartet on the Raj — a darker riff on Jan Morris’s trilogy — before moving backwards to Indian antiquity. Frankopan, by contrast, moved in both directions, encompassing the longue durée in histories of the Silk Road and climate change.

Billed as a “new history of the world”, no less, The Silk Roads offered a highly idiosyncratic take on global history, giving us the view from the Stans, as it were. Halford Mackinder called the region the world’s “heartland”, control over which is the sine qua non of global hegemony — a provocative argument when it was made in 1904, though these days seen as common wisdom in think-tank circles. Frankopan’s sweep — taking in the Achaemenids and Abbasids, commending the Persians and Mongols, depicted here not as barbaric cretins but as begetters of a sophisticated civilisation — no doubt had a touch of Whiggishness to it, confirming Herbert Butterfield’s wry observation that historical compression often tends towards upbeatness. One can see why Beijing’s mandarins fell head over heels with it. Trade gets top billing in these pages. War and prejudice — between Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim — often recede from view. This was the kind of feel-good story the architects of a new Silk Road could get behind.

All the same, Frankopan was at pains to argue that the term itself was, in fact, of recent vintage. He didn’t go as far as Khodadad Rezakhani in dubbing it the “road that never was”, though he did maintain that the East-West carrying trade — ferrying money and maladies, goods and gods — coursed in the main through Indian ports. Overland routes from China were a minority taste. The fact is that no “Silk Road” ever existed in antiquity or mediaeval times. The Romans and Chinese were hardly aware of one another’s existence. On the other hand, Rome and India did a roaring trade in diamonds and drugs, amethysts and eunuchs, hair and diaphanous fabrics. Fast-forward a millennium to the 9th century, and it is still Gujarati entrepôts, topped up with the likes of Basra or Siraf in the Persian Gulf, doing the heavy-lifting.

Historically, the camel and caravan were no match for the ship. Across Central Asia, disconnection — not connection — was the norm. Then as now, sea transport was exponentially cheaper than land transport. Thanks to the revolution that is containerisation, these days it costs next to nothing to have your Shein jeans conveyed halfway across the world; the real expense, and environmental harm, lies in last-mile delivery. As it was, the “Silk Road” only became a proper thing in 1877. That is when the Prussian geographer Baron von Richthofen, enlisted to supply a fanciful genealogy for a railway linking Berlin and Beijing, coined the word. It was still later, in 1938, that the Silk Road made its Anglophone debut.

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William Dalrymple's colonial complex

By Samuel Rubinstein

These subtleties were lost in the reception of The Silk Roads. Coming at a time of the Middle Kingdom’s return to the world stage under state-capitalist aegis, the hype around it neatly dovetailed with the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s latest effort to win friends and buy influence. It followed that Beijing was unencumbered by real history, preferring a nostalgic version of it. As Don DeLillo’s quip has it: “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Very simply, the ancient Silk Road was good PR, another win for China’s “heritage diplomacy”.

It is only fitting, then, that the British Museum has cleared some precious Bloomsbury real estate to commemorate its (chimerical) existence in its blockbuster show. Not in any sense a work of Chinese propaganda, of course, the Silk Roads exhibition is nevertheless of a piece with the deceptive Silk Road Revival. Its message of global connection inevitably, if inadvertently, plays up its popular image as a Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre. Rather much is made of silk, a commodity that scarcely featured in international trade. Historically speaking, an emphasis on more important items — cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood — would have placed India to the fore. Indeed, as Dalrymple has argued, the elision of India in the show was striking, even as a great many of the exhibits screamed the Subcontinent. One suspects that the omission owed to curatorial parochialism, not a willingness to regurgitate Beijing’s talking points, but it was revealing all the same.

On this score, Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, published this year, is a salutary corrective to the Scylla of Sinocentrism. Yet in its upbeat Indocentric pushback, it makes itself vulnerable to the Charybdis of Hindu nationalist appropriation. Time was when India was number one, Dalrymple argues, exporting mathematics and medicine, music and mythology, religion and architecture across what he calls the “Indosphere” — “the Sanskrit ecumene” to pointy-heads in the know – spanning Kandahar and Singapore from c. 250 BC to AD 1200.

It’s a story that is bound to give Hindu nationalists hard-ons, not least because the Indosphere bears a passing resemblance to an akhand bharat — a Greater India fencing in much of Southeast Asia under direct rule from Delhi. This, apparently, was the way things were in Asia’s deep past. The more hare-brained of the Hindu nationalists, the historian Sara Perlangeli has shown, continue to harbour fantasies of an “offshore Hindu nation” protected by Delhi. Dalrymple’s own retort, prefigured in The Golden Road — that a great deal of ancient “Indian” soft power was of Buddhist, definitely not Hindu, stamp — one suspects falls on deaf ears in this puerile milieu.

Historians have no control over how their books are received — more’s the pity. Frankopan is under no illusions. “I know my place as a commentator and it’s not to shape answers for politicians… I’m a mere historian sitting in Oxford,” he has said with resigned candour. Dalrymple’s version could run: “…sitting in a farmhouse in Mehrauli.”

The Golden and Silk Roads have acquired lives of their own, as signs of forgotten, precolonial national greatness. Conceived at the outset as correctives to Eurocentric history, they will be read in an altogether different light in certain quarters. For the votaries of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” — Global Times editor Hu Xijin (who once likened Britain to a “bitch asking for a beating”), for instance, or China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua (who once called an American senator a “lifetime bitch”) — accounts of the Silk Road no doubt serve as comforting reminders of a seemingly endless golden age before the country’s “century of national humiliation”. In India, too, histories of precolonial gloire will go down swimmingly in milieux brimming with postcolonial resentment. One imagines India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar might cull a titbit or two from The Golden Road for inclusion in a future speech rehashing his obligatory swipes at “the West” and its “old habit” of imperialism.

Yet it can scarcely be denied that both India and China have long since ceased to be colonised nations. If anything, they are now both colonial powers in their own right. No longer the “sick man of Asia”, China today is the world’s largest debt collector. Exporting its surplus capital and flexing its military muscle, its ruling class has come to treat a large chunk of Southeast Asia — everything west of its so-called “9-dash line” — as its own private garden. Power projection on the high seas has gone hand in hand with economic exploitation further afield, with Chinese tycoons snapping up everything from Zambian copper to Liberian redwood.

India’s ruling class, likewise, has come to assume that it is the sole keyholder to the Indian Ocean, propping up favourable regimes from Mauritius to the Maldives. Again, the Indian national oil company’s stab at controlling Sudanese oil and the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s monopolisation of Ghana’s 5G network are hardly lessons in Third World solidarity.

Small wonder forgotten histories of Asian greatness are in such demand. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history”.

Insecurity, then, drove Hastings into devising the “system of conciliation”, essentially a vanity project that entailed winning over the déclassé intellectual elites of India to the Company cause. And so, surrounded by a coven of Hindu and Muslim clerics and thinkers, he was able to reinvent the Company man as a patron of the native intelligentsia. The upstart merchant-mercenary of yesterday was now the enlightened scholar-statesman of the new dispensation. As it was, the overwilling Hindu and Muslim pundits cynically, and perhaps understandably, treated the whole exercise as a power grab, letting on to the Company’s pen-pushers that they were the repositories of India’s unchanging laws. Their spurious claims about the existence of a fairly coherent body of “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” were taken at face value and willed into being.

With a few minor tweaks, it’s a system that still exists in India today. Under its original terms, the state abdicated responsibility on matters relating to inheritance, marriage, and divorce, ceding control over “personal law” to hastily appointed ultraconservative religious authorities. The upshot for Indian Muslims was a legal regime of shariatic derivation in which unilateral divorce without alimony was a male prerogative. The inheritance law was of a piece with this vision: sons were entitled to twice the share passed to daughters. This was just as well for the “orientalists” of the East India Company, enamoured of “authentic” native custom, even if no such thing existed. It likewise suited its more hard-nosed businessmen, anxious to rule on the cheap. Public law — land contracts, taxes — was kept in British hands, while pesky personal law was offloaded to priests.

Over the past quarter-millennium, no universalising countervailing influence has been able to breach this identitarian consensus. Indeed, only two serious stabs have been made by rationalists to undermine religious authority, the first of which was the zestful Utilitarian attack of the early 19th century on a range of religious customs. The second was the largely passive revolution of 1947, when the baton passed from an English to Indian elite, committed notionally to secularism. But Hindu and Muslim personal law remained on the books.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hastings is to blame for Modi, or that a direct line can be drawn from 1772 to 1992, when Hindu fanatics sparked nationwide riots after tearing down Babur’s Mosque, a pivotal episode in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rare though it was, precolonial India was no stranger to confessional violence between Hindus and Muslims, not least over matters of cow worship and slaughter. Yet the fact remains that Indians, in the main, clung to their primary identification as members of this and that sect and subcaste. It took British legal reform and Hindu and Muslim religious revivalism in the 18th century to convince a great many to start thinking of themselves above all as Hindus and Muslims.

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Devolution added a further fillip to fanaticism. As the franchise expanded from the 1860s on, and first councils and then provinces fell into Indian hands, religion offered a crude shorthand for political difference. Hindus and Muslims milked votes through their respective positions on cows, and increasingly the stakes went beyond bovine blood, also encompassing human flesh. Here was the unholy alliance between votes and violence that would have crippling consequences for the country after independence. And the arrival of the new intellectual current of nationalism only compounded this confessional problem. Deciding to mine the rich vein of national identity, the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, established in 1885, propounded an anticolonialism which amounted to a sentimental tribute to Hindu gods. It unsurprisingly found itself at loggerheads with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, which successfully lobbied for a Muslim quota in the services and in parliament, essentially an electoral extrapolation of the Hastings principle. If still far from a foregone conclusion, the road to Partition was now clear.

By the time the cantankerous and identity-obsessed Mohandas Gandhi seized control of the Congress in 1920, it was, in a sense, already too late for course correction. Rather favourably disposed to Muslims unlike many a rabidly prejudiced Congressman, Gandhi nevertheless inaugurated a political style that precluded any semblance of common ground between Hindus and Muslims. “My Hindus” could strike deals with, even befriend, “you Muslims”, but any alliance between the two faiths could only ever be skin-deep. The chasm between Hindu and Muslim was far too existential to warrant any meaningful connection with a member of the opposite team. More dismayingly, Gandhi’s handpicked henchmen didn’t so much as even pay lip service to the official ideology of secularism. By 1937, a mere 2.2% of the party membership was Muslim; at the time, one in four Indians swore by Islam. When the bulk of the provinces fell to the Congress that year, the trial run at independence revealed what a farcically one-sided affair the party was. Cow slaughter bans were introduced. In schools, idolatry was forced down the throats of hapless Muslims. Not long after, in 1940, Jinnah’s Muslim League would demand a separate homeland for Muslims.

So it was that when the Brits Brexited the subcontinent seven years later, the transfer of power was accompanied by a carve-up: a largely Hindu India achieved independence sandwiched by two pools of Pakistan snipped from its sides.

Since independence, Indians have struggled to make one nation out of two communities. Already in the early Fifties, a purge of Muslims had left the higher echelons of the civil service entirely devoid of minorities. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP — in power since 2014 — has given carte blanche to Hindu militias to break up interfaith marriages and bulldoze Muslim homes. Its new citizenship law is designed to disenfranchise millions of Muslims in the borderlands. In cities such as Ahmedabad, laws have been passed preventing Muslims from buying and renting property in Hindu areas.

Detached observers will rightly point out such enormities are par for the course in young democracies, where the demos falls hostage to the ethnos. Indeed, the Indian dilemma is far from unique. As in the former colony, so in the metropole. Postwar Britain, too, was after a fashion a new nation, having just emerged out of the British Empire. It is no accident that the rise of English nationalism in the mid-century was roughly coeval with the rise of Hindu nationalism. As the historian Olivette Otele has recently reminded us in African Europeans, race mattered rather little in Europe in the age of empire; prejudice turned instead on religion.

The experience of black Britons in the 20th century confirms this. In their brilliant sociology of the British elite since Victorian times, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman recall an interview with a black British woman who contrasted her experience of Oxbridge in the Seventies (“Don’t come to my room while my parents are here. They don’t like coloureds,” she was told) with that of her parents in Thirties Oxbridge (they “absolutely loved it, so I had a slightly rose-tinted view of the whole thing. So I walked into the kind of prejudice that my mother never met. She was met by a lot of curiosity, but not overt racism”.)

Their strikingly different experiences point to a broader phenomenon. As a rule, modern empires have handled diversity better than nation states. In the latter, parochialism has all too often trumped cosmopolitanism; and prejudice, toleration. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of a black Briton in the Thirties, when Britain was still an empire with at least a smidgen of commitment to ethnic plurality, was altogether different from that of her daughter in the Seventies, when Britain was in the throes of a rabidly intolerant postimperial nationalism. It is the reason why, despite being a Brexiteer, I maintain a theoretical sympathy to supranational projects, even the one that has gone horribly wrong next-door. For it can hardly be denied that Britain’s return to cosmopolitanism, in great part of Europhilic stamp, took the edge off English nationalism.

If Hindu nationalism has succeeded where English nationalism has failed, it is because identity politics has won out in India. Segregation in all its declensions — legal (the long shadow cast by Hastings and the orientalists); electoral (the marriage of votes and violence); social (Modi’s war on miscegenation and mixed neighbourhoods) — has been placed on a pedestal. Contrariwise, in England, a steady universalisation of laws has resulted in the dismantling of the pillars of minority oppression — Catholic emancipation in 1829; decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967; abolition of blasphemy laws in 2008 — all the while steering clear of the kind of identitarian quotas and carve-outs, exemptions and exceptions, that have gained ever greater currency in India. It is no accident that, beyond the crenellated confines of the ivory tower, so few Brits set any store by racial or religious identity politics today. Compare Tommy Robinson’s itsy-bitsy fan base with that of Enoch Powell’s in his prime. Small wonder the far-Right’s brat summer proved to be such a damp squib.

Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.

Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.

That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”

It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”

In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.

Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.

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But Dalrymple’s interpretation of history has always been more sophisticated than bog-standard empire-bashing. In White Mughals, he illustrates and underscores the extent to which a genuine love of, and respect for, India coexisted alongside avarice and exploitation within the East India Company. On one early episode of his podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, he goes out to bat for the great bogeyman of Company Rule, Warren Hastings. Far from prosecuting Hastings in the manner of Edmund Burke, Dalrymple finds something redeeming in him: his learning, his curiosity, his enthusiasm for Indian letters and manners. All this stands in contrast with Robert Clive, the real villain of the piece, whom Dalrymple takes as representing the less urbane, more cynical dimension of British imperialism — the dimension which ultimately, on his telling, came to dominate the stage.

Dalrymple has now moved back in time with his latest book, The Golden Road. Here he tells the grand and gripping story of how India shaped the ancient and medieval world. “Why”, he asks in the introduction, “is the extraordinary diffusion” of Indian influence “not better and more widely known?” “Some might argue that this is a legacy of colonialism,” he answers. This construction anticipates a “but”, but none comes: in any case, Dalrymple, as his appreciation of Hastings makes clear, knows better than anyone that British attitudes to India were always a good deal more complex than regarding it as an “ignorant backwater”.

In The Golden Road, he gives the impression of self-consciously hamming up his Indophilia, perhaps for comic effect. Early on he cites, with a wink, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!” Then, as we progress through his narrative, more and more things turn out to be Indian in origin. The university? Indian! The wealth of the Roman Empire? Indian! Our numbers — and with them “a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come”? Indian!

It may therefore be that the old travel writer hasn’t completely disappeared from his own narrative, and that he’s playing a character that is in some ways an imperial throwback. It is as though he goes into overdrive to undo 1857: this may be said to be his overarching mission, if he has one. In a recent interview, he bristled at being described, in jest, as the “last of the White Mughals”, but perhaps this can be meant as a compliment. White Mughals, Indophiles, and William Dalrymples have been a perennial presence in Britain’s intellectual culture, and we are better for it.

Modi had been angling for a moment like this since September of the year before, when he lobbied the United Nations to make 21st June “International Yoga Day”. In an address to the General Assembly, he claimed that “Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition. Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action … a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and our well-being. Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.”

Modi’s successful pitch for yoga at the UN contained eerie echoes of a pitch for Hinduism made by one of his heroes, the religious teacher Swami Vivekānanda, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago back in 1893. It was a masterclass in using the language of inclusivity to make the case for a particular idea. Hinduism, declared Vivekānanda, is the “mother of all religions” and has “taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. To an audience consisting primarily of American Christians, familiar with Jesus’s claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me”, Vivekānanda offered a contrasting line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

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Vivekānanda’s expansive case for Hinduism was helped by the fact that the concept itself was only around a century old by the late 1800s and remained somewhat flexible. Europeans in colonial-era India had used the term “Hindu” (derived from a Sanskrit word for the Indus River) to describe people on the subcontinent who did not belong to better-understood and apparently more clearly-defined traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Indian reformers later used the term “Hinduism” to refer to a broad system of ideas and practices that went beyond “religion” in the narrow confessional sense familiar to modern Westerners and encompassed culture, identity and, in time, a sense of national political purpose.

In the decades running up to Indian independence in 1947, there was nervousness among religious minorities — particularly Muslims — about what this might mean for the role played by Hinduism in a future independent India. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was among those who advocated for secularism and religious pluralism. Other forces in Indian politics, including the predecessor to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), encouraged the idea that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and that its politics and institutions ought to reflect that fact.

The vexed politics of “Hinduism” in India — religious tradition versus a more encompassing cultural or national identity — has been mirrored in the West by arguments about yoga, one of whose earliest teachers was Swami Vivekānanda during visits to the United States. Is yoga essentially religious in character? If so, is it wrong to use it purely for its health benefits or to teach it in schools that are subject to rules about the separation of church and state? And given its origins in India, is there something morally wrong or at least a little unseemly about white Westerners making money from promoting it — or even practising it at all?

Just as these anxieties appear to be ebbing in the West — though concerns remain about shallow and overly-commercialised forms of yoga — Modi has been leading the charge to reclaim yoga for Indians, and for himself in particular. It is part of a broader push to promote traditional Indian culture at home and to leverage India’s spiritual wealth abroad as a soft power asset. Modi has already made much of his country as the home of Buddhism, finding it useful when dealing with Buddhist-influenced cultures around Asia, from Vietnam to Korea.

Modi’s critics worry about what this might mean for the secular and pluralist character of their democracy. When, in his 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Modi described yoga as a gift from “our ancient tradition”, who exactly was the implied “we”? Indians as a whole — or the country’s large Hindu majority? Modi and the BJP are suspected of using yoga as a means of encouraging people, both at home in India and abroad, to think of those two categories as more or less one and the same. That risks reinforcing the idea that India’s Muslims, Christians and Dalits — formerly referred to as “untouchables” and historically mistreated by upper-caste Hindus — are outsiders, potentially exposing them to yet more discrimination and violence. Modi is also accused of engaging in what one commentator memorably called “om-washing”: linking yoga to everything from world peace to a healthier climate while pursuing destructive policies on these and other issues.

No doubt there will be those who regard worries over Modi’s appropriation of yoga as of no more consequence than hand-wringing in the West about wellness enthusiasts who like to greet each other with namaste gestures. Depending on your point of view, Indian soldiers performing yoga in freezing temperatures at the Siachen Glacier is either a step towards entrenching Hindu nationalism at the heart of Indian politics while provoking Pakistan — with whom India remains in dispute over sovereignty in the region — or simply a nice touch for International Yoga Day. Likewise, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats in India taking up yoga, on Modi’s advice, may be regarded either as working on their general health or participating in a slow but steady narrowing of acceptable discourse in India.

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Time will tell just how much or little this matters for India. As Modi enters his third term as prime minister, the argument over yoga seems set to extend to schools across the country. Some BJP-led regional administrations have already sought to make it mandatory among the nation’s children, prompting objections from defenders of India’s minorities and the country’s secular constitution. A Sun Salutation — or Surya Namaskar — may strike most as an innocent sequence of yoga moves. But “Surya” is both the sun and the Hindu solar deity, rendering the sequence controversial in the eyes of some Muslim groups in India.

Those wanting to see yoga’s influence diminished in Indian politics may hope that Modi’s Olympic dream comes true. Modi wants the Games to come to India in 2036, and for yoga to be included on the list of events alongside chess, kabaddi, kho kho, squash and T20 cricket. It may well prove divisive: plenty of yoga practitioners will no doubt object to what they see on display, just as large numbers of karate fans regarded its Olympic incarnation — when Tokyo hosted a delayed Games in 2021 — as “not proper karate”. A more potent message still would be sent if things take an Australian turn. The sight of an unfortunate competitor butchering their contribution — offering an unintentionally comic twist on the downward dog to rival Raygun’s kangaroo hop — might end up harming yoga’s global reputation.

In the shorter term, there seems little prospect that Modi will retire yoga as a pawn in India’s over-heated politics. Promoting ancient glories is a cheaper and more reliable way of winning hearts and minds than promising the earth politically, whether at home or abroad. And as long as the wellness boom is with us, so too will be that sweet spot where fitness, fulfilment and wisdom coincide — seasoned, dare it be said, with a dash of the exotic, courtesy of images of the far-away or the long-ago. For all the anxieties that it seems to be causing of late, in the West and in India, nothing promises to hit that spot quite like a good sweaty hour on a yoga mat.

Tibet and China go back a long way together, and theirs has rarely been a happy history. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the Tibetan kingdom’s armies fought their way into the great capital of Tang China, Chang’an, and occupied it. The Tibetan Empire would later fragment after the last king of Tibet was murdered in 842, and Buddhist teachers known as lamas would eventually come to rule in his place. They helped the Mongols to govern Tibet in the 13th century. Then, in 1279, Kublai Khan established the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol-led dynasty of China, and Tibet became nominally part of his empire.

The degree of authority over Tibetan affairs exercised by Chinese emperors of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties fluctuated a great deal over time, but in general they preferred indirect influence to outright control. Crucial to these arrangements was the maintaining of good relations with Tibet’s Buddhist leaders and in particular its tulkus. These were lineages of men and sometimes women who were regarded as manifestations of a particular bodhisattva: an enlightened being who puts off their entry into paradise in order to help others. By controlling the intermediate realm between death and rebirth, they were able to choose specific human incarnations, again and again, in order to continue their lineage and fulfil their salvific purpose in the world. Among the best-known Tibetan lineages are the Karmapas and the Panchen and Dalai Lamas.

The lineage of the Dalai Lama goes back to the turn of the 15th century, peaking with the “Great 5th” Dalai Lama who united Tibet under his rule in 1642. Subsequent Dalai Lamas enjoyed both spiritual and political authority but found themselves embroiled in struggles for power between neighbouring Mongols and Chinese. In 1720, the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty won a decisive victory over a Mongol rival and managed to install his favoured candidate as the 7th Dalai Lama. From then on, China’s Qing dynasty regarded Tibet as a protectorate of sorts and the question of a Dalai Lama’s reincarnation as very much their business.

Yet the mysteries of reincarnation were often hard to control. Traditionally, an elderly Dalai Lama might leave written information about where he intended to be reincarnated or drop hints during the last weeks of his life. The direction in which the smoke drifted at his cremation might be watched for clues. Senior lamas would weigh these things alongside dreams or intuitions of their own before paying a visit to the homes of children who appeared to be likely candidates. There they might lay in front of the child some of the predecessor’s possessions, alongside unrelated objects, to see whether the child recognised the correct items as his own.

Concerned about the political quarrels and corruption that sometimes accompanied this process, and worried more broadly about Tibetans dabbling in divination when this was supposed to be the prerogative of the imperial court, the Qianlong Emperor sought to exert some control over Tibetan reincarnations. In a move that may well have important repercussions next year, the Emperor decided in 1792 to intervene in the process of identifying reincarnations within tulku lineages. Personally doubting the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation but resigned to managing the people of Tibet on their own terms, the Emperor had a golden urn made and sent to Lhasa. When it came time to identify a reincarnation, candidates identified in the usual way would have their names placed inside the urn. After prayers were said, a single name would be drawn by a Qing official.

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This wasn’t about luck or having China’s preferred candidate fortuitously selected, though it did rather usefully allow for the latter. The Golden Urn method was based on a form of divination already used in branches of China’s imperial administration and was intended as a means of avoiding human corruption and allowing fate to take its course. Qing efforts to make the method acceptable to Tibet’s elites were helped by the fact that the chosen children frequently came from wealthy and influential families. The Golden Urn method ended up being used, over the decades that followed, to finalise a number of reincarnations. Precisely how many is debated, but they may have included the 10th, 11th and 12th Dalai Lamas.

After the Qing dynasty fell and a Republic of China was proclaimed in 1912, the 13th Dalai Lama sought independence for Tibet. But both the Republic and then, after 1949, the People’s Republic continued to regard Tibet as belonging to China. After the 14th Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in 1959, China moved steadily to consolidate its control over Tibetan affairs. This included the use in 1995 of the Golden Urn to identify the 11th Panchen Lama. It was an important moment: the Dalai Lama’s favoured candidate was rejected and both the candidate and his family were disappeared into “protective” custody. The People’s Republic has since gone further still, creating a register of all those who are permitted to reincarnate after death. The state can revoke that permission at any time. It also claims authority over when the search for a new reincarnation may begin.

Much of this appears to be designed to ensure that the 15th Dalai Lama will be a person with whom the Chinese Communist Party can do business. The current Dalai Lama, alongside Tibet’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, rejects the idea of using the Golden Urn to identify the next Dalai Lama and insists that no candidate who is effectively chosen by the People’s Republic will be acceptable. It is highly likely as a result that within a few years we will have two people both claiming to be the 15th Dalai Lama: one in China selected using the Golden Urn, and another elsewhere chosen in the traditional way. Assuming that both are children — likely, but not inevitable — they will probably have regents speaking and acting on their behalf.

Why would the CCP go to all this trouble? More than a decade ago, the current Dalai Lama relinquished his political authority in favour of a prime minister, or sikyong, elected by Tibetans in exile. But although the Dalai Lama no longer holds political power, over the course of a long life he has become synonymous with Tibet’s spirit and its hopes of independence — the question of who succeeds him is therefore enormously important. The United States made clear its position in 2015: Chinese government interference in the Tibetan reincarnation process would go against the internationally recognised right to religious freedom. The Tibetan government has been working hard, of late, to persuade European countries to follow suit, but much will depend on how willing those countries are to risk antagonising China. Standing up to China over Tibet in the Sixties was a relatively cost-free exercise for Westerners. That is no longer true in 2024.

India, meanwhile, will face a particularly difficult decision. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently warmed to the Dalai Lama, sending him birthday greetings and attending a Global Buddhist Summit alongside him in 2023. It is all part of an effort to deploy Buddhism as part of India’s soft power, especially with countries such as Japan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and South Korea, in whose cultures Buddhism runs deep. Modi has spoken of India’s “Buddhist cousin nations” around the world and of his desire to develop Bodh Gaya — the place where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment — as the “spiritual capital” of Buddhism. In April 2023, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting produced “Lessons from Lord Buddha”: a compendium of speeches by Modi that emphasise his spiritual debt to Buddhism. India’s Prime Minister is, the introduction assures readers, “a huge admirer and follower of Lord Buddha”.

India cannot, however, afford to ignore its relationship with China. India recognises China’s sovereignty in Tibet and has to tread carefully when it comes to disputed border areas in the Himalayas — many of which are home to significant Buddhist populations. China’s leadership has already shown its displeasure, on a number of occasions, with Modi’s wooing of the “anti-China” Dalai Lama. It also hopes that a “Buddhism with Chinese characteristics” will be capable of enhancing relations with its neighbours. Both Modi and Xi Jinping, it seems, regard Buddhism as key to their attempts to win friends and influence people in Asia.

Modi may also need to worry about how the search for the next Dalai Lama could cause divisions within Tibet’s exile community in India. Without the current Dalai Lama there to act as a unifying figure, older rivalries may once again come to the fore. Meanwhile, it is no longer sensible to assume that Beijing’s candidate for the 15th Dalai Lama will be uniformly rejected or ignored by Tibetan Buddhist leaders living in Tibet and China. Some of these have made converts among Han Chinese who find the drama of Tibet’s landscape and esoteric religious traditions a refreshing — perhaps even a countercultural — alternative to urban Chinese life. For Tibetan monks and lamas ministering to these Han Chinese Buddhists, the backing — or at least the tacit permission — of the Chinese state is essential in going about their work.

The countdown, then, is on. A Hindu leader in India, an atheist one in China and their Christian and secular counterparts around the world must soon decide how to respond to what a nonagenarian Tibetan Buddhist will say about his forthcoming reincarnation. Perhaps this strange moment will be the last of its kind. The next Dalai Lama may well lack their predecessor’s charisma, gift for communication and international status. The lineage may fall into semi-obscurity as geopolitics moves on. China’s leaders may well be hoping for just such a turn of events. For Tibetans in exile, it would be a disaster: their greatest spiritual and diplomatic asset gone, with no-one to take his place. Lacking a homeland and having lost a powerfully symbolic leader, the challenge will be daunting of retaining — perhaps remaking — Tibetan identity.

One suspects she has still not got around to plodding through DeLillo’s Underworld. What a shame, you might say, but rest assured that in her case, it was a sensible choice. For the past 30 years or so, perhaps more so than any other denizen of her class, Roy has ventriloquised the rage of the rabble. What’s more, hers has been an admirably dependable dissidence, all the more welcome in a landscape where liberals such as the columnists Ashutosh Varshney and Pratap Bhanu Mehta turn coat at the drop of a hat; both have since returned to their original anti-Hindu nationalist positions, the latter only after he was hoisted with his own petard when Hindu nationalists forced his resignation from Ashoka University. Roy, by contrast, has been a paragon of clarity, nothing short of a national treasure. ¡No pasarán! has been her motto, and it has largely served her well.

Until now. Smarting from his recent humbling at the polls, India’s Hindu nationalist ruler Narendra Modi has decided to lash out at his long-standing critics. Roy, it seems, is enemy number one. A speech she made in 2010 has been strenuously unearthed, on the strength of which she has been charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which permits detention without trial. Accordingly, Delhi’s top mandarin has given the city police the green light to prosecute Roy. Will she be arrested? We don’t know yet. What is clear, though, is that the celebrations by liberals following the election have been premature. So long as Modi is in power, his reduced majority notwithstanding, the war on free speech and religious minorities will continue.

Roy’s small-minded critics can tar her with the brush of “anti-Indian” sentiment all they like, but, as she has time and again made clear, it is a higher nationalism that she tenaciously answers to. Indeed, there can be no greater act of patriotism than to point to the enormities in one’s own land. Lesser mortals, of course, would much prefer to sweep injustices under the carpet.

Roy’s cardinal sin, it appears, was to argue that “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India”, a self-evident truth to any right-thinking person. A third of the majority-Muslim region is, in fact, directly administered by Pakistan. As for the part that falls in India, it has alternated between military, presidential, and scarcely democratic rule; in other words, Kashmiris have been denied the free and fair representation accorded to their brethren in the Hindi belt. To all intents and purposes, Delhi’s rulers have treated the place as an internal colony, subjecting its people to the strappado, pellet guns, internet blackouts, and — until 2019 — even different laws. But in stating the obvious, Roy has been consigned by both of India’s main parties, the press and the bien-pensant bourgeoisie to that circle of hell reserved — in her words — for “hysterical, lying, anti-national harridans”.

Her critical perspective, one surmises, owes to her intellectual formation. Born in Shillong in India’s forested and tribal northeastern enclave — a world away from the Hindi heartland — Roy perforce could not partake in the democratic self-congratulation of the country’s ruling class. This was a land — in nationalist lexicon — infested with insurgencies. The governance of these areas was for long given over to Delhi’s emissaries, typically paramilitary outfits operating a shoot-on-sight policy.

Then there is Roy’s Jacobite Syrian heritage, something her Hindu nationalist critics never fail to mention. When they call her Suzanna Arundhati Roy — her full name — it’s a dog whistle everyone can hear. As a contemptible Christian, the insinuation goes, she has it in for India. Roy, however, has never been an uncritical admirer of the faith. She has followed in the footsteps of her feminist mother, Mary Roy, who used to be a name to reckon with in the Eighties, when she successfully campaigned to institute equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women, hitherto denied their fair share.

Thereafter, Roy grew up between Kerala’s backwaters and the hilly Nilgiris, both pastoral arcadias that nurtured an interest in conservation, before going up to the School of Planning and Architecture, where she read the latter and met her beau, Gerard da Cunha. The two spent the rest of their university years quite literally slumming it in a nearby slum, not long after she became estranged from her family; “they pretended to be married in deference to the slum’s conservative mores,” the New York Times explains.

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A second relationship accompanied a turn to the cinema. This was a productive period for Roy, who played a “tribal bimbo” in Massey Sahib and wrote the screenplay for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, both directed by her husband Pradip Krishen. Fame and notoriety followed in 1994, when she took the director Shekhar Kapur to task for depicting the rape of Phoolan Devi, a Robin Hoodesque outlaw turned lawmaker, in Bandit Queen. “You’ve turned India’s most famous bandit into history’s most famous rape victim,” and without her consent at that, wrote Roy.

Her breakout year was 1997. It was, in a sense, India’s breakout year too. The country celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence amid serious stocktaking. Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things, for which she received a £500,000 advance, no doubt profited in some small measure from its propitious timing — Elizabeth Windsor was visiting India when Roy won the Booker, and the British press was gripped by a sense of patrician benevolence to the former colony — though this, of course, does not diminish her many considerable talents. Roy’s achievement was her singular authorial voice, reassuringly universalist but at the same time free from the corny clutches of magical realism. “My book doesn’t trade on the currency of cultural specificity,” she said at the time.

The laboriously political work of intercaste erotica wasn’t for everyone. Carmen Callil, chair of the previous year’s panel of judges, thought it “vulgar and execrable”. Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times found it twee and puerile. Even so, few could deny that it was unlike anything else available in the post-Cold War literary market — passionate, political, punchy, prurient. Kerala’s communist government put her on trial for obscenity, though one wonders if it was instead her “anti-Communist venom” — as Kerala’s chief minister put it — that incensed the apparatchiks. Roy lampoons the democratic Left much in the manner of Jaroslav Hašek, who sent up The Party of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law. In Small Things, communist waiters dance attendance on fat-cat tourists at the Hotel People, located in the ancestral home of the communist party chief, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, no less.

If all of this is a little on the nose, it also points to a broader defect in her writing, and indeed her activism, which has taken centre stage since the publication of Small Things: her intransigence. The fact is that the violent overthrow of the state that she advocates has failed every time it has been tried: 1948, 1967, 1969. In the face of state repression, the insurrectionary Left simply doesn’t stand a chance. The democratic Left that she disparages has, by contrast, delivered not only high literacy and decent healthcare, but also meaningful land reform in Kerala.

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Likewise, as the historian Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, Roy’s earnest stance of ¡no pasarán! may be well-meant, but it is hardly a principle fit for the real world. As an activist, she cut her teeth opposing the construction of the Narmada dam in Gujarat that would have displaced half a million with only a smidgen of compensation. A laudable cause, no doubt, yet her outright opposition to that project, many felt, did the proles a disservice. More moderate parties called for higher compensation and a smaller construction, recognising the uses of a dam to the water-starved peasants of arid Saurashtra and Kachchh. Roy, however, would have no truck with compromise. In her radical zeal, she was ready — in the words of the sociologist Gail Omvedt — to sacrifice the “drought-afflicted” on the altar of the “dam-afflicted”.

Guha upbraided her for her “atavistic hatred of science”, though it seems to me to be more a case of primitivist enchantment. Roy’s bedside reading, one Guardian journalist discovered, was Thomas Paine and Charles Dickens. In the same interview, she gave vent to her disgust with bourgeois philistinism: “the Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism.” Elsewhere, she has patted herself on the back for forgoing a life of cultivated literary elegance in “ridiculously posh” hotels out of love for the lower orders.

Her embrace of the Naxalites, who are waging a guerrilla war against the Indian state, is of a piece with this worldview. True, their grievances against a parade of governments that have dispossessed them in order to sell their lands to grasping industrialists, not to mention deployed private militias to persecute them, are real enough. But the monochromatic fresco she has painted of the militants, extolling them as saints, has been just as misleading as the official narrative, villainising them as terrorists. The districts under Naxal control are no prelapsarian paradise. Many of the Naxal leaders are upper-caste, upper-class Calcutta types, on the run from well-heeled boredom; as it is, they treat the hapless primitives with the same contempt as state authorities. Protection rackets, even deals with the very capitalist nemeses they are meant to be fighting, are common enough.

Similarly, in pooh-poohing what she calls the “Progress project”, Delhi’s target of 10% growth, she betrays the same impulse of Western degrowthers, who fetishise permanent recession. Now, world-historically speaking, no society has been able to redistribute the pie in a more egalitarian fashion without also growing it. Roy would do well to remember the instructive example of the trente glorieuses.

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Still, all of this is minor carping. She does a marvellous job of asking the big questions, though one wishes she would also ask the hard ones. For all that, the world needs Arundhati Roy more than it needs her critics. In the war against casteism and sexism, she has distinguished herself as an intrepid front-line maquisarde. The political boldness, moreover, has gone hand in hand with snappy lucidity. Roy’s chosen idiom is the thundering zinger. Here she is ironising the misplaced priorities of Hindu nationalists: in contemporary India, “it is safer to be a cow than it is to be a woman”. On the priapic flood ejaculated in the press in the wake of India’s nuclear test: “reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra and when they were talking about the bomb.”

This is a voice at once playful and powerful. That Narendra Modi can do no better than silence it with brute force is evidence enough that the Hindu nationalists have lost the battle of ideas. If anything, Roy’s impending arrest is a vindication of her worldview.

I can, moreover, enter and leave Britain at will. Modi was banned from Blighty for a decade for having blood on his hands. When raucous Hindu pilgrims aboard the Sabarmati Express were torched alive by a Muslim mob in 2002, it came as manna from heaven for Modi, the newly descended carpetbagging chief minister of Gujarat. Dipping into his sixth-form science textbook, he declared that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The police were pressured to stand down as Gujarat descended into violence. Muslims had to be “taught a lesson”, Modi told senior policemen.

In the pogrom that ensued, Hindu nationalists unleashed fire and fury, using electoral rolls to smoke out Muslims. Some 2,000 were killed, and more than 125,000 displaced to refugee camps. One of Modi’s close associates later boasted to the press how he had “slit open” a pregnant Muslim woman during the riots. Meanwhile, his ministers and marionettes were spotted marauding about Ahmedabad, orchestrating the violence.

In London and Washington, the revulsion prompted visa bans on Modi. At home, however, this only stirred sympathy. So you had the liberal journalist Vir Sanghvi only half-ironically working up much patriotic indignation: “He may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer.” Modi made hay while the sun shone, bullying the election commissioner into — in that splendid Indian-English word — “preponing” the election in Gujarat, insinuating that if he didn’t, it was only because he was a Christian in the pay of foreign masters.

The snap election produced the desired result. Hindus closed ranks and Modi won his first election. Twelve years later, he gave us a repeat performance, only this time it was on the national stage. Hard on the heels of the anti-Muslim Muzaffarnagar riots — again choreographed by Hindu nationalist parliamentarians, whom Modi hailed as “heroes” on the hustings — his Bharatiya Janata Party coasted to victory in 2014, permanently displacing the Congress Party that had ruled the country more or less uninterruptedly since independence. The chief minister of Gujarat was now prime minister of India. By this point, his mates had exonerated him for the 2002 riots.

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The French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot recently wrote a superlative study of the early life and dark times of India’s current ruler. (Full disclosure: my book on the Emergency, aforementioned, was co-authored with him.) Gujarat Under Modi languished in “legal read” hell for a decade. Timorous lawyers felt it betrayed “an unyielding view of Narendra Modi” — thanks, captain obvious — and, accordingly, recommended cuts so extensive as to make a Vatican censor squirm. Jaffrelot exercised good judgment in waiting for a plucky publisher (Hurst) to come by rather than suffer the surreal indignity of seeing his book stripped to the bone.

The early chapters tell us how the young Modi, a low-caste tea-seller’s boy, was drawn to the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP. On the face of it, the RSS was an upper-caste affair, whose very existence owed to the déclassé resentment of the high-born in a world where the lower orders had begun to get ideas above their station. The aim was to sublimate their frustrations, heightened on account of their vow of celibacy (yes, Modi’s likely still a virgin), through punitive calisthenics, sweaty wrestling and textual exegesis. These days, with less time on his hands, Modi squeezes world leaders in ever-tighter embraces — the “hugging diplomacy” for which he has become infamous.

Modi, however, would have felt no reason to dwell too deeply on the caste contradictions inherent in his embrace of the RSS. True, its high-born apparatchiks would have taken a dim view of his caste origins. The modh ghanchis — oil pressers — were officially recognised as a “backward caste” in 1999. But Modi himself, like other lower-caste Indians, would have truckled to his caste superiors rather than resented them. Even a figure such as Mahatma Gandhi, a Gujarati like Modi, thought it perfectly comme il faut to rail against intercaste “interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying”, even as he set about uniting the country in the Twenties and Thirties.

The RSS gave Modi a social purpose. One suspects he was also thankful to the Sangh friends who helped him flee Vadnagar, saving him from the clutches of an arranged marriage aged 17. Still, in the Fifties and Sixties, there was something unfashionable about being an RSS man; the outfit had been forever tainted by Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 by one of its members.

All of this changed with the Emergency, the dictatorship of 1975-77. The Congress’s enemies, Left and Right, were banged up in prison together, where they, perforce, warmed to one another. After the Emergency, they rode to power as one big coalition. For the first time, though only briefly, out-and-out Hindu nationalists sat in the cabinet.

Modi turned the bleak biennium to good account, liaising with bigwigs underground and distributing samizdat. We have, from this period, some improbably convincing snaps of him disguised as a Sikh to elude the police.

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By the Eighties, the Congress in Gujarat was in an increasingly tenuous position. Already discredited by the Emergency, they had managed to scrape by thanks to the support of the backward castes, the lower-middling sort clamouring for affirmative action. The BJP, on the other hand, monopolised the upper-caste vote, stirring violence every now and then to expand its base. It was a gory business, of course, but there was an arithmetic logic to it. For interfaith conflagrations had the perverse effect of producing intercaste unity. Put differently, uniting Hindus against Muslims was a way of papering over their unwholesome caste divisions: Muslims accounted for a mere 8% of Gujarat’s population, Hindus the remaining 92%.

The 1985 Gujarat riots, one of the bloodiest the country has witnessed to date, brutally underscored this dynamic. Led by chanting Hindu priests, a mob of 100,000 entered Muslim neighbourhoods, torching everything in sight. More than 2,500 homes were flattened, and some 12,000 Muslims made homeless. Much of the dirty work was done by Dalits, hitherto antagonised by caste Hindus but now on the same side, even if hierarchically split.

Thereafter, the BJP moved from strength to strength in state elections. Modi made his bones as the campaign manager of Haren Pandya, a rising star who beat the sitting chief minister in a stunning by-election upset in 1993. By all accounts, it was an ugly campaign, with undue emphasis on the Muslim bootleggers undermining prohibition. Two years later, the BJP permanently displaced the Congress in Gujarat. A seismic stroke of luck came Modi’s way in 2001, when Keshubhai Patel’s botched handling of the Bhuj earthquake prompted his ouster. Never having fought an election before, Modi was airdropped as chief minister. It would, again, be thanks to backroom manoeuvring that he would become the BJP’s national candidate in 2014 — making history as the man who became PM without having ever been an MP.

As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi ruled with an iron fist. Jaffrelot shows how he turned the police into a vigilante force with a penchant for extrajudicial killings. The victims were invariably Muslims, one of them a 19-year-old college girl. Law and order was given over to Babu Bajrangi’s shock troops, who were tasked with “rescuing” — kidnapping — Hindu women from their marriages to Muslim men on pain of abortion and torture.

Modi’s government, Jaffrelot argues, was as corrupt as it was violent. Unpossessed by a cupidity of his own — the rare celibate among dynasts — Modi has nevertheless facilitated the fortunes of the grasping oligarchs around him. His favourite one, Gautam Adani, was given state-owned land for a pittance, which he then immediately sublet to state-owned companies at market rates. Schemes such as these briefly made him the second richest man in the world. An Adani Green Energy Gallery was inaugurated at London’s Science Museum in March.

Modi’s rise has been good for Adani — and Adani’s for Modi. But while Adani claims his motto is “nation building”, this is hardly clear from the situation in Gujarat. The state’s wealth, much vaunted by the press, only trickles upwards. Surveys dubbed Modi’s Gujarat the malnourishment capital of India, with three in five children underweight. Wages stagnated, consumer spending plateaued, household debt burgeoned, investment rates fell off, even as a few billionaires did a roaring trade.

Modi ran one of the most thuggish and corrupt governments in Indian history, Jaffrelot concludes. Yet electorally he remains invincible, thanks in no small part to a piss-poor opposition. The Congress high command routinely depicts the chaiwallah’s son as a chav — when he met Obama, Modi showed up in a monogrammed pinstripe suit spelling out his name a million times in gold — which is hardly a sensible charge in a country where nearly everyone is working-class.

Modi’s charge, by contrast, sticks. He paints his rivals as a bunch of cosmopolitan elites cut off from hoi polloi. There’s no doubt an element of schoolboy crassness to his epithets, a touch of Berlusconi perhaps, but it goes down well. The leader of the opposition party, the Veneto-born Sonia Gandhi, was sent up for her Italian ethnicity as “Pasta-ben”, Sister Pasta. Rahul, her pallid son and lately successor, has been nicknamed “Jersey Cow”.

Compounding the gift of the gab is Modi’s facility with technology. Enlisting the services of the PR firm APCO, whose choice clientele included the Nigerian and Kazakh dictators Sani Abacha and Nursultan Nazarbayev, Modi was an early adopter of 3D holograms in election campaigns. The advantage of addressing multiple audiences simultaneously was magnified in a highly illiterate setting where mesmerised audiences were left wondering whether Modi was an avatar of Vishnu’s.

Then there is his braggadocio, so extravagant as to put Putin to shame: his 56-inch chest; his penchant for wild swimming surrounded by crocodiles, one of which he nonchalantly brought home only to be reproached by his mother. His fans lap it up, as they do his antisemitism. The BJP’s latest campaign depicted a befuddled Rahul Gandhi dangling on puppet strings manipulated by a vulpine George Soros, omnisciently above him in black-and-white. Modi has form here. As early as 2005, he had the Holocaust removed from history textbooks. In its place came a paean to the Third Reich: “Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government… He brought prosperity to Germany… He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.”

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For most of the last quarter-century, Modi was unassailable. His party rivals learnt this the hard way, as when a fake sex tape surfaced at just the opportune moment to see off the party secretary Sanjay Joshi, who had it in for Modi. By the time Joshi cleared his name, it was too late to rehabilitate him. At the same time, Modi can cannily switch his weapon of choice from the stick to the carrot. These days, it isn’t unusual for Congressmen to cross the aisle for the BJP; the going rate for legislators is about £3 million. One of these turncoats, a Canarese septuagenarian, was spotted sporting a Rolls-Royce post-defection.

Ideologically, too, everyone now plays by Modi’s rules. Before Modi, the BJP trick was to tar the Congress with the brush of “pseudo-secularism” while vehemently declaiming the real thing. “Hindu nationalism” used to be a term of opprobrium. No more. Modi has repurposed it into a term of approbation.

Until very recently, Modi’s rise left Congressmen dumbstruck. As early as 2002, they saw no better option than to mimic his policies. Over the following decade, the best the opposition could come up with were attacks on Modi’s deficient Hinduism. The chief minister stood accused of destroying 200 temples while gentrifying Gujarat, and, horror of horrors, not lifting a finger to stop the butchering of 100,000 cows.

Batting on Modi’s home turf proved disastrous for the Congress. A few years ago, Gandhi was to be found criticising Youth Congress party workers in Kerala for their “thoughtless, barbaric, and completely unacceptable behaviour”. And what would that be? Cooking a calf to protest Delhi’s absurd cow slaughter laws. Gandhi has spent the better part of the last few years trying to out-Hindu Modi, inter alia prancing around temples and perusing the Upanishads, to no avail.

Now, at long last, some efforts are being made at course correction. In the 2024 election, widely seen as a victory for the opposition and Indian democracy, a gaggle of two dozen parties contested together to deprive Modi of a decisive majority in parliament. For one thing, the first-past-the-post system worked in their favour, eliminating triangular and quadrangular contests that would have split the anti-Modi vote. For another, Modi’s popularity in recent months took a dive, what with slower growth rates and higher unemployment. The clientelism and corruption of his regime, too, went a long way in discrediting Modi in the eyes of voters. Still, even as the opposition coalition rejoices at its better-than-expected showing, it would be remiss not to point out that this is still a defeat for Modi’s foes. Modi is still in power. If the Congress and its allies don’t get their act together, they’ll be on the opposition benches until the cows come home.

But on 29 June 2020, Sharma lost his livelihood overnight — along with several thousand other content creators — when the Indian government announced it was banning 59 Chinese apps including TikTok. At that point the app had roughly 200 million users in India, making it the largest market outside of China. “When the ban was announced, I just spent the whole day locked up in my room and crying,” Sharma says. “I didn’t leave home for a month and didn’t know what to do.” 

In theory, the measure was a response to the perceived Chinese threat to India’s cyber security. The Indian government’s press release spoke of the “misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data”. This was an impingement on the “the sovereignty and integrity of India” and, as a result, required “emergency measures”. While there was no evidence that Beijing was actually using TikTok to spy on India, Indians were encouraged to buy “Made in India” products instead.

In reality, the ban probably had more to do with geopolitics than cyber security. Earlier that month, a skirmish between India and China in the Galwan Valley resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers. The battle, fought with sticks and clubs, was the first fatal altercation between the two countries since 1975 — although the two nations have long disputed the location of the Himalayan border.

“The ban was one of many steps that the Indian government took in response to the Galwan clashes,” says Manoj Kewalramani, a fellow of Chinese Studies at The Takshashila Institution. “Over 500 Chinese apps have reportedly been banned since… In general, the India-China relationship has remained deeply strained because of the continued stand-off in eastern Ladakh and broader geo-strategic rivalry. TikTok really has nothing to do with this.”

Yet even if cybersecurity was a real problem, banning an app was not necessarily the solution. “Improving cybersecurity and cyber-governance as a whole requires regulation to address a host of issues, from disinformation to the role of intermediaries and data protection rules,” says Kewalramani. “I don’t think one can discuss it simply in the context of one app… Chinese propaganda and influence operations are multi-faceted and can leverage any platform that is accessible in an open society, such as Twitter and Facebook. What is needed is broader and better governance rather than simply banning a platform.”

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By the time of the ban, TikTok had become a cultural phenomenon, nurturing a new generation of content creators from poorer rural areas. Indians posted dance videos from farm fields, construction workers filmed the process of bricklaying, and housewives expressed their personalities on the app. Based on the premise that all a user needs is good content, TikTok was able to cut through class and caste barriers. “The best thing about TikTok was that it didn’t matter who you are and where you are from — if your content is good then you’d go viral,” says Sharma. “Even if you’re sitting in a small village, TikTok will show it to the whole world.”

All this was possible because TikTok had fashioned a bespoke experience for the Indian market. It focused heavily on local language content in India, as well as targeting lesser-known regional influencers such as Sharma. “Every three months, [TikTok’s Chinese managers] would hit the streets and conduct user surveys, in Madurai, Trichy and other places,” said Kumar, a former ByteDance employee. The rise of TikTok also came at a time when India had one of the cheapest internets in the world thanks to Mukesh Ambani’s telecom network Reliance Jio, which meant that Indians from all over the country could dream of becoming TikTok stars.  

“With approximately 200 million users at the time it was blocked, TikTok in India had acquired a distinct character,” says Prateek Waghre, executive director at Internet Freedom Foundation. Not only did it allow rural and small-town Indian creators to develop a global audience, but the vast audience in India also meant that foreign creators began catering to Indians, creating a “unique cultural exchange”.

When the ban severed this relationship, copycat companies raced to fill the void. The market was soon flooded with TikTok replicas: of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store, at least 13 were clones. Four months after the ban, Sharma received calls from the multiple alternatives including short video apps such as Josh, MX Takatak and Moj, the last of which was launched within days of the TikTok crackdown. Sharma chose to work with Moj, where his following eventually grew to more than 8 million.

A few months later, Instagram launched Reels and YouTube came out with Shorts, offering creators more options to choose from. But this in turn split creators and users across a wide range of platforms. “The resulting fragmentation — with a split between global and Indian audiences, as well as splintering of domestic audiences across different apps — meant the cross-cultural networks effectively dissipated,” said Waghre. “Since then, many of the domestic alternatives have either merged, pivoted or folded up, with Instagram, mainly, and YouTube, to some extent, emerging as winners.” In the end, the big American companies defeated the smaller Indian ones.

Almost four years later, the US has reached the same crossroads. Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing TikTok to find a new US owner within a year or reckon with a ban. TikTok is gearing up for a fight, saying the law is unconstitutional. Though its executives insist that it is not a security threat, the Biden administration is concerned that Beijing can demand US user data from ByteDance under Chinese national security law.

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In response, TikTok claims the ban violates the First Amendment rights of 170 million US users. And some US academics agree that it is not the appropriate response to a potential national security threat. “Congress should be concerned about platforms’ collection of Americans’ data, but this ban is not a solution,” says Nadine Farid Johnson, a policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “China and other foreign adversaries will still be able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data from data brokers on the open market. And they could still engage in disinformation campaigns using American-owned platforms. Lawmakers should be addressing the real problem, not undermining the First Amendment.”

Many are also concerned that a ban or forced sale of TikTok could escalate geopolitical tensions between the US and China. “Such actions may be perceived as aggressive moves in the broader context of economic competition and strategic rivalry,” says Justin Miller, a professor at the School of Cyber Studies at the University of Tulsa. He suggested that this could “trigger a tit-for-tat cycle of sanctions or restrictions” that could end up affecting other countries aligned with either side. Joe Biden may think he’s outsmarting Beijing — but his own country could turn out to be the victim.

Yet what will transpire will not be, in any meaningful sense, an electoral contest. Narendra Modi, India’s ruler since 2014, will trounce his rivals for a third time. And if the cards appear stacked in his favour, it’s because he owns the pack. Cobbled together at the eleventh hour, the hapless, heteroclite alliance ranged against him, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — INDIA for short — has had to suspend campaigning for want of funds; its bank accounts have been frozen by Modi’s government ostensibly on account of tax evasion.

Smaller parties, too, don’t stand a chance. Arvind Kejriwal, locally in power in devolved Delhi, has recently joined some of his party mates in prison. Kickbacks on liquor contracts are alleged, though everyone sees the ruse for what it is: a means to destroy the Common Man’s Party, which has for long been a burr in the ruling BJP’s saddle.

What of popular protest? Revolting farmers calling for higher procurement prices for wheat and rice, both Indian staples, learned their lesson in a hard school last month, when police and paramilitary forces were set on them. During the pandemic, the tractor classes had dealt a major blow to Modi, who was forced to climb down on agrarian reform — allowing big business to enter the wholesale market — in the face of a Delhi blockade. This time around, however, Delhi’s ruler gave no quarter. Farmers beat a hasty retreat as drones rained smoke bombs and tear gas upon them. On pain of fines and even imprisonment, social media apparatchiks were arm-twisted into blocking accounts critical of Modi and suppressing reports about the protests. To Elon Musk’s credit, though, X went public about government intimidation where previously Twitter had quietly gone along.

As for the press and television, the less said the better. The latest World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, ranks India below Afghanistan and Libya; in a list of 180 countries, India comes in at 161st place. This in a land that, at the height of the Cold War, was arguably the freest between Berlin and Sakhalin. These days, however, a single critical piece of reporting is sufficient to warrant the taxman’s — or the policeman’s — knock on the door, as the BBC discovered last year.

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Nearing 10 years in power, Modi hasn’t held a single press conference. His favourite Bollygarchs, Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, both cronies of old, have a stranglehold on the legacy media. Ambani controls 70 outlets, which have a combined viewership and readership of 800 million. Meanwhile, the last independent network of sorts, NDTV, fell in 2022 to Adani, whose chartered plane Modi used on the campaign trail. Since the Prime Minister’s election, Adani has serendipitously scooped up all manner of contracts from airports to seaports, petroleum to edible oil.

As with the press, so with the judiciary. Time and again, the Supreme Court has proven itself as little more than the current ruler’s rubber stamp, ruling in Delhi’s favour over the construction of the Ram Temple atop the ruins of the razed Babri Mosque; over the suspension of rights in the disputed northern enclave of Jammu and Kashmir, whose residents were denied internet and phone access for 18 months; over Aadhar, a comprehensive China-style biometric database designed to be used, inevitably, as a mass surveillance tool.

Last month came a belated display of juridical independence: the Supreme Court scrapped electoral bonds — backhanders by another name — which in recent years had become the main source of campaign finance. Too late. The BJP has already raked in £600 million from them, as against the Congress Party’s £140 million. No surprise there. The donors — in the main mining and construction magnates tangled in red tape — naturally preferred the incumbents to their opponents.

The Congress, it is true, doesn’t inspire much confidence. That it ruled virtually uninterrupted from independence in 1947 to Modi’s election in 2014 — 54 of those 67 years — was in itself a little miracle, thanks in no small part to its historical role in displacing colonial rule, and the distorting effects of the Westminster system that guaranteed it supernumerary representation in parliament. Still, each passing decade registered growing disaffection with Congress misrule: bovine growth rates in the Fifties; wars in the Sixties; dictatorship in the Seventies; pogroms in the Eighties; corruption in the Nineties and 2000s.

By 2014, the Congress had run out of steam. Worse, it was hoist with its own petard. Decades of cosseting Hindu nationalists in its ranks had paradoxically mainstreamed their outré ideology. Similarly, just as the first-past-the-post system had worked to its advantage from the Fifties on, it now benefitted the BJP. In 2014, with 31% of the vote, Modi commanded 52% of parliament. Conversely, with its 19% vote share, the Congress boasted a mere 8% of lawmakers.

Now, it seems, we’re in for a repeat performance. Polls predict a BJP sweep. Modi’s coalition is set to win three quarters of the seats. If playing dirty works for Modi, he has been helped along by his duff opposition. Led in name only by the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, a cipher by all accounts, the face of INDIA in fact is Rahul Gandhi, fourth-generation nepo baby and loser of the last two elections, now awaiting his third drubbing. Watching him on the hustings is a painful experience. He comes across as insufferably smug — also humourless, guileless and entirely lacking in irony. Modi, by contrast, laces his speeches with sarcasm, revelling in the double entendre and bon mot. Substantively, Gandhi’s pitch consists of no more than a vague rehearsal of multicultural shibboleths. Stylistically, he affects the élan of a cut-price Modi: scraggly beard, staccato delivery, superfluous appeals to piety.

All the same, too much should not be made of these personal defects, or indeed of Modi’s strengths. For there is a third dimension enabling India’s slide into dictatorship (or, at any rate, “electoral autocracy”, the more precise expression favoured by political scientists): the Indian masses. The fact remains, though it is unfashionable to point it out, that the people never really took to this democracy business. But one can hardly blame them. As the economist Pranab Bardhan has argued in a superbly lucid analysis, democracy was imposed from on high by competing Indian elites, none of whom were strong enough to rule single-handedly. Indian democracy was, above all, a gentlemen’s agreement. Liberty, equality, and fraternity had nothing to do with it.

Properly speaking, the people themselves have had a say only in a handful of elections — the two following the dictatorship of the Seventies, and the six between 1989 and 2004. Before that, India was essentially a one-party state, a state of affairs to which the country has now once again returned. Then as now, structural reasons — political violence; business backing; media clientelism; mass defection — conspire against a free and fair vote.

The upshot has been political ossification. In the grey expanse of ramshackle slums, where scavenging counts as gainful employment, politicians’ promises are understandably received with cynicism, even incredulity. Decades have gone by since independence, and India has nothing by way of a national health service to show for it. State schooling remains a shambles. A recent study found that less than a third of 10-year-olds could handle basic maths. Only 84 million — 6% of Indians — make more than $10 a day.

Yet, at a popular level, inequities provoke little resentment. For vertical deference counts for more than horizontal solidarity. The average Indian looks up to his betters, and shares no fellow feeling with his equals. To the latter sentiment is attached the rank odour of Marxism — by turns foreign, unnatural and even a little sinister. G.K. Chesterton held that “the oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.” Nowhere is this truer than in India.

Here, in a nutshell, is how the caste system is sustained, every stratum content with its station. Against this backdrop, elections degenerate into computational games played out in panelled boardrooms, with parties vying for the support of “caste leaders”, who, in exchange for public sinecures, deliver votes en bloc. Democracy proper, needless to say, can hardly thrive in cultural conditions where individuality is at such a discount.

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Indeed, no observer of the Indian scene can fail to note the oppressive conformity — ideological; cultural; sartorial — of the place, of an order with few world-historical equivalents outside the Muslim world. From haircuts to home décor, one is hard-pressed to detect even a hint of deviancy. Outside elite ghettoes, public displays of heterosexual, let alone homosexual, affection are as rare as alien sightings. Women remain practically absent from the workplace; the female participation rate hovers around the 28% mark.

Pop culture offers no respite. Barring the odd tour de force such as the Amazon show Pataal Lok, a coruscating, chiaroscuro masterpiece that pulls no punches in depicting the dregs of Delhi, film and television rarely deviate from the usual formula: slapstick snoozefests interspersed with mechanical dancing and nationalist propaganda; think Adam Sandler meets Jane Fonda with hints of Leni Riefenstahl. The premise, invariably, is boy meets girl, something which is all too rare in the real world. Marriages — few of which are open (quelle horreur), mixed (caste taboos apply), or liable to termination (1% of Indian marriages end in divorce, as against 42% in Britain) — are customarily brokered by parental fiat.

Intellectually speaking, what was once a luminous world of letters is now a backwater. Time was when — as late as the Nineties — the hottest name was Vikram Seth, a terrific prose stylist unafraid to tackle the darker recesses of Indian culture. His heirs, if they can be called that, are Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi, both subliterate dispensers of postcard schlock. Tellingly, their celebrity rests not on their vapid writing but their vigorous cheerleading for Modi.

The review and opinion pages, likewise, used to be a punchier affair. There was a real joy to be had leafing through the latest number of Seminar, Quest, Swarajya, even the Economic Weekly. The latter nowadays throws its writers under the bus, pulling pieces to placate offended industrialists. The leading dailies, for their part, simply toe the party line. Real investigative reporting is left to the dissident press — the likes of Caravan, Scroll, and The Wire, which eke out a tenuous existence amid spurious lawsuits and tax raids. Anti-caste academics and activists are routinely carted off to jail on trumped-up charges of conspiracy.

All of this evidently enjoys popular approval. With polls showing that 85% of Indians express a preference for autocratic or military rule, one can only conclude that the vast majority of Indians don’t exactly swear by democracy. On the eve of what promises to be a sham election, with opposition leaders in prison and party funds frozen, it seems they have finally got what they wanted.

Millions watched the spectacle. A 30-metre priapic incense stick made of 1,500kg of cow dung was lit for the occasion. Babies were prematurely induced so that they would be born on this holiest of days. Yet, for all the pomp, the pilgrims will doubtless be returning home disappointed. For the Ram Temple, which is supposed to be the third-largest in the world, isn’t even close to completion. Not even its first floor has been built: it is set to be inaugurated in December — too late for Narendra Modi, who is evidently a man in a terrific hurry. At the height of the pandemic, either conscious of his mortality or deliberately disregarding the convention of posthumous recognition, Modi had the Ahmedabad cricket stadium renamed after him. This time around, there’s an inconvenient event just around the corner: a spring general election.

And so, like the Italian umarell — the ubiquitous pensioners who have an inexplicable penchant for observing construction sites, and every so often proffering unwanted advice to workers — Modi’s fans have had to content themselves with what is essentially a work in progress. To the bhakts — diehards — of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there was the consolation prize of seeing their ruler lather mascara on the idol’s eyes.

Indian liberals, by contrast, observed the proceedings with obituarial gloom. To them, this is the end of an era. The curtain has fallen on secularism — on the grand vision of the country’s founding fathers. The Fifties and Sixties, so the story goes, were a golden age of religious peace; the Congress Party that had ruled uninterruptedly since independence in 1947, we are told, not only protected minorities from the worst instincts of the Hindu majority but also gave them considerable constitutional concessions. Muslims, for instance, were allowed to conserve such folksy and innocent practices as polygamy, unilateral divorce without alimony (a male prerogative only, of course), and discriminatory inheritance (sons being entitled to twice the share of daughters). The meddlesome state was kept at bay.

This arrangement was proof, apparently, of the genius of “Indian secularism”, which liberals saw as superior to French laïcité, with its unedifying principle of separating church and state. Such a severance would have resulted in monstrous godlessness, argued Indian liberals. Worse, the very idea stank of foreignness. Fortunately, though, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had no truck with such heresies. As the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has argued in The Argumentative Indian: he understood that only by making concessions to religion can religious passions be controlled.

The political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, doyen of Delhi’s liberal intellectual aristocracy, made a similar case. Nehru had cracked the formula. His secularism did not disregard Hinduism and Islam; rather, it maintained a “principled distance” between the two. Stanley Tambiah, anthropologist, also praised Nehru’s “large-hearted and genuinely accommodative” secularism, which — unlike laïcité — won over minorities. Or so he claimed.

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Try telling that to the Muslims who actually lived through the Nehruvian period. For all his secularist bravura, Nehru scarcely lifted a finger to stop the massacre of Muslims in Hyderabad in 1948. Some 40,000 were killed, and another 13,000 imprisoned, as the kingdom was annexed to the republic. Further north, in Uttar Pradesh, Muslims were fired en masse from government after accusations that they were a fifth column in the pay of Pakistan. In the eastern borderlands, some 98,000 Indian Muslims were deported to East Pakistan. Meanwhile, influential Muslim leaders such as Sheikh Abdullah and Kasim Razvi were thrown in prison.

What’s more, the Congress Party singularly failed to tackle the scourge of interfaith riots — although “riots” doesn’t quite cut it. These were, in fact, pogroms. They claimed nearly 3,000 Muslim lives in the 10 years to 1963; at just under a tenth of the country’s population, they accounted for 82% of the fatalities in this era of violence. The following year, in the wake of the theft of the moi muqaddas — a strand of hair that once nestled in the Prophet Muhammad’s beard — a few thousand Muslims were slaughtered in and around India’s eastern rustbelt. Many responded by giving up on the nation altogether: around 800,000 — one in 50 Indian Muslims — left for Pakistan.

All this in the golden age of Indian secularism. Yet half a century on, liberals remain in denial, forever regurgitating the sophistry of the secularists. The unthinking celebration of Indian secularism was in fact wishful thinking disguised as wisdom. In recent years, scores of revisionist studies have shown, with good old-fashioned empiricism, how Indian secularism appeased violent Hindu nationalism. Sadly, these have been greeted with a deafening silence. Rather disingenuously, India’s liberals remain oblivious to the dangers of religious appeasement. Few recognise how, for instance, calls to introduce a ban on cow slaughter might alienate Muslims and low-caste Dalits, who see no reason to uphold the upper-caste Hindu injunction against consuming beef.

Such concessions to Hindu majoritarian sentiment have been the cause of much grief and interfaith tension. Not that secularist liberals — many of them card-carrying Congress members — were over-bothered by such unpleasantries through the second half of the 20th century, when the party was in power for all but nine years. Their attitudes began to change when the BJP, the Congress’s explicitly Hindu nationalist rival, came to power for the first time in 1996. Now that the Congress was in the opposition, it was fair game to fault Delhi’s rulers for failing to put a stop to Hindu violence against Muslims. The process accelerated under Modi in 2014 — the same Modi who as Chief Minister of Gujarat had been criminally negligent at best or complicit at worst in handling the riots of 2002, in which a thousand Muslims perished.

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The liberal secularists, however, have been loath to admit that the Congress was just as nasty to minorities when it was in power as the BJP is today. In fact, the BJP did not come out of nowhere. Both parties have shared a pensée unique: a commitment to caste and class hierarchy, coupled with an allergy to redistribution, sustained electorally by roaring appeals to Hindu tradition. This was the worldview that produced a Congress that murmured secular pieties, claiming that its ranks were a “mirror of the nation”, even though in the Thirties and Forties Muslims accounted for a mere 2 to 3% of its total membership — while making up 25% of India’s population.

In the provinces the Congress controlled, idol worship was forced down the throats of hapless Muslim students. Discriminatory licensing policies destroyed Muslim businesses. Cow slaughter bans bankrupted Muslim butchers. History textbooks were rewritten to heroise Hindus and malign Muslims. And so the path to Partition was laid. But no lessons were learnt. Indeed, scarcely any attempt was made at course correction after 1947. Very simply, the Congress needed religious appeals to win elections. This was true in the late-19th century: when devolution and the extension of the franchise to the middling sort proved a challenge, religion had come to the rescue, with Congress leaders wrapping themselves in the saffron flag of Hinduism. And it was true in the mid-20th century as well. In the absence of redistribution and land reform, Hinduism was the glue that held the orders together. Election campaigns began in temples. Religious festivals became indistinguishable from political rallies.

Still, before the century was out, it had become clear that the Congress was a spent force. Poor economic growth rates had steadily discredited it; staggering corruption in the Eighties and Nineties ultimately did for it. But the BJP was able to steal a march on the Congress not because it was radically different but because it was essentially the same — only less inhibited and more articulate in its majoritarianism. Indian secularism was the first step on a slippery slope to Hindu nationalism. We can now see that the Congress Party was simply BJP lite.

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The modern history of Ayodhya illustrates this point rather well. When the idol of Ram magically appeared overnight at Babur’s Mosque in 1949, no doubt through the agency of local delinquents, the Congress took a rather indulgent view of the whole affair. The mosque was boarded up and the idol left inside, giving oxygen to Hindu zealots. In 1985, their demands that the locks be opened were answered by the Congress, whose leader cynically launched his election campaign four years later at the site, amid raucous calls for Hindu renewal. But it was the BJP that proved more adept at that game, demolishing the mosque completely in 1992. Predictably, riots ensued across the country, and the BJP rode to power four years later off the back of religious polarisation.

By 2010, Hindu nationalists enjoyed a comfortable presence in all walks of life. That year, the Allahabad High Court pronounced Muslims “junior partners” in national life, dividing Babur’s Mosque into three tracts and pledging two to Hindus. Then, 10 years later, with the BJP once again in power, the Supreme Court handed the entire plot to Hindus, to construct a temple on the ruins of the 16th-century mosque. Now, with the consecration of the Ram Temple, and by extension the effective inauguration of a new theocratic regime, I suspect we have finally heard the last about that spurious, self-congratulatory declension of laïcité that was Indian secularism. Perhaps it is time liberals defended the real thing.

Yet the app has achieved neither of these things. All it’s done is create more anxiety for many of the 140 million workers registered under India’s rural employment scheme known as the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA), who are all required by law to use it.

Kumar, 32, has been toiling under India’s rural employment scheme for four years now: working on public infrastructure projects such as road and building construction. He typically gets paid around 2,700 rupees ($33) per month for his labour — but last month, he earned only 1,600 rupees ($19), despite working the same number of days he always does. This is because, without good internet connectivity, the app is prone to glitching or not uploading photos, which means that Kumar doesn’t get paid for the actual number of days he works.

As the sole breadwinner of his family of five, Kumar is worried about providing for his children if this problem persists. “I don’t even understand what’s going on — sometimes I get less money and sometimes I get nothing,” Kumar told me. He’s not alone: as a direct result of this app, the number of workdays registered via MGNREGA have fallen 35% from 530 million in January and February 2022 to 340 million during the same months this year.

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“There are weird technical error codes that nobody understands; numbers and alphabets that nobody really knows what they mean,” says Laavanya Tamang, a senior researcher with LibTech India, an organisation that works to improve public service delivery in the country. Tamang tells me about a group of seven MGNREGA workers in the state of Jharkhand who worked at their site every day: due to app-related issues, their attendance was calculated as zero. (The Ministry of Rural Development that runs MGNREGA did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

As a result of this dysfunction, workers are agitated and trying to take action. Earlier this year, hundreds, from across multiple states, went to Delhi to protest the mandatory imposition of the technology, demanding that the app be rolled back. The protest lasted 40 days, followed by talks with the Government, but to no avail. “It’s like a human rights violation,” said Nikhil Dey, an activist who works with MGNREGA workers.

All this points to a bigger challenge for India. Over the past eight years, there has been a sweeping digitisation of many aspects of everyday life, from identity cards and Covid vaccinations to digital payments — all in the name of efficiency and inclusion. Narendra Modi’s administration has embraced digital governance, claiming it will make welfare services more transparent and weed out corruption. It was a key theme of India’s presidency at G20. “We in G20 have a unique opportunity to lay a foundation of an inclusive, prosperous and secure global digital future,” Modi told a group at the conference.

Yet by failing to consider the reality of rural life in India, Modi’s tech imposition has alienated ordinary people. In 2021, female rural childcare workers, known as Anganwadi workers, were mandated to use an app that led to them being overburdened with work for very little pay. It was met with protests across the country. Around the same time, female rural healthcare workers, known as Asha workers — who were on the frontline during Covid — were forced to install an app that would track their whereabouts. In many Indian states, sanitation workers have also been asked to wear a GPS wristband that would track their work hours, but many argue that such devices invade their privacy.

When it came to inoculating 1.4 billion Indians, the Government leaned on a vaccine slot-booking app called Cowin. By making it mandatory for people who wanted to get vaccinated to download Cowin, Modi left behind Indians from low-income backgrounds who didn’t have a smartphone or enough digital literacy to use the app. Concerns about data privacy also turned out to be credible. Earlier this year, the personal data of millions of Indians was exposed by a leak supposedly from Cowin — an especially problematic event in a country that did not have a data protection law until this August.

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Of course, all these projects claim honourable motives. The NMMS app is intended to curb corruption in India’s rural employment scheme, which guarantees at least 100 days of employment in a year for rural households. Considered to be the world’s largest welfare programme in absolute numbers, the scheme has more than 250 million workers registered. But over the years, it has become notorious — for corruption. One investigation found that roughly $130 million of this programme’s funds were misappropriated in four years, used for bribes or as payments to non-existent people. “MGNREGA was infested with ghost accounts,” India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said last year, adding that Modi’s government was working towards using the programme with “transparency”.

Activists and policy analysts argue that the app has been ineffective in stopping corruption. “MGNREGA is riddled with corruption — when you go to villages you will see that many work sites only exist on paper, or the job cards are fake,” said Tamang. “But the Government’s approach to solving this is that they will slap on a tech band-aid and it will be resolved, which is not an informed approach that prioritises workers.”

The Government, however, isn’t paying attention. Despite strong resistance to the app, it brought in another tech innovation earlier this year. Now, all payments have to be done through Aadhaar, India’s vast biometric ID system — a process that further excludes thousands of workers. While most Indians have an Aadhaar number, many of them have had their information entered incorrectly: with spelling errors, or the wrong date of birth. This makes them invisible to the system.

The Government first announced this mandate in February, though it has since been extending the deadline to comply with it. But the damage is already done, says Mukesh Nirvasit, joint secretary of the Rajasthan Asangathit Mazdoor Union. “On the ground, many work sites have started rejecting workers unless they have an Aadhaar card, which is depriving people of work even though the deadline for this new rule has been pushed till the end of the year,” said Nirvasit. “In my opinion, this issue will not be resolved even if they give us 10 years.”

Yet either way, India’s internet connectivity will increase regardless, with one billion smartphone users expected by 2026. And while experts believe that some of the technical issues arising from the rise of digital governance will be resolved, the larger issue of surveillance and data collection will become commonplace. “Smartphone use is growing by millions per year and eventually, in five to 10 years, everyone is going to have a smartphone — but this will not only increase surveillance but also normalise it,” said Shweta Mohandas, a researcher with the Center for Internet and Society. “There’s also asymmetry in terms of consent because what happens if a worker doesn’t give consent to their data being captured? Would this mean that they would not be able to get the job?”

If the early 20th-century racial theorists of white supremacy were still alive, they would be mortified that the “tides of colour” had truly “risen”. One might also expect the Left, if it weren’t for Sunak’s conservatism, to make much of this racial inversion. But scratch below the surface, and the true story here transcends reductive categories of race — if anything, it is a reflection of both premodern and globalised realities of class and caste. Consider Sunak, who once admitted that he did not have working-class friends as a young man, and who, like Varadkar, has a parent who is a physician, placing both of their proximate origins firmly in the professional upper-middle class. Yousaf’s father, meanwhile, was an accountant, perhaps more modest in origins than his peers to the south and east, but nevertheless still solidly middle-class.

Despite today’s focus on race, class and status have always formed the bulwark of India’s elite ideology. As David Cannadine observed in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, this explains Queen Victoria’s repeated habit of adopting and fostering children of African and Asian royals, inculcating them with Christianity. Separated from her white subjects by a chasm of class and origin, this practice was aimed at forming a ruling elite informed by 19th-century Victorian sensibilities of race, but also transcending them, harkening back to an older ideology where the rulers were a fundamentally different species from the peasants and shopkeepers they ruled.

This class element in imperial life is clear even from the perspective of Indians; it was as much a British as an Indian ideology. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s initial activism in South Africa was motivated by his offence, as an upper-caste Indian, at being categorised with black Africans. Gandhi dressed like an Indian holy man later in life, a return to indigeneity, but in South Africa he initially exhibited the sartorial affect of an English-trained barrister. A vegetarian Hindu who had married a woman from his own caste at a young age, Gandhi was still in his early years one of Macaulay’s men: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Two hundred years later, the rise of Sunak and Yousaf illustrates how such class dynamics still hold the British nation in thrall. Both are ethnic Punjabis, but of a variety very distinct from the dominant element in British life, the Mirpuris. The Mirpuris, who hail from Pakistani Kashmir and its environs, form about 70% of the Pakistani population in Britain. These rural villagers eventually went to work in the mills of the English north, and have created their own Pakistani but essentially British working-class culture. Sunak and Yousaf’s family are ethnically related to the Mirpuris, but are more conventional Punjabis from further south: Sunak’s paternal lineage is rooted in modern Pakistani Punjab, as were Yousaf’s ancestors. But more salient than their Punjabi ethnicity is that Sunak and Yousaf both have connections to Africa. The mother and father of Britain’s Prime Minister were born in British Tanganyika and Kenya, respectively. Yousaf’s mother, though ethnically Punjabi, was born and raised in British Kenya.

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Subcontinental people of East African provenance have been prominent in British life for decades: in 2011, more than 10% of those of Indian ethnicity in the UK were born in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania (this does not include those born of African Indians in Britain). And Sunak is hardly the only prominent African Indian in Conservative politics. Both the current and former home secretary, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, have African connections: Braverman’s father being Indian Kenyan and mother Mauritian, while Patel’s family are part of the Ugandan Indian diaspora. The Ugandan Indians, expelled in the Seventies from Idi Amin’s regime with £55 on their person, have re-established themselves as entrepreneurs and professionals in the UK, part of the reason that Indian Britons are a relatively affluent minority.

These Indians, then, are a global people for a global nation. A simple racial calculus sees in Sunak a brown-skinned Indian, but the vast majority of subcontinental people do not have connections to Africa or the influential slice of South Asians who catalysed trade and travel along the shores of the Indian Ocean. This elite diaspora was always made up of enterprising individuals from commercial castes; self-selected for the personalities and peoples who ventured across the kala pani (“black water”). Sunak’s devout Hinduism and orthodox vegetarianism reflect his indubitably Indian cultural background. But the fact that he married not only outside of his caste but his ethnicity, with his wife being a South Indian heiress of one of India’s largest fortunes, simply confirms his membership of the global elite. Sunak may be of a nation, but he is truly not of any nation. After all, he filed US tax returns while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Like Yousaf in Scotland, Varadkar in Ireland, and even Ramaswamy in the USA, Sunak is therefore hardly a representative son of the subcontinent. More than one billion South Asians live just as their ancestors have for thousands of years, tilling the land, speaking the tongues of their forefathers and venerating the landscapes of their ancestor gods and saints. But amid this population are an enterprising sliver whose skills, aptitudes and inclinations have injected them into the bloodstream of the quasi-post-national global world. These are children born to globalisation, cultures within the subcontinent who have operated inter-regionally and even internationally for centuries. Globalisation is part of their tradition, etched into their bones. Rishi Sunak was born in England, his father in Kenya, and his grandfather in Indian Punjab. But they were always of the world, their opportunities painted upon a canvas without a border.

The global growth rate is being dragged down by the big beasts, namely the G7 countries and China — but elsewhere things are looking up. Modi’s India is humming along at more than 6% a year, with Indonesia close on its heels. While there are still laggards in the developing world, such as South Africa, other perpetual slow-growers including Mexico and Brazil are now coming up strong. Significantly, this growth is generally being engineered amid fairly conservative fiscal conditions, suggesting that expansions will have a better chance of becoming sustainable.

The same cannot be said of the world’s largest economies. There is much excitement in the US about Joe Biden’s green transformation programme, but it is not yet clear if this debt-fuelled boost will outlast the spending spree. In fact, once one strips new debt from new growth, the G7 economies are close to flatlining. They would have collapsed altogether during the pandemic had it not been for their governments borrowing trillions to keep them afloat — something that can’t be said of most developing countries, which weathered the storm fairly well. In this state, the ageing and debt-saddled West will struggle to restart its economic engines.

This seems to be the direction in which China is headed as well. An alleged Chinese spy at the heart of Westminster may have captured the media’s attention this week, but Beijing’s bigger story is one of diminishment. While it may sound impressive, China’s growth rate of more than 5% is significantly less than what its leadership had expected. Moreover, given China’s heavy reliance on debt to keep boosting its economy, it’s not even clear how much of China’s expansion can count as growth. With its population ageing rapidly, the Middle Kingdom’s dream of one day resuming its historic place as the world’s largest economy now looks to be in jeopardy.

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If there is spirited debate among economists as to whether China will be able to escape its funk, there is broad agreement about how it sank into it. Over the last 40 years, and particularly in the two decades straddling the turn of the millennium, China built its economy by exploiting its massive labour force. By repressing wages so as to attract investment in the manufacturing of goods wanted by the rest of the world, it was able to allocate nearly half its economic output to investment. The result was an unprecedented buildup of a world-class industrial base.

There are obvious limits to this strategy. Eventually, the world gets tired of being a sink for one country’s output. Overseas markets were saturated by “Made in China” goods and recent moves in China’s trading partners have put a crimp in its ability to keep exporting its way towards growth. In the US, for instance, the Biden administration has largely continued with its predecessor’s attempt to reduce trade with China, and even though Europe won’t go so far, talk is growing of the need to “de-risk” trade. As a result, China has reached the mature phase in its development; now it has to shift from an investment-based model towards a consumption-based one — in which rising incomes enable more of the economy’s output to be consumed locally.

On the face of it, this shouldn’t be difficult to achieve. One of the reasons that China’s saving rate is so high — some 45% compared to a G7 average of half of that — is that it does not have the sort of welfare state that exists in Western countries. As a result, Chinese households build up large rainy-day funds, storing much of it in real estate, which only adds to the country’s economic woes since it further inflates the housing bubble that has so worried the government. In addition to direct transfers of money to boost consumption, such as stimulus cheques, the Chinese state could encourage its citizens to spend more by providing them with the sort of healthcare that removed the necessity to self-insure to such an extent. If Chinese families knew they could rely on state care to cover a long-term illness, they might not feel the need to squirrel away so much of their earnings.

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That, however, is proving to be an obstacle for the ruling Communist Party. Part of the resistance to changing its economic strategy is ideological: Xi Jinping frequently muses that welfare will sap Chinese resilience. But part of it is practical. China has the administrative infrastructure needed for big public investment programmes, from building housing blocks to high-speed railway lines, but lacks the capacity for a similar ambition in delivering services to their citizens. When faced with an economic slowdown, the Chinese authorities keep doing what they do best — borrowing tons of money to fuel yet more big public works programmes. But the problem is that these merely add new capacity to an economy that already has too much of it, leaving the country with even heavier debts in the meantime.

China’s economic woes are part of a wider global trend. The two-track world economy, in which the big powers are slowing and the rising ones are catching up, began to take shape in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and it seems to have ossified since the pandemic. It was only a matter of time before the consequent economic redistribution began to alter the geopolitical landscape. Although Western observers still tend to see the world through Cold War lenses, merely substituting China for the old Soviet Union as the opposite pole in the global political economy, the emerging world order is actually a lot more complicated.

Along with the recent Brics Summit in South Africa, the G20 revealed a more assertive developing world that is less willing to sing superpower tunes. If India and other developing countries — including the African Union, which secured a permanent seat at the table of what will now become the G21 — feel they got what they wanted out of the Summit, the same probably can’t be said of the US, China, or Russia. While the final declaration on the war in Ukraine didn’t deliver the condemnation that the Western allies had wanted, it didn’t exactly leave Russia off the hook, regardless of what Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov would have us believe.

The same was true at the Brics summit a few weeks ago. Widely seen as a success for its South African host, Russia tried but failed to enlist support there for its position and ended up looking somewhat isolated. Countries such as India are quite happy to buy Russia’s oil and natural gas at the knock-down prices resulting from sanctions, but they’re not going to line up in its camp. As for China, Xi sat out the G20 Summit, probably as a snub to his Indian rival, only to watch as it produced a blueprint for a trade corridor between Europe and Asia that will rival China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Xi has long wanted to position himself as the head of a rising world; Modi may have exploited his absence to take his place.

What all this reveals is a range of rising middle powers that will pick and choose from what the major powers have to offer, whether it be trade concessions or aid, without offering them blanket support. India not only won the African Union a seat at the table but also engineered language favourable to the multilateralism and World Bank reform it favours. Rather than a world which is polarising into two camps, therefore, what we are witnessing is a world in which middle powers are skillfully playing the US, China, Russia, and Europe off against each other, securing concessions from all as each of the superpowers tries to curry favour with as many of them as possible.

Meanwhile, something interesting is going on in the background. To say that big economies are floundering obscures the fact that for many people, their individual circumstances may be turning a corner. In Western countries, house and share prices have been falling in real terms, but real wages have, after decades of stagnation, recently turned positive. It will take a while before people begin to feel the cost-of-living crisis is receding, but there are reasons to believe that reversal may prove permanent. After decades of rapid expansion, the growth of the global labour supply has begun slowing. The consequent rise in labour’s bargaining power has shown up in recent pay settlements across the developed world, where competition to attract immigrant workers will get more fierce.

In short, while the world economy slows, the poor get richer and the rich stand by. Not only is the developing world’s share of global income rising, but within Western countries, the share of income that goes to labour looks set to rise too. If this is what the end of growth looks like, many could be forgiven for saying “bring it on”.

Vaishnavi Sundar, an Indian feminist filmmaker, has long been furious at the way women and girls are treated in India. Not only do many of them live in fear of rape and sexual assault, but there is still a staggering gender disparity when it comes to education and workplace equality. This, combined with honour killings; abusive menstruation huts; child marriage and the dowry system, leaves many women longing for a way out.

When Sundar set up her charity Women Making Films (WMF) in 2015, in response to widespread sexism from male film technicians, she was celebrated as a darling of the liberal Indian elite. “Years before Hollywood paid attention to this issue, I encouraged women to work with other female filmmakers and technicians,” she tells me. Yet in 2020 she became a pariah in the film world for a series of tweets questioning gender identity. One of those was: “There are no identities. There is only sex. Male and female.”

She was swiftly punished for her defiance. The film she had spent three years making, But What Was She Wearing? — which is about sexual harassment towards Indian women in the workplace — was pulled just before its screening in New York in February 2020 because the Polis Project had deemed it transphobic. “To block a screening of a film about an urgent topic that affects women across all social strata in society is obscene,” Sundar says. “And all because I say sex is real, and men in women-only spaces can pose a danger to women.”

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Since then, Sundar has been ghosted by several liberal media outlets that once asked her to write. “Friends have completely abandoned me; film friends who used to collaborate with me have all stopped responding to my messages. Screenings of my films that used to happen regularly have all been called off even when the film is not about the transgender issue.”

With the well of donors drying up, Sundar began to crowdfund her work. By January 2021, she had raised enough to write and direct a four-part documentary series called Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire, which interviewed women who regretted transitioning. It was then that she began to see the spread of gender ideology in India as part of a wider international context, with a universal language and terminology. “I learnt that it is just as pervasive in India as it is in the rest of the world, maybe India was just a few years behind,” she says. “I wanted to shine a light on what’s going on in Anglo-Saxon countries and consider how this might impact developing countries in about five or six years.”

It was while working on Dysphoric, that Sundar started wondering about the suffering experienced by the families of trans women. “I was starting to wonder what it feels like for a wife when their husband announces that they are going to live as a woman, and they are just expected to affirm it.” It was then the idea for her latest documentary, Behind the Looking Glass, was born. The pioneering film tells the story of 18 “trans widows” from Europe, Asia, and America whose male partners transitioned and left misery in their wake. Eight of these women have to remain anonymous because of potential danger from ex-partners. As one interviewee says: “This is the untold story no one wants to hear.”

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The story is one of humiliation and sexual abuse. What unites all these women is the sense that the person they had married had disappeared, and been replaced with a totally different individual, with a new name. Some women in the film speak of being pressurised into validating their husband’s “womanhood” and being told they were in a “lesbian relationship”. Then there are accounts of the horror of discovering a male partner dressed in female underwear, and of husbands going outside dressed in “pornified” feminine frippery. “These men often force their wives into unspeakable pornified sexual violence”, says Vaishnavi.

There are notably no Indian trans widows interviewed in the film — but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. (Instead, the film conveys their predicament through images and voiceovers.) “The regions in India where women experience the life of a trans widow are mostly rural,” explains Sundar. “‘Kothis’ — intact males who live a double life, one with family, children and a home, and the other with a cross-dressing fetish, where they may or may not prostitute themselves — are largely prevalent in rural India.” This means it is more difficult for trans widows to speak publicly about their ordeals for fear of shame and ostracisation. It is also harder for them to get a divorce, as it is considered a mark of shame in rural communities.

Many of the women whom Sundar interviewed feel extremely isolated. Their friends don’t dare to say, “That’s horrible, you should just leave”, because the cost — in terms of social capital — is too high. Instead, they have to affirm the husband’s choice and say: “Your husband is stunning and brave — why don’t you just cooperate and become a lesbian now?”

The overwhelming majority of stories from the widows describe husbands enjoying the act of “wearing a woman”, says Sundar. In other words, they are deriving some kind of sexual pleasure from dressing up as women. But the women she has spoken to are no longer willing to keep up the facade of a happy, progressive married life; they are saying, “No, my husband is not stunning and brave.”

Sundar is also interested in the tragic fate of their children. Some are being forced to call their father “mother”; others have experienced being “breastfed” by them. One woman talks about the pleasure her husband takes in “passing” when he is out and about dressed as a woman and posing as a mother. Sundar believes that what excites these men is the idea of having a child and of “being a lesbian mother” — rather than the child itself. The child is simply an accessory to help realise their fantasy.

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Not only has the Indian legal system failed to stop violence against women, but the entire apparatus, along with much of Indian society, appears to have capitulated to trans ideology. In February this year, a man was sentenced to seven years for raping a minor in 2016. But because he had transitioned following the rape, female pronouns were used to refer to him in court, and he was subsequently placed in a women’s prison. “Men are being given even more opportunities and excuses when it comes to rape and sexual assault,” says Sundar. Meanwhile, even though many women do not even have a functioning toilet in their homes, laws and policies are being introduced that allow men to enter the few public toilets available to women.

Meanwhile, in a country where gay and lesbian marriage is still illegal, “upper-class so-called feminists have become fixated with trans and non-binary marriage rights”. “They’ve removed the words ‘same-sex’ from this entire debate.”

The trans lobby’s latest tactic, according to Sundar, is to compare the battle for trans rights to the dismantling of the caste system in India — both being about “freeing individuals from the cage into which they were born”. She says that many trans activists have “very cleverly, actually strategically” bound up the issue with that of caste. Yet it takes quite a leap of logic to compare the two: “Caste oppression is the most sinister form of human discrimination ever.”

Dalit women, previously known as “untouchables”, are among the most maltreated women in the world. Not only are they part of India’s lowest class, but they are also considered inferior for their gender, and so are often raped, beaten and abused by men across all caste groups. And yet, Sundar tells me incredulously, there is now a group named “Dalit Trans Lives Matter”, which claims to be an even more oppressed group than Dalit women.

Sundar despairs at the ideological capture of the LGBT and feminist movements in India, which she would ideally like to be working alongside to achieve women’s liberation. Instead, so-called liberal feminists are busy defending pornography, the sex trade, and trans ideology rather than oppressed women. “These women dare to claim that the campaigns to end male violence towards women and girls are a ‘Western import’,” says Sundar. “These upper-class women ignore the fact that rape and domestic abuse is a fact of life for so many women, and that pole dancing is not going to liberate them.”

In this way, India’s struggle is not dissimilar to the West’s. “Women and girls are dying, are raped, on a daily basis,” says Sundar. “We are in a state of emergency and need a united front to even begin to solve the problem of male violence.” With so much work left to do to improve the lives of Indian women, she doesn’t think this is the moment for a feminist civil war.

Like 58-year-old Kamala Devi Harris, America’s Vice President, Ramaswamy and Haley are in the 1% of the US population that is Indian American. Despite their shared heritage, all three grew up in different Americas — though in each, Indians were rare, exotic and little understood. Harris, born at the end of 1964, was among the first members of Generation X, while Haley is solidly in the middle of that cohort. Ramaswamy, as a geriatric millennial, is firmly a child of the Eighties and Nineties.

For Harris’s generation, the dominant image of India in the American imagination centred around gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose association with The Beatles brought them to public prominence. In its most benign manifestation, India meant mysticism and spirituality, though sometimes this would transmute into cult-like communities around charismatic and exploitative figures who drugged their followers and inspired anxious newspaper headlines.

Seven years later, during Haley’s childhood, India had become a byword for overpopulation and global environmental catastrophe. The Western view was summed up in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1969), in which he described a night in Delhi that “seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… People, people, people, people”. By the late Eighties and Nineties, however, when Ramaswamy was growing up, this view of India and Indians had become less hostile: the most prominent Indian American was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons.

Largely as a result of their different childhoods, these three politicians responded to being outsiders, aliens despite being born in America, in disparate ways. Harris, the product of Sixties liberal idealism, has never denied her Tamil Brahmin mother’s identity; she was, after all, raised by an Indian woman after her parents’ divorce. But Harris’s attendance at the historically black Howard University and her Baptist religion points to the fact that she has chosen to align more closely with her African-American roots. Though she is both a black American and an Asian American, it is widely accepted that Joe Biden selected her because of her identity as the former.

Meanwhile, Haley, who grew up in the recently desegregated South, has talked about her lack of a place in a biracial world; as a young girl, she was disqualified from a beauty pageant because she was neither black nor white. Raised a Sikh by Punjabi Indian parents, Haley has never publicly distanced herself from her Indian heritage, but her conversion to Methodist Christianity, her decision to assume her husband’s Anglicised surname, and her somewhat racially ambiguous appearance have all furthered the perception that she is a model of smooth assimilation.

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Ramaswamy, by contrast, cuts a different profile. The self-styled “skinny guy with a funny last name” is entirely candid that his Hindu religion is unfamiliar to most Americans. Married to another Indian-American professional, Ramaswamy is an exemplar of an emerging group that is often termed the “new Jews” in the media. They are American, but distinctive, notable and stand out.

Look around today and Indian Americans hold prominent roles in all walks of public life. In tech, the CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are both Indian American. In politics, they are particularly dominant in the ruling party. Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna are prominent progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and among five Indian Americans in the House of Representatives, while former engineer Saikat Chakrabarti served as chief of staff for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. Towards the party’s centre, Neera Tanden, director of Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, has been a consigliere of Democratic leaders since advising Bill Clinton in 1992. And in more technical domains, the Surgeon General of the United States is Vivek Murthy, while the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is Arati Prabhakar.

This boomlet in prominent Indian Americans is a function of two complementary dynamics. First, and perhaps most obviously, America is truly a land of opportunity, a nation where immigrants can ascend to positions of power and accrue great wealth through dint of hard work and application of human capital. Yes, racism may exist, but it is no bar to advancement.

Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, it seems that South Asians, at least in politics, have talents and cultural dispositions that make that flourishing easier. Like other highly skilled Asian immigrants, Indian Americans are wealthier and more likely to be married and well-educated than the average native-born citizen — and yet, there does not seem to be a similar rise to cultural prominence in politics among East Asians as South Asians. A common explanation for this is that, as English-speaking and highly verbal elites from a society where disputation and competition are taken for granted, South Asian personalities and cultural orientations are better suited to the rough and tumble world of America’s ruling class, where self-promotion is no sin and assertion is taken as a given.

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Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the end result of this dynamic. With an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, he perfectly captures the balance between technical and verbal fluency that is the marker of many South Asian elites. His brash, assertive and pugilistic debating style would not be out of place at an Indian American social gathering. And, crucially, he has accrued a vast fortune, a symbol of an opportunism that is entirely all-American, where getting rich is seen as glorious and a sign that one has “made it”. As a result, unlike earlier generations of Indian Americans, who aimed to blend in, the millennial Ramaswamy brings his distinctive South Asian personality to the fore, synthesising it with American assertiveness and claiming Donald Trump’s Maga mantle without embarrassment.

But should we be surprised? This is, after all, how it has always been. From Irish politicians to Jewish intellectuals, immigrants have transformed this country and reshaped it in their own image, all the while maintaining the cultural DNA that goes back to the intrepid British settlers who set out for a frontier for both the sake of God and gold. Ramaswamy and the current crop of Indian American public figures are simply what is old made new.

The Brics acronym was coined more than two decades ago by Lord Jim O’Neill, formerly Goldman Sachs’s head of global economic research, and it has stuck — unlike the initial expectations for the group. Only this week, O’Neill himself suggested that the collective of emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — has not “achieved anything since they first started meeting”.

Yet the aggregate numbers remain impressive. Jointly, the group holds $4.4 trillion in reserves. Its New Development Bank (NDB), a counterpart to the World Bank, is capitalised at $100 billion, and the Brics Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), equivalent to the IMF, also stands at $100 billion. Between them, Brics countries are home to more than two-fifths of the world’s population.

Despite this success, Brics members disavow any competitive or confrontational aspirations against the developed world in general, or the G7 in particular. Sotto voce, they make it clear they regard themselves as the new kids on the block, emphasise their common purpose and extol their bountiful resources. Look deeper, however, and one finds more conflicting sub-agendas in Brics than the group lets on.

First, the two biggest players, China and India, are prickly neighbours. Apart from the ongoing 60-year border dispute that has claimed hundreds of lives, the two are highly competitive in developing world countries, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and are certain to clash at this year’s summit over China’s ambitions to expand the group to bring in more “non-aligned” members. Twenty-two states have formally applied to join, among them Iran, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India — which, in terms of GDP, would beat France, Italy and Canada to a seat at the G7 — wants to keep things reasonably tight.

Second, embattled Russia hopes to use the Summit to push its own agendas, primarily garnering developing-world support for its imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe and driving a de-dollarisation of the international financial markets, possibly through some form of Brics currency. This might seem a forlorn hope in the short term, but it’s perhaps obliquely attainable in the distant future, through the strengthening of the Chinese renminbi against a weakening dollar. Again, India, alarmed by Russia’s putschists methods in Africa and locked into deep market relations with the US and the Middle East, is unlikely to be convinced. The absence from the meeting of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, because of the possibility of arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant (he is expected to appear by video link), indicates exactly how embattled his country’s position is.

Third, the Brazilian and South African governments will likely pursue a narrative aimed at creating an ostensible “non-aligned” lobby in world geopolitics, inside or outside the Brics group, that is, in reality, an anti-America front, something that may become too confrontational for India’s liking. They hope, perhaps erroneously, this will play well with the punters back home. Yet the duo is unlikely to be making any of the big calls: Brazil and South Africa’s combined shareholding in Brics, if measured by nominal GDP, amounts to 7.3%; South Africa is at 1.62%, which is perhaps why O’Neill has always argued the country should not be part of the club at all.

Lastly, the Brics are divided on key issues of energy policy. Resource-poor India and China favour alternative energy systems. Russia and South Africa are prodigious producers of coal, and, in the case of the former, oil.

So, what does Ramaphosa hope to gain from this gathering of fraternal yet deeply wary confreres? He certainly hopes to use it to add weight to his public argument that, regarding the Ukrainian war, there is a middle way between blind support for the United States and Europe on the one hand, and Russia and its silent sponsor, China, on the other. Amid a resurrected Cold War, he wants a resurrected “non-aligned” movement — or, to use the buzzword, “Global South states”.

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Few in the developing world would disagree with the objective; many feel the US has acted badly in attempting to lead-pipe third-party nations into picking sides. But Ramaphosa also seeks to use the Brics Summit to promote Africa, to advance Russian interests in Africa, and to divert focus from the multiple self-induced crises that confront him at home. Sixty-nine heads of Global South states, including all African heads of state but no developed world ones, have been invited as “observers”.

The extent to which African leaders respond to the invitation will be a guide to some key questions: the attraction of the Brics option, the resilience of US influence in the Global South, increased Russian and Chinese activity in Africa and, lastly, the status of Ramaphosa himself at both home and abroad. His vulnerability, ironically, may well be his chumminess with Russia.

The nature of South Africa’s relations with Russia hardly needs rehearsing: its persistent refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the holding of joint naval exercises with Russian naval forces, clandestine arms trading between the countries, and the unhealthy predominance of Russian oligarchs financing the perennially cash-strapped ruling African National Congress. Ramaphosa was also instrumental in organising a quick-fire “peace mission” to Ukraine and Russia in June, with seven rounded-up African heads of mostly minor states. He was also front and centre in the recent Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, though attendance by African heads of states was down — 17 this year, compared to 43 at the Sochi 2019 Summit, which had heralded Russia’s new and ardent embrace of Africa.

As his gofer efforts continue to be coolly received by the majority of African leaders, Ramaphosa’s Russophile position runs the risk of sidelining him and South Africa from the doyen position that the country and its president has always assumed since liberation. Indeed, if India has claims to a place at the G7, Nigeria has an even greater claim to Africa’s seat at Brics: its GDP is now larger than South Africa’s.

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Samuel Ramani, in his new book Russia in Africa, intensively tracks Russian post-Cold War engagement in Africa. The theme of that diplomacy, although sometimes erratic, is a long-term strategy: patience in ambition, opportunism in deployment and lupine in execution. “By combining counterinsurgency operations, arms sales, autocracy promotion and soft-power tools, such as media outreaches, educational diplomacy, debt forgiveness and humanitarian aid, Russia could remain an attractive partner for African countries and preserve a unique niche between France, the United States and China,” he writes.

The target countries for such attention share certain disfiguring features: fragile states under weak leadership, volatile internal politics, collapsed national institutions, despairing polities, emigrating elites, biddable security services and vacuums created by the departure of agencies once able to guarantee sovereign stability. To these tottering autocratic regimes, Russian Private Military Companies (PMCs) make an offer they cannot refuse: private security support to maintain power in return for control or shares in mining operations and preference in infrastructural contracting.

Since its renewed interest in Africa in 2019, Russia’s fingerprint can be seen wherever there is existent chaos: in Libya, Burundi, Congo, Central African Republic, Guinea, the Sudan and, most recently, in Niger. This is particularly true in the Sahel and Maghreb, where the West’s reckless and naïve support of the Arab Spring in 2010 destroyed stable autocratic regimes and left a mishmash of theocratic zealots, bandits and irredentist nationalists, opening the way for the independent and muscular Russian PMCs such as the Wagner Group, with its billions of dollars in revenue from its mining and oil operations in Africa and the Middle East. A Blackwater on steroids, Wagner is dangerously independent and ferocious. In asymmetrical warfare, they offer their clients something the judicialised military of the West cannot: brutal, indiscriminate efficiency.

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The involvement of Wagner in coup or counter-coup activities on the continent has raised huge concern among African leaders, most recently in the Niger coup which the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) vows to crush. But curiously, and damagingly, President Ramaphosa — known here as “Cyril the Silent” — has not taken a firm public position on Wagner, despite the fact mercenary activity is outlawed under the African Union’s Covenant on Mercenarism, effective since July 1985. Indeed, one of Ramaphosa’s predecessors, Thabo Mbeki, was the driving force behind its implementation and instrumental in closing successful white South African mercenary operations across the continent following the democratic transition in 1994.

After its bizarre, two-day quasi mutiny in June, Wagner’s role as Putin’s stormtroopers in Europe appears to have run its course. It now proclaims that Africa is its future, another troublesome legion consigned to the farthest part of an empire. Thinking South Africans, watching the complex forces at play in their Brics summit, conscious of the fragility of their nation and alert to the possibilities of tumult at the elections next year, pray that they remain out of reach.

Pakistan needs friends, but they are in short supply. Since Partition in August 1947, the Government has fabricated a national identity hinged around despising India. Delusions of grandeur followed — and now they are starting to shatter.

The secession of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 after war with India should have been a rude awakening. It should also have binned the narrative that India is trying to annex its territory, since New Delhi facilitated the transition of East Pakistan to an independent Bangladesh, instead of gulping it down as war spoil. The creation of Bangladesh should also have disabused Pakistan of the farcical notion that adherence to Islam can forge a single national identity — if indeed that weren’t obvious from the presence of two separate Muslim-majority states along Pakistan’s western border.

Instead, under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led the country post-1971, Pakistan Islamised the constitution, propelled jihadist groups towards Afghanistan in search of more geopolitical influence, and invited investment of freshly-minted Arab petrodollars. Since then, Pakistan’s leaders have enabled the establishment of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, the Talibanisation of Pakistan itself, and the radical Islamisation of Kashmir, as well as multiple jihadist attacks on India. Yet even after decades of jihadism backfiring on Pakistan, the country’s leaders still won’t rethink their extreme, religionist narrative on India. Incumbent Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari doesn’t hesitate to use Islamist rhetoric in discussing Kashmir; Imran Khan confidently urges Indian Muslims to pick up arms against the state.

The trouble is that Islamist policies created Pakistan, rather than the other way around. Hostility towards India, therefore, is not temporary opportunism on the part of Islamists, but the consequence of centuries-old political and theological narratives. Once the British Raj took over, the Muslim elite of India became increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of eventually living in a Hindu majority nation, and struggled for religionist separation. This became the ideological raison d’être of Pakistan, in the form of the Two Nation Theory: “Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations that cannot live together.” For the past 76 years, “Muslim” Pakistan let this narrative direct its relations with “Hindu” India.

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Today, the nations’ differences are most obvious in the economic realm: Pakistan and India have foreign reserves of $3 billion and $600 billion respectively. While pointing this out might have been met with accusations of treason in Pakistan until a couple of years ago, recent events have led to the beginning of a massive rethink. After Imran Khan’s government became the latest to be ousted by the military’s machinations last year, anti-army sentiments have been simmering. But even more critically, the extent of Pakistan’s ongoing fiscal crisis has made people question the army’s grandiose rhetoric, including the gross impracticality of any ambitions for Kashmir, given the economic strides India is making. Pakistan is missing out on at least $37 billion worth of potential trade with India annually, owing to its obstinate fixation with self-inflating Islam-centric narratives.

With the already limited trade with India largely frozen since the border skirmishes of 2019, Pakistan has instead looked to China. The $62 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is Beijing’s biggest-ever overseas investment. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, CPEC was supposed to be a fiscal lifeline, but it has instead metamorphosed into a debt trap, owing to skewed agreements predominantly dictated by Beijing. CPEC is starting to seem more like a neocolonial venture, a front for the Chinese takeover of Pakistan, which is leading to human rights abuses and mass appropriation of resources. The Chinese stranglehold has left Islamabad with little choice but to continually express gratitude to Beijing over partial loans to pay import bills issued mostly, of course, by China.

For Pakistan, which has persistently chosen to alienate all its neighbours, the only rational way forward would be to actively work towards regional cooperation — beginning with the subcontinent’s largest country. The longer Pakistan takes to come to this conclusion, the harder it will be. Today, better ties with India aren’t something that Pakistan can simply ask for; Islamabad would need to offer some incentive. It would have to right those wrongs that leaders in Pakistan have openly confessed to: the provocation of wars, the facilitation of India-bound jihadist groups such as the JeM or the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated, among others, the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Gaining India’s trust will be very, very difficult.

Moreover, Pakistan will face internal resistance from the jihadist superstructure it has buttressed for years. Every time there are ostensible steps towards initiation of peace with India, that structure responds with a coordinated manoeuvre. After the 2001 Agra Summit, there was an attack on the Indian Parliament; after Narendra Modi’s visit to Pakistan in 2015, there was the Pathankot raid. If Pakistan is to develop strong, productive ties in the region, it must stop supporting jihadist outfits of any variety. Pakistan will also have to start acknowledging the simple reality that the Indian subcontinent has a shared history spanning millennia — and hence overlapping cultures, languages, and customs. Finally, Pakistan’s economy would have to reinvent itself as growth-oriented, rather than heavily militarised and reliant on foreign aid. These steps could usher in a future of better politico-economic collaboration — and put an end to the submissive, extractive alliance with China.

Unfortunately, the supposed peaceniks in Pakistan have instead been fixated on their own anti-India agenda. For them, the recent surge in Hindutva nationalism driven by Delhi, and the targeting of Muslims, vindicates Pakistan’s separation. They tend to gloss over the fact that religious minorities are disproportionately looking to leave Pakistan for India, while Indian Muslims aren’t exactly queueing up to move in the other direction. They ignore, too, the fact that, despite Hindutva ambitions to reconvert disputed mosques into Hindu temples, there are over 300,000 mosques in India, with numerous under construction or renovation. By contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed over the past 76 years in Pakistan.

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Even leaving aside the possibility that the increasing marginalisation of Indian Muslims could be a side-effect of Pakistan’s creation, a country founded and sustained on Muslim nationalism has little grounds to criticise Hindu nationalism. And besides, all this bickering over whose nationalism is more toxic, and whose treatment of Kashmir is worse, pales into insignificance when one considers the glaring difference in the two nations’ global standing.

More than anything else, the success of Pakistan’s “bleed India with a thousand cuts” policy can be gauged by the volumes of blood the country has shed of its own people. More than 80,000 Pakistanis are direct victims of jihadist attacks. But where glorification of death in the name of “martyrdom” has belittled the colossal loss of life, Pakistan’s rapidly emptying coffers might leave the nation with no choice but to surrender — especially with Saudi Arabia pulling the plug on jihadi funding. The still-rising defence budget suggests that the Pakistan army is refusing to let go of its delusions of grandeur. It is only a matter of time, though, before it caves. At the end of the day, governments need money to run a country, and for that they need allies. A nation cannot live on stories alone.

Today, the Indian prime minister, well into his second term in office and facing elections next year, is accused of condoning pervasive violence against religious minorities, introducing of a stealthy religious test of citizenship, destroying India’s secular character, fostering crony capitalism and criminalising dissent. And yet to ascribe the wretched state of Indian democracy solely to one man is to engage in a form of self-deception. The consolidation of Modi’s authoritarian rule would be inconceivable in the presence of an effective democratic opposition.

Modi’s rise has been facilitated by an opposition that now exists solely to provide subsistence to one family: the Gandhi dynasty, which seized total control of the Congress Party in the Seventies and converted it into a family fief. Despite handing two historic electoral victories to Modi and his Hindu-first Bharatiya Janata Party, the governing apparatus of Congress — the “secular” alternative to the ruling party — has clung religiously to the Gandhis.

The great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, Rahul Gandhi is the seventh member of his family to occupy, formally or informally, the pinnacle of Congress. His conduct radiates an almost feudalistic contempt for his obligations. He has one of the worst attendance records in parliament. Between 2015 and 2019, as Modi subverted autonomous institutions, sanctifying murderous Hindu supremacism and building a cult of personality unrivalled in the democratic world, Gandhi averaged about five foreign trips a month. Virtually every time Modi created an opening for the opposition to push back against the government, Gandhi was abroad, leaving his party without leadership and the nation without an opposition. With the exception of Maha Vajralongkorn, the notoriously dissolute monarch of Thailand, it is difficult to think of another Asian leader who has spent more time away from his country in times of need.

But, then, in March, the scion of the storied Nehru-Gandhi dynasty found himself sentenced to two years in jail on charges of defamation, for mocking Modi’s name in a 2019 speech. Since his punishment met the statutory minimum prescribed in law for disqualification from membership of parliament, Gandhi was served a notice of eviction within 24 hours of the trial. The rapidity with which he was removed was staggering. “I am fighting for Indian democracy,” he declared as he announced his intention to appeal. But far from being a martyr for Indian democracy, Rahul Gandhi is complicit in its slow murder.

Those who have questioned Gandhi’s record and challenged his paramountcy have found themselves stamped upon or driven out of the Congress Party. In 2020, during an important state election in Bihar, Gandhi went away on a Himalayan holiday midway through the campaign. A senior figure who objected to this and faulted the leadership for another Congress defeat was severely upbraided and subjected to disciplinary action. That same year, as defeats piled up in state elections across India, a group of 23 Congress leaders issued a call for internal reform of India’s oldest political party.

The Gandhis retaliated with a scorched-earth response. The reformists were shouted down, bullied, heckled, insulted, told to leave the party and punished in petty and humiliating ways. The party’s politburo tightened the screws with a unanimous resolution to “strengthen” the Gandhis’ control of Congress “in every possible way”, pledging never to permit anyone to “undermine or weaken” their hold on it, and praising them for inspiring “a generation of Indians”. 

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The degeneration of Congress into a family-run despotism ought to dismay all who claim to be concerned about the state of democracy in India. Congress is more than a political party. It is the institution that incubated Indian democracy. Founded by a Scotsman in 1885 as a forum for the expression of native aspirations in British India, it grew under the supervision of Mahatma Gandhi into the engine of India’s freedom movement. Aspiring democrats in Africa and Asia came to regard it as a model for their own countries. “In the upsurge of anti-colonial and freedom struggles that swept through Asia and Africa in the postwar period,” Nelson Mandela wrote from Robben Island in 1980, “there could hardly be a liberation movement or national leader who was not influenced one way or another by […] the All India Congress”.

Following India’s independence, the values of Congress — secularism, socialism, democracy, neutrality in foreign affairs — became the values of the republic. The reverence for Congress ran so deep that elections were a formality: until the Seventies, the party had no challenger. Then, in 1975, confronting the prospect of disqualification from parliament after being convicted by a lower court of violating election rules, prime minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of internal emergency, suspended the constitution and ruled as a dictator for 21 months.

During this period, internal democracy vanished completely from Congress. As party propagandists produced slogans extolling the prime minister (“Courage and Clarity of Vision, Thy Name is Indira Gandhi”), Indira’s older son, Sanjay, a dropout with no formal title in the government, gangsterised the party machinery by inserting his henchmen into its highest echelons, raided state banks and established a reign of terror. Fixated on “beautifying” the country and curbing the growth of population, he ordered the demolition of Muslim slums, paraded in chains those who defied him, and superintended the forcible sterilisation of 6.2 million men — 15 times the number of men sterilised by the Nazis.

Congress was booted out of office in 1977 when Indira Gandhi, desperate to redeem her standing in the West and assured by her intelligence officers of an easy victory, called a snap election. It was an extraordinary affirmation of Indian democracy as an overwhelming majority of mostly illiterate voters threw out a family that had come to regard itself as a native aristocracy.

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Indian democracy opened up to competition; Congress, however, hardened into a hereditary dictatorship. The mystique of the dynasty has hypnotised generations of Westerners. Even during the most violent phase of her dictatorship, Indira Gandhi received praise, rather than rebukes, from figures as ideologically apart as Michael Foot and Robert McNamara. A decade later, when her son Rajiv addressed the US Congress after his administration presided over a pogrom of Sikhs, the Washington Post gushed: “Watching him, you had to believe in genes.” Barack Obama admitted in his memoir to being struck by the “dark, probing eyes” and “quiet, regal presence” of Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow (and Rahul Gandhi’s mother), Sonia. Her position, Obama wrote, was proof of “the enduring power of the family dynasty”.

Since Indira Gandhi’s defeat in 1977, the British Labour Party, the sister party of Congress, has elected a dozen leaders. Barring a brief interregnum in the 1990s caused by a death in the family, Congress, operating in the most populous democracy on earth, has not known a single leader outside one dynasty. Not even the existential threat to India from Modi’s sectarian rule has been able to galvanise it into democratising itself. Under Rahul Gandhi, it has been reduced to a paltry 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, the 545-seat lower house of parliament.

Last year, as Congress found itself out of power in all but two of India’s 28 states, the party reluctantly agreed to hold a leadership election — the first in nearly a quarter century. Since the electoral college was stacked entirely with voters handpicked by the Gandhi family, Rahul Gandhi chose not to enter the race in the hope of giving it the appearance of a fair contest.

But the election was a farce. The Gandhis nominated a proxy candidate: Mallikarjun Kharge, an 80-year-old subservient acolyte of the family from the southern state of Karnataka. Having spent two decades pitching Rahul Gandhi as the hope of India’s young, Congress picked as his surrogate a man born in the reign of George VI, the last emperor of British India.

Kharge’s opponent in the election was Shashi Tharoor, perhaps the only figure with the oratorical prowess, charisma and profile to rival Modi. As a high-ranking diplomat at the United Nations until 2007, Tharoor oversaw a gargantuan bureaucracy, supervised a complex international relief operation for refugees during the Vietnamese boat people crisis and helped negotiate the end of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia. A late entrant to Indian politics, he won three successive terms to parliament from the communist bastion of Kerala in southwestern India.

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Tharoor’s record would make him a frontrunner for the leadership of almost any centrist party in the democratic world. In Congress, however, he was exposed to relentless abuse because he threatened, by virtue of his competence, to eclipse Gandhi. As the campaign got underway, Tharoor, who was among the most passionate advocates of internal reform in Congress, was instructed to withdraw in favour of a “consensus” candidate. When he did not, rumours were circulated to suggest that he was quitting the race. Some leaders took great pains to be seen to spurn him. Others hurled abuse at him. Jairam Ramesh, one of the most powerful functionaries in the party, undermined the election by calling it a “sideshow” even before a vote had been cast. Ramesh, the kind of buffoonish bawler found in every despotic set-up, is emblematic of so much that is wrong with Congress: a self-regarding sciolist who has never exposed himself to a lone popular election in his life and yet wields enormous clout by toadying up to the Gandhi dynasty.

Tharoor was prevented from campaigning in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and politically important state, given voter lists without contact details and denied audience with state leaders of the party, who received Kharge with great fanfare. The unfairness of it all was obscured by the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a so-called “unity march” led by Rahul Gandhi that traversed the length of India as the internal elections happened. The objective of the march was not so much to “unify” India as to burnish Rahul Gandhi’s bruised reputation. He was made the focus of an expensive campaign designed to evoke comparisons with Mahatma Gandhi’s historic Salt March in 1930 against the British Empire.

It all paid off. Kharge was “elected” leader. And his first order of business was to pay tribute to the Gandhis by anointing Gandhi as the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2024 general election. Tharoor and his supporters were mercilessly marginalised. In March, a veteran of the Congress Party told me that there was a serious effort underway to make an “example” of Tharoor by stamping on his backers and engineering his defeat in the next general elections. 

Congress, built by India’s most revered founding fathers, remains the only political organisation that can rival the BJP’s reach and recognition across India. But its ability to restore democracy to India is being fatally undermined by its preoccupation with preserving dynastic despotism within the party. Its recent victory in the statewide election in Karnataka in southern India — naturally credited to Gandhi’s leadership — has deluded some Congresspersons into the belief that their party is poised to defeat Modi in next year’s general elections, and given rise to an ever more militant contest to display loyalty to the Gandhi dynasty. The result: Congress is arguably more feudal today than it was before the leadership contest.

Democracy is a collaborative enterprise: it cannot last if the opposition abdicates its duty. That’s why the prime minister does not wish to finish off Gandhi — his conviction will eventually be overturned by the higher courts — but wants to revive him, energise him with insults and help make him the sole face of opposition to Modi in the minds of voters. That is his path to winning a historic third term, and making secular democracy in India history. Gandhi, by refusing to vanish, is determined to help him achieve his goal.

And so India’s culture wars wearily carry on, pitching liberal secularists against Hindu nationalists yet again. This particular battle has already claimed its first life in Maharashtra: a 40-year-old electrician died in a stone-pelting contest provoked by an Instagram post about the indie drama. Meanwhile, 20-somethings at a Jammu hostel pummelled one another into hospital beds, after one of them voiced the rather outré opinion that the film was “worth watching”.

It most certainly wasn’t. It’s 138 minutes of my life that I will not get back. Here is a production that falls into the dominant genre in contemporary Indian filmmaking: the deranged docudrama. Militarism and a muscular Hinduism, ChatGPT scriptwriting and CGI cinematography, combine in these epic fantasies of unblushing Modi-ana, as myriad villains get their comeuppance: Muslim militants in The Kashmir Files, Pakistanis in Uri: The Surgical Strike, opposition parties in The Accidental Prime Minister, and all three in the biopic, PM Narendra Modi.

In The Kerala Story, Muslim fundamentalists are once again the villains of the piece. The theme is “love jihad”, an oxymoronic term that refers to a conspiracy theory now ubiquitous in India. Lascivious Muslim men, so Modi’s publicists have it, are seducing unsuspecting Hindu women only in order to convert them and increase the number of Muslim babies. This is the Indian version of the Great Replacement Theory, pedalled by the ruling BJP. Muslims are conspiring to become a majority, the argument goes, in order to impose sharia rule on Hindus and, ultimately, obliterate Hinduism altogether.

The director Sudipto Sen’s sleight of hand is to weld love jihad with another Hindu nationalist bugbear: actual jihad. So, we find Shalini, the tragic heroine, abandoning her nursing degree to take up with a Muslim man, who carries her away to an Isis boot camp in the Afghan desert. Her fate as a suicide bomber destined for Syria seems sealed. But then — spoiler alert — a drone, the deus ex machina of our times, spots her. She is whisked away to a Gitmo-style military prison, where she spills the beans about a ginormous terror network set on converting and killing Hindus in their millions. So far, so trite. So why are liberals up in arms?

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Sen’s spurious statistics, together with the echolalia of the unthinking press, seem to be the main source of outrage. Shalini has it that 32,000 Hindu women from Kerala, all victims of “love jihad”, lie buried in the sands of Syria. In interviews, Sen has stood by that number. Maths clearly isn’t his forte. Only around 500 Hindus convert to Islam every year — generally not to become Isis fighters but, in the main, to marry outside their faith. (At its peak in 2017, Isis counted a mere 37 Keralite recruits and sympathisers, as a convincing database put together by Sara Perlangeli and Dhruva Jaishankar shows.) But liberals need not worry about Sen’s trouble with numbers — or, indeed, his trouble with Muslims. For as propaganda goes, The Kerala Story is piss-poor. If anything, it reflects worse on Hindus than Muslims.

In fact, what the film does is show why it is so easy to convert Hindus. The impetus for Shalini’s conversion betrays not so much the pull of Islam as the push of Hinduism. Flashbacks reveal a life of stifling domesticity and sexual harassment. Evidently, Hindu patriarchy didn’t have much to recommend it. The same goes for the individualistic vacuity of Hindu family life, an instructive contrast with the communal conviviality of its Muslim counterpart.

Shalini, admittedly, might be overreading things here. If Muslim families seemed closer to her, it is because, generally speaking, Muslims in India are poorer than Hindus, and richer Indians have a preference for nuclear over extended families. Likewise, if Hindu women — in her experience — were more likely to be pawed and groped in shopping malls, it is largely because they are more likely to come out of the confines of the home. Nevertheless, Shalini is smitten by the pedestrian theology of her pious Muslim roommate, Asifa. The naughty gods of Hinduism, about as craven and lustful as in the Greek epics, are no match for the pensive prophet. And when Asifa throws a hijab over Shalini’s head, ridding her of unwanted male attention, the good Hindu girl is lost. So utterly convinced is Shalini of Islam’s virtues that not even ludicrously grim jihadists gleefully cutting up bodies and dismembering women for wearing lipstick can shake her faith. That this is how Hindu nationalists choose to depict women — by turns credulous and treacherous — is revealing.

Something, one suspects, is rotten in the state of Hinduism. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Dalit architect of India’s constitution, put his finger on it in 1956, the last year of his life. After decades spent trying to reform religion, it dawned on him that women and the lower orders got a raw deal not because of the corruptions of Hindu belief but rather because of Hindu belief itself. It was, above all, a doctrine of “graded inequality”, a social order held together by “an ascending scale of hatred and a downward scale of contempt”. There was no more to it. He converted to Buddhism, as do thousands of Dalits every year on the anniversary of his birth.

The Hindu obsession with conversion, then, speaks to a constant source of insecurity among its believers. The system works only so long as everyone accepts their station, which is why, when even a few leave the fold, it sets off a moral panic. During the colonial period, the threat stemmed from that adventitious agent of emancipation, Christianity. A vestigial fear of the faith remains central to Hindu nationalist thought today, church burnings being common enough in the eastern tracts of India. But over the past 100 years or so, it was instead Islam that frightened the living daylights of caste Hindus, as I argue in my book Another India.

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Indeed, the very origins of Modi’s BJP lie in the fear of conversion. Its parent organisation, the Sangh Parivar, was born in the Twenties out of panic about lower caste conversions to Islam and Christianity. Most spectacularly, in 1981, more or less coinciding with the birth of the BJP, an entire village of Dalits embraced Islam. Class politics in India always needs to find a religious register. At the outset, these Dalits had contemplated converting to Buddhism before deciding against it, Islam being the epitome of subalternity. The shock of Islam was designed to draw Delhi’s attention to the injustices of the caste system as well as the enormity of state neglect.

In response, Brahmins embraced proselytisation — historically alien to Hinduism. Missionary orders were set up and converts won in elaborate shuddhi — purification — ceremonies. More recently, Modi’s reign has been coeval with the Ghar Wapsi campaign, a concerted drive to, as it were, “return” converts back to the House of Hinduism. Christians and Muslims are won over, often under duress, to their “true” faith, their foreign-sounding names replaced with suitably Hindu ones.

The war against “love jihad” is of a piece with this vision. Starting in the late 2000s, Hindu nationalists set about cracking down on miscegenation. These days, marauding gangs break up mixed couples in ice-cream parlours, cinema halls, and even register offices, forestalling marriages in the nick of time. It’s an uphill struggle, but Hindu nationalists seem to be winning. Interfaith relationships are on the decline.

All the same, and perhaps counterintuitively, liberals ought to take comfort from films like The Kerala Story. Sure, it offends the viewer’s intelligence, but I’m not convinced that the film should be banned because it offends Muslims. For in carping about conversion, not least the effortlessness with which it is secured, Sen and his ilk are unwittingly making the case against Hindu hierarchy: exposing the very real factors that push people away from the nationalists’ faith, rather than confirming the conspiracy theory about Islamism. Here, then, is a truth about Hindu nationalism. It’s brutally effective when violently evangelised, but the minute it tries to persuade, its propaganda goes hopelessly awry.

Some would say he had it coming. The doyen of India’s nationalist historians, R.C. Majumdar, has said that Mill “suffered from a strong dose of racial prejudice and ignorance about ancient Hindu culture”. Likewise, for the Stanford historian Priya Satia, Mill was little more than a propagandist for empire, an apologist for “Britain’s civilising mission”. To be sure, there is plenty in Mill’s triple-decker History of British India to support this view. “The Hindu,” Mill writes, “like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.” In the Muslim, he discerned “the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy”. India was a “rude” and “backward” society.

But to carp about a clutch of infelicitous phrases is to miss the wood for the trees. The charge of racist imperialism, of course, isn’t easily resisted in our time. Understanding the thought-world of the 19th century, however, requires more than a mindless aggregation of poorly-aged gaffes. Reflexive cries of “Orientalism” will not do. The truth is that Mill was a radical egalitarian ahead of his time.

If the History took the form of a scathing sermon, it was only because its author was a sour man. His impatience with Indian tradition must be taken as a proxy for his frustration with British tradition. Railing against the caste system was a way of railing against the class system. Born in Angus in 1773 to a shoemaker and smallholder, Mill had a keen awareness of status. His mother had married down. Mill’s benefactress, who put him through Edinburgh University, that centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, reminded him of his station when he fell in love with her daughter, whom he was tutoring. Wilhelmina Stuart was hurriedly married off to the seventh baronet of Pitsligo, very much against her will. In her dying breath, apparently, she would call out Mill’s name, and he would name his daughter Wilhelmina.

Mill carried his hatred for the aristocracy into maturity. It didn’t help that, studying for the Kirk, he had to moonlight — like the character in Parasite — by teaching the privileged sons and daughters of the titled nobility. Disillusioned with the ministry, he reinvented himself as a freelance writer in London, married, and sired nine children.

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Mill had never been to India. It was poverty and precarity that prompted him to write his History, a job application masquerading as a 2,000-page love letter to Progress, in 1818. In it, Mill made a virtue of his shortcomings, spinning his lack of first-hand experience, not to mention his monolingualism, into a commitment to objectivity. But no matter. Ruth Benedict wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the greatest work of 20th-century anthropology, without ever setting foot in Japan, and the East India Company’s head-hunters duly recognised Mill’s equally impressive achievement. On the strength of it, Mill was placed in charge of examining the Company’s prodigious correspondence, a position he held until his death — as a very rich man — in 1836.

Proclaiming the creed of Utilitarianism, the History seemed to come out of nowhere. At the time, the Company men who ran the subcontinent were traditionalists to a man — committed, in the first viceroy Warren Hastings’s phrase, to “reconciling the people of England to the nature of Hindustan”. Indians, by their account, were incorrigible. It was the Company’s job to interpret their way of life. Mill disagreed: the point was to change it.

It may appear that in tut-tutting at the nabobs who went native, Mill shared the reforming ambition of the radical Clapham Sect, which believed in putting the heathens to rights with the aid of its militant brand of Christianity. Yet Utilitarianism was an altogether different proposition. For one thing, it belonged to the Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, Mill and his mate Jeremy Bentham thought in universalist terms, where once even Voltaire held that different rules applied in the “oriental despotisms” of the East.

So it was that where, like obliging Erasmus students on cultural exchange, the likes of Hastings and his successor Charles Cornwallis coolly accepted — appreciated even — the inequities of the caste system as a fact of life, Mill vehemently denounced the “detestable views of the Brahmins” in rather colourful terms. Caste was “a degrading and pernicious system of subordination”, and the Hindu “system of priestcraft” was “built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind”. It was for this reason Mill described Hindus as “the most enslaved portion of the human race”. The enormities of untouchability, in particular, made a deep impression on him: “Those wretched outcastes had no resource for subsistence excepting either the bounty of the established classes, to whom they were objects of execration and abhorrence, or the plunder of those same classes, a course to which they would betake themselves with all the ingenuity of necessitous, and all the atrocity of much injured, men.”

Contrast this with the head-in-the-sand observation of Mill’s nemesis, the Bombay governor Mountstuart Elphinstone: the condition of the lower castes “was much better than that of the villains of the Middle Ages or any other servile class with which we are acquainted”. What’s more, while Mill was drawing attention to the plight of India’s underclass, Elphinstone insisted that such a “servile class” had ceased to exist in the early 19th century.

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Our latter-day Elphinstones, of course, still like to bang on about cultural relativism, defending primordial hierarchy as “alternative modernity”, primitive savagery as “alternative justice”, shamanic quackery as “alternative medicine”. These are fanciful sleights of hand. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but too much sympathy for an alien society can easily shade into a naive exculpation, if not outright endorsement, of its most hidebound traditions.

Some of Mill’s contemporary critics, such as Lord Bhikhu Parekh, complain that the Utilitarians tipped the balance too far in the opposite direction. For nearly 40 years, to 1855, the History was the established textbook at Haileybury College, the Company school in Hertfordshire. It was insinuated by early Indian nationalists, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R.G. Bhandarkar, that Mill had spawned a whole generation of Indian Civil Service apparatchiks inimical to Indians, a foreign ruling caste as removed from hoi polloi as the native Brahmin elite. Not so. To the traditionalist credo of “live and let live”, the Utilitarians had one of their own: “Human nature is the same in Cawnpore as in Cheapside.” Ideology trumped culture. Far from being a homogeneous mass of traditionalists, Indians, too, had their diminutive reforming currents. The heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment found allies in the freethinkers of the Bengal Renaissance.

Mill’s greatest contribution, however, was his stab at bettering the lot of the Indian peasantry. This is a side of him generally ignored by decolonial historians, for it sits uncomfortably with their Manichean worldview. In Mill’s time, two systems of land tenure prevailed: Cornwallis’ zamindari system, predicated on middlemen who served as tax-farmers and prevalent in Bengal, and Thomas Munro’s ryotwari system, widespread in the South and North-Western Provinces, wherein the state took a share of the produce directly from peasants. Both were perversions of pure capitalism. Mill’s solution was to bring all land under public ownership. He was inspired by David Ricardo, who had held that “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to every other class in the community”. It followed for the Utilitarian Mill that the “greatest happiness of the greater number” could only be secured if the parasitic rentier interest was eliminated.

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Harry Flashman's imperial morality

By Nikhil Krishnan

It should be stressed that, despite being a radical egalitarian, Mill was no Marxist avant la lettre. His vision turned on free trade and individual enterprise, both shackled in equal measure by government and go-betweens. Here, then, was a rather quaint, Right-wing case for nationalisation. A big state was dead weight, he argued. As universal landlord, government could extract the tiniest rent to conduct its business and educate the masses, and so eliminate taxation altogether. As he put it in his History, “light taxes and good laws; nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe”.

What of good laws? Here, too, the cocksure know-it-all that that he was, Mill had a ready answer: abolish juries and judicial procedures, investing competent judges with autocratic powers. Mill and his mentor Bentham had no time for the Whig fetishisation of checks and balances. The separation of powers was pooh-poohed in Utilitarian circles. Betraying a vestigial Protestantism — he had in fact developed his own eccentric faith — Mill hoped that mass education and simpler legislation would render the legal profession redundant and every man his own lawyer. More importantly, where Company traditionalists supported having separate legal codes for Hindus and Muslims, and preferential treatment for Brits, Mill believed there ought to be only one law for everyone.

These were big, bold reforms. Needless to say, Mill’s startlingly original assault on privilege did not go down well with the men on the spot, many of them of aristocratic and gentry stock. Land reform along the lines proposed by Mill was briefly piloted in the Bombay Deccan, but then abandoned as impracticable. Spurred by developments at home — the Great Reform and Slavery Abolition Acts — a soupçon of social reform ensued in British India from the 1830s on, admittedly more of Whiggish than Utilitarian stamp, outlawing suttee and enabling widow remarriage. But then, in 1857, the deus ex machina of the Great Rebellion detonated. For a brief moment, it appeared that Britain’s empire in India was teetering on the edge of collapse. Lessons were learned, and the blame laid squarely on reformist zeal.

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In the autopsy of the revolt that followed, the view from London was that traditionalism was a better doctrine to rule India than Utilitarianism. One could either keep the moral high ground or keep an ear to the ground — but not both. So it was that the traditionalist consensus that ran from Clive of India in the mid-18th century to Elphinstone in the mid-19th, fleetingly interrupted by the Utilitarian moment, resumed for another 100 years until independence in the mid-20th. Ultimately in the grand scheme of empire, Utilitarianism was little more than a blip, a pointillist dot shrouded by the thick brush strokes of traditionalism. But of its existence, and brief influence, there can be little doubt.

Mill himself, it needs stressing, was no saint. Like Whitman, he contained multitudes — embarrassing contradictions even. Iconoclastic in some ways, he was utterly conventional in others. For one thing, his impeccably liberal premises led him to conclusions that were incontrovertibly authoritarian. Utilitarianism, after all, preached the doctrine of happiness, not liberty — of good government, not self-government. Mill himself ruled out democracy for Indians. Likewise, to the dismay of his contemporaries — his son John Stuart Mill especially — he argued against extending the franchise to women, who, like children, had no interests independent of the family patriarch.

In philosophical mode, he struck a rather different note. Each individual, he wrote in his Essay on Government, was the best judge of his own interests. Suffragists a century on, then, were staying true to Mill’s principles rather than his prejudices, as indeed were Indian nationalists after independence, when they abolished zamindari and outlawed untouchability. It’s an irony of history that it was the Indians, not the British, who put into practice the theories James Mill advanced in his History of British India.

Yet for the past two years, he has hardly been seen. Stuck at home during the pandemic and shackled by his family’s financial insecurity, Shaikh abandoned education in 2021. Since then, he has been working on haulage trucks, transporting goods to nearby cities as a “cleaner”, assisting the driver and maintaining the truck. Once an outgoing teenager, now Shaikh only visits home every few days, often for just a few hours between trips. His childhood, as he knew it, is over.

Shaikh’s story is far from unique. Three years on from the pandemic, the entire world is still reeling from its effects. But in India, the restrictions were particularly extreme: in March 2020, when the whole world was shutting down, the Modi government imposed what became one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. With just four hours’ notice, more than a billion people were confined to their homes — and 1.5 million schools were closed. The country’s 247 million children were then condemned to “online” learning, little more than a euphemism in a country where only a quarter of students had any internet access. The long-term social effects of lockdown are slowly becoming apparent across the world — but in India, where education was already stratified by savage disparities of wealth and resources, its crippling consequences are already devastatingly clear.

In the region where Shaikh lived, smartphones and the internet were even scarcer than the Indian average. Local activists say internet coverage stood at less than 5%. “That’s when we realised that it was futile to think that we could deliver education digitally in rural India,” says Rahul Bais, who set up Swarajya Mitra, a local not-for-profit that campaigns for children’s rights. But while those on the ground like him realised the futility of online education, the Indian government pushed ahead. In a statement in August 2021, the Modi government highlighted the steps it had taken to ensure “no loss of education” during the pandemic. Topping the list was a government website named “DIKSHA” which hosted material such as school textbooks, educational TV and radio programmes, and YouTube videos.

Except, in areas like Wardha, none of it could reach students. S.S. Athawale, the principal of a government-funded secondary school in the area, the Dr Devidas Karale Vidhyalaya, explains: “Of, say, 100 students, only 20-25% of the children’s families had mobile phones. But 10% had analogue phones, and the 10% who had smartphones had no money to top-up their data. So, we were really able to reach only 5% of the children, depriving the remaining 95% of even basic education.” And even when students had both smartphones and the money for a data plan, the patchy internet connectivity in their villages stymied their efforts. Many students, faced with the seemingly indefinite interruption of their education, simply lost interest in their studies or turned to work to support their struggling families. When schools finally reopened for offline education in 2022, students in Shaikh’s position never returned.

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And the effects of this are already tangible. A countrywide study, the 2022 Annual Status of Education Report, which surveyed more than 700,000 Indian children, found that children’s basic reading abilities had deteriorated to levels last seen in 2012, while their basic arithmetic skills had also regressed sharply to levels lower than in 2018. In another survey of school teachers in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states, 53% admitted that most of their pupils had forgotten how to read and write.

Shaikh’s story echoes across the villages of Wardha. Overnight, the pandemic forced many children to become adults. In the tiny village of Kinhala, just a 20-minute drive from the state highway, the single road barely sees any traffic. Instead, throughout the day, the road sees a steady stream of young children, mostly girls, walking up and down the street with steel pots. The village’s common source of water is a well, around 600 metres away from the village. Children who dropped out of school now find themselves huddled around the well several times a day, waiting for their turn to draw water.

Among them are 16-year-olds and best friends Amruta Shelke and Nikita Dabhekar, both of whom are no longer at school. Shelke’s mother passed away after an illness two years ago, coinciding with the pandemic. Since then, she has had to shoulder the burden of running the household while her father Prakash works in the family’s farm, cultivating cotton and soybean. “He looks after the farm while I take care of the household duties like cooking and cleaning and tend to the cattle,” Shelke says, standing outside the hay-roofed cattle shed adjoining her home.

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Her friend Dabhekar has a similar story. Her father died during the pandemic, threatening the family’s financial stability. Debhekar had no choice but to work full-time as a labourer in the farms, earning £1.50 a day for a seven-hour shift. For years, Dabhekar had been straddling the world of labour and education — she would work for a week or so, before going to school for a couple of days and then back to work. But the pandemic disrupted this cycle of intermittent educational forever. She hasn’t given up on her education yet. But, she says, “we’ve just not been able to make enough money, so I have to keep working”.

Although similar stories abound across the region, official government data stubbornly refuses to reflect the self-evident crisis. Last year’s government report claimed that more than 785,000 additional students were enrolled in schools at all levels, from pre-primary to secondary, between April 2021 and March 2022 when compared to enrolment the previous year. But this claim relies on dubious data-keeping practices, as local teachers and principals admit. “Even when we know that a student is unable to come, we keep their names on the rolls because, that way, they’ll be easily able to come back whenever they want,” said a teacher at a secondary school in the area, who did not want to be named.

According to his mother, Shaikh himself, who has not been to school since 2020, is still on the school’s rolls as a student, and is officially in the tenth grade. Students like him only visit school to appear for examinations and are often allowed to go through the years without a strict test of their abilities. Teachers insist that such steps are taken out of compassion for students, but local activists say this “compassion” also conveniently allows schools to escape scrutiny for their absentee students.

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Bais argues that many in Shaikh’s position have at this point lost interest in schooling, having instead tasted the freedom that earning a salary brings. And others are put off returning by the sense that they have fallen irretrievably behind their peers. “We tried to re-enroll students who had dropped out, but we realised that they were too anxious about how other students around them would make fun of their ignorance,” Bais says. “The pandemic has shattered their confidence.” Shaikh’s mother Rehana, who had steadfastly refused to let her children work, have had no choice but to acquiesce to their children’s wishes. “My son tells me when we need money, no one will help us. So let me go and earn,” she says.

In a country that is both the world’s largest democracy and an aspiring superpower of the coming century, the long-term implications of this silent crisis could be stultifying. “After the pandemic pushed children into earning a living, many children started wondering why education was even necessary,” says Bais. “They would see their parents were doing similar work. As a result, many children asked us, ‘if we have to grow up and do this exact same work, why even bother finishing our education?’” Three years later, this is the true effect of lockdown in rural India — one that will take years to remedy.

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The Children of Nowhere is released today.