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.

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.”

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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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.

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.

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.

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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Liberalism didn't protect Salman Rushdie

By Pratinav Anil

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.

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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Modi has created a new theocracy

By Pratinav Anil

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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Gandhi hasn't aged well

By Pratinav Anil

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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Gandhi hasn't aged well

By Pratinav Anil

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.

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”.

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.

If anything, Victory City feels like Sin City — cartoonishly brutal, emotionally stunted, jarringly anachronistic. There’s the usual parade of deities and elephants. But peel away the exoticism and one is left with a useful history lesson. For too long, pre-colonial India has been a tabula rasa for both nationalist and liberal projections. It was, Rushdie reminds us, no golden age.

For India’s Hindu supremacists today, the Vijayanagara empire was a land of cow’s milk and saffron-infused honey, a Hindu holdout in the Muslim Deccan, where Art and Culture, solemnly graced with capital letters, flourished unhindered by the depredations of the barbarians at the gates. (Those barbarians, of course, are all mascaraed Muslim men flaunting their philistinism, their many wives and their dextrosinistral script.) Queasily sharing a bed with the supremacists are liberals given to an allied fantasy, that pre-colonial Indian kingdoms were pristine, perfect societies, unsullied by contact with the West; that it took the Brits to cow a self-respecting people into submission.

Both are bovine delusions that Rushdie sends up in Victory City. His two fictional cow-herding founders of Vijayanagara, the brothers Hukka and Bukka, medieval India’s answer to Romulus and Remus, are apostles of openness. They briefly consider the beliefs of their subjects — “do you think they are circumcised or not circumcised?” — but are then confronted by the impracticability of the task: “Do you want to go down there and ask them all to open their lungis, pull down their pyjamas, unwrap their sarongs?” It’s all too much of a bother. “The truth is I don’t really care.”

Indeed, unlike Narendra Modi, the historical Vijayanagara’s rayas — rulers — weren’t that interested in the faith of the people they lorded it over. Rushdie, of course, gives their toleration a blasé touch, as if they were detached moderns. But the point stands: they may have been rather religious themselves, building temples and adopting deities, but they preferred not to saddle their subjects with their beliefs. Vijayanagara, in fact, was a fairly Islamicised affair, its kings dressing like Muslim rulers, its armies enlisting Muslim strategists and horse traders, its architecture incorporating Muslim motifs — a riot of arches and domes, vaulted arcades and squinches.

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So, rather than a plucky Hindu kingdom standing alone in the South, enisled in a sea of Muslim kingdoms, Vijayanagara was, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from its neighbours. And those neighbours weren’t especially hostile. Bijapur’s Muslim kings, for instance, were not the grim, Sharia-obsessed, humourless, Isis types of lore, but rather, like Hukka and Bukka, a largely tolerant bunch. Hindu gods were halal, as were erotic miniatures.

War made quick work of religious distinctions in the real world. Vijayanagara’s rayas were men of fickle loyalties, siding with Bijapur against (also Muslim) Ahmadnagar at one time, and with Ahmadnagar against Bijapur at another. The corollary was also true: the Hindu Gajapati empire was once a sworn enemy of Vijayanagara. And according to the latter empire’s foremost historian, Burton Stein, its rayas registered their biggest military successes against the Hindu empires to its south, not the Muslim ones to its north. What’s more, these victories were secured in the main through the recruitment of Muslim mercenaries. In the end, a notionally “Muslim” triple alliance did in Vijayanagara — not because it was a Hindu kingdom, but because it had the temerity to declare war on all three of them.

Rushdie takes aim at the myths of not only the Hindu nationalists but also those of unthinking anti-imperialists. Today, an increasingly common view peddled by American academics has it that the caste system was a British construct, alien to the golden age to which Vijayanagara belonged. It is a view, moreover, that appears to be finding a receptive audience this side of the pond. The BBC, for one, has aired the risible claim of a Temple University geographer that “the pre-colonial written record shows little or no mention of caste”. The Indian polemicist and parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor argued much the same in a puerile Oxford Union performance, before repeating the assertion in the Guardian.

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It’s an assertion that liberals, British as well as Indian, instinctively sympathise with, since it points the finger at the villainy of imperialists and casts the colonised as blameless victims. But it is just as blinkered and anachronistic as the pseudo-histories hawked by Hindu nationalists. As Rushdie rightly shows, and indeed as scores of sensible historians such as Ananya Chakravarti and Rosalind O’Hanlon have argued, caste hierarchy was the organising principle in pre-colonial Indian society. Endogamy was the norm: inter-dining, let alone inter-marriage, was rare to the point of nonexistence.

Rushdie’s allegorical “castes” — crows, owlets, parrots, songbirds — don’t get on. They live as communities apart, much as real castes did in Vijayanagara. Contemporary travellers recorded the wildly different lifestyles of the lower and upper orders, their mutually unintelligible customs. Here’s one of them, observing the consuming passions of the Brahmins, the priestly class, in 1535: “The learned Brahman [has] never married nor ever touched a woman… These people have such devotion to cows that they kiss them every day, some even on the rump, and with the droppings of these cows they absolve themselves from their sins as if with holy water.” He then goes on to describe a ritual associated with “that [low] caste of people called Telagas, amongst whom the wives are buried alive with their husbands when they die”.

Vijayanagara was no liberal utopia, then. It may have been multicultural to a certain extent, but Rushdie carefully avoids falling into the trap of viewing medieval India as a “composite culture”. Secularism was very much work in progress. Violence along religious and caste lines was not absent, and even the peaceful interludes were more of a passive, live-and-let-live business, rather than an active celebration of unity in diversity. As Rushdie shows, medieval India was a deeply divided society long before the arrival of the “foreign pink monkeys”.

Time and again, as in his previous novels The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence, toleration proves a false Eden. His latest heroine Pampa Kampana’s “theological laxity” proves elusive. Hindu supremacists take charge, and she is exiled to a forest. But then she returns to usher in a fleeting renaissance, only to be relegated by another Modi-type. The dark ages return. Here, then, is Rushdie’s cyclical interpretation of history: good times follow bad times follow good times follow bad times ad nauseam.

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Above all, his new book paints a picture of life in pre-colonial India that isn’t pretty. As elsewhere, it was nasty, brutish, and short. Victory City opens with mass suicide, an all-too-graphic description of sati, self-immolation, as war widows throw themselves into flames to escape dishonour as their “fourth-rate” empire collapses. Severed heads circulate as if legal tender. A deposed king has his “crownless head” chopped off and filled with straw. These aren’t always magical realist flourishes. Some quick cross-checking reveals that Rushdie has culled many of these gory details from the accounts of two Portuguese travellers, Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes, both of whom feature as prominent characters in Victory City. The latter’s memoir is especially graphic:

“The punishments that they inflict in this kingdom are these: for a thief, whatever theft he commits, howsoever little it be, they forthwith cut off a foot and a hand, and if his theft be a great one he is hanged with a hook under his chin… Nobles who become traitors are sent to be impaled alive on a wooden stake thrust through the belly, and people of the lower orders, for whatever crime they commit, he forthwith commands to cut off their heads in the market-place… These are the common kinds of punishments, but they have others more fanciful; for when the King so desires, he commands a man to be thrown to the elephants, and they tear him in pieces.”

“The past is a foreign country,” wrote L. P. Hartley, “They do things differently there.” Which is to say the past is never pretty. History is full of awkward facts. Fiction, especially good fiction, recognises this. Victory City will upset some liberals, of course, who will find no pre-colonial golden age between its covers. But I suspect it will rile up Hindu supremacists a lot more. As it happens, the villain of the piece in Rushdie’s fictional world is a faux-celibate pandit who has it off with the reluctant heroine, a prepubescent girl possessed by the deity Parvati. In other words, a Hindu goddess is raped by a Hindu priest. Rushdie may have spent the last 30 years of his life hiding from Muslim mullahs, but I fear he’ll have to spend his remaining ones fleeing their Hindu counterparts.

The old arguments were dredged up yet again last week, when the Guardian ran a story under the headline, “‘Cultural appropriation’: discussion builds over Western yoga industry”. The description of this discussion as building is, I guess, technically true, in the same sense that a news item about a certain unfortunate mythological figure might be titled, “Man pushing stone uphill nears summit”. It is a construction project without a conclusion, without even the dream of one. Consider another headline, also from the Guardian, this one from 2010: “Yoga heritage: don’t even think about stealing it, says Indian government.”

Even in this decade-old account of the efforts of the Indian government “to provide irrefutable evidence for anyone hoping to patent a new style of yoga that the Indians got there first”, one gets the sense of a barn door being closed after the horse had escaped. Yoga was already a global phenomenon then, and it has only grown, both in terms of its market share and its place in the cultural discourse. The latest estimates put the number of yoga practitioners at more than 300 million worldwide, with the industry valued at just shy of $90 billion. Before the pandemic, yoga was ubiquitous — not just at dedicated studios but in hotel fitness centres, universities, care homes; during the pandemic, it became famous for being one of the few forms of exercise you could do without leaving your home.

Given its ubiquity, it’s hardly surprising that it’s had its fair share of controversies. The hot yoga guru Bikram Choudhury was best known for his failed attempt to copyright his signature 26-asana sequence in the US, which is cited in that 2010 piece as having catalysed the Indian government’s protective instincts surrounding yoga’s origins. But in 2017, Choudhury became one of the more deserved casualties of the MeToo movement, and fled to India after losing a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers. (Choudhury is now attempting a comeback campaign, which is called “Bikram is back: the unapologetic tour.” Unfortunately for him, this news is buried in his Google search results beneath mentions of a 2019 Netflix documentary titled Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.)

Considering the global saturation of the practice, the idea that Westerners doing yoga represents a form of cultural theft is surprisingly resilient. After a 2013 essay on the now-defunct XOJane website declared, “LIKE IT OR NOT, WESTERN YOGA IS A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION”, a painstakingly-researched rebuttal by Michelle Goldberg should really have put an end to the discussion once and for all. Among Goldberg’s acerbic observations was that yoga had been strategically pushed by India to Western audiences, not least because its popularity acted as a flipped bird of sorts to the contemptuous attitude of colonial Britain toward Indian traditions and religion. The same year Goldberg’s essay was published, 2015, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully campaigned to further globalise yoga with the UN-approved International Yoga Day, which has since been recognised annually with mass yoga demonstrations worldwide. Modi’s campaign wasn’t without its critics, who believed that the celebration was in fact an act of oppression against India’s Muslim population — but, per Goldberg, it at least demonstrated “that the spread of yoga in the West is not just a story about Westerners raiding some pristine subcontinental reservoir of spiritual authenticity”.

And yet, in these final days of 2022, here again is the now-familiar narrative of an awakening to the unwokeness of yoga. The featured complainant, an author named Nadia Gilani, was alarmed to realise that “not only were most yoga teachers and students in the UK white, but the accompanying wellness narrative has divorced yoga from its 5,000-year-old roots”. Beyond that “wellness narrative”, which puts yoga in the same category of commercialised self-care as juice cleanses and jade yoni eggs, Gilani is also especially peeved about t-shirts bearing the ubiquitous Om symbol and tattoos featuring Hindu gods. “It’s cultural appropriation and it’s offensive.”

This is an interesting moment, with interesting rules about which religions and cultures are deserving of reverence. On the one hand, tattooing an image of Ganesh onto your body is offensive cultural appropriation; on the other, a hilariously blasphemous sweater featuring Jesus himself in a baby bjorn is available for $60 and will make you the life of every holiday party. Ironically, the people who believe that Eastern cultures are too precious, too exotic, to be subject to this sort of playful remixing are the same ones who tend to hurl allegations that Western yogis are “fetishising” the practice. There is also the question of who is more guilty of failing to acknowledge the roots of yoga: the yogi so invested in its cultural background that he gets a Ganesh tattoo, or the yogi who couldn’t pick Ganesh out of a lineup.

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But it is also strange to describe yoga as divorced from its roots, when every breed — from hot to nude to power to goat — derives from just one ancient practice, which has evolved in its native habitat just as much as it has spawned offshoots on other continents. Even contemporary yoga in India differs hugely from the practice described in ancient texts, which is one of the reasons the Indian government had such a hard time defining it in 2010. But far from being forgotten, what is incredible is how easily those roots have grafted onto other movement styles, other cultures, and other forms of community building. In a world where human ingenuity and imagination has given birth to everything from water ballet to jazzercise to competitive cheerleading to cat dancing, yoga stands out. The accessibility of it, the many paths that lead people to it, its infinite adaptability to any body or lifestyle, have allowed it to become not only one of India’s chief cultural exports but the living embodiment of that saying about letting a thousand flowers bloom.

And while, yes, one of those flowers is the fancy boutique studio where a moneyed clientele with fawn-like bodies practise handstands in $500 spandex jumpsuits, this is at worst a conceptual annoyance. It doesn’t stop anyone else from rolling out a mat, from taking a breath, from exhaling against the limits of a stretch until the body opens. The latest Guardian article features one yoga instructor lamenting the scourge of “$100 Lululemon leggings and an equally expensive mat”, while Gilani describes group classes at a flashy studio as “gatekeeping, in a way” — but is it? More so than demanding religious or cultural fealty in exchange for the privilege of practising? More so than aspiring to make yoga off-limits to people of certain socioeconomic backgrounds, who are wearing certain pants?

This is somewhat personal to me: I’ve been practising yoga regularly for just over 10 years and teaching group classes for five — it seemed in the pre-pandemic times like a reasonably secure alternate source of income should the writing work dry up. My teaching style is focused on movement, anatomy, and choreography; I don’t Om or chant or pray, which is either an egregious failure to acknowledge yoga’s heritage or a noble refusal to appropriate another culture’s spiritual practices, depending on who you ask.

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But then, every teacher at the studio where I work approaches the practice differently. There’s the one who leads long, guided meditations that make 15 minutes feel like five hours, seamlessly dipping in and out of consciousness until even the sensation of the floor underneath you completely disappears. There’s the one who brings little gifts to her students, shells or stones or paper butterflies, so that her classes feel a little bit like yoga but also a bit like nursery school. There’s the one who reads aloud from poetry books and punctuates the end of savasana with a Tibetan singing bowl. The thing about yoga is, it leaves room for all of us. There is no one path to the sense of peace and connection that comes from the practice, no one right way — and, crucially, no wrong one.

But it’s difficult to build a marketing campaign on that, and here it is worth noting that Gilani’s appearance in this article is tied to a book release. Of course it is. After all these years, this might be the biggest reason why the debate about yoga and cultural appropriation won’t die: because bringing it up is too valuable a promotional tool to let it go entirely. What is being built in these endless relitigations of the same set of talking points, these arguments over who owns what, is not a discussion, but a brand. Yesterday it was Bikram’s. Today it’s Gilani’s. Tomorrow, it will be someone else’s.

My favourite of the yoga sutras goes like this: By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness. I can’t speak to its spiritual meaning; it just strikes me as good advice, a variation on that Alcoholics Anonymous prayer about knowing the limits of one’s control. Disregard toward the wicked: an acknowledgment of the existence of wickedness, but a refusal to dwell on it, to obsess over it, to let it spoil everything else.

This doesn’t just work as a means of staying sane and centered while the latest outrage cycle churns — but for that, it works very well indeed.

Khan was shot last week at a political procession he had convened as part of his reckless agitation to topple Pakistan’s legitimate government. The failed assailant confessed he wished to assassinate Khan for leading Pakistanis astray; he succeeded only in lionising his target. Khan’s supporters are spinning his survival as evidence of their master’s superhuman qualities. But he is neither martyr nor saint: he remains one of the most pernicious political personalities in the world today.

Khan was first lofted into the prime minister’s office in 2018, in a vote manipulated by what Pakistan’s human rights commission described as the “blatant, aggressive and unabashed” interference of his sponsors in Pakistan’s mighty military, which has governed the Islamic republic directly or indirectly for most of its existence. Opponents of Khan were relentlessly harried and intimidated. Many Pakistanis experienced the election as a “soft coup”.

It is a measure of Khan’s incompetence that, despite the backing of the khakis, his party failed to secure a majority in parliament and had to enter into coalition to form government. One theory in Pakistan is that the military denied Khan a majority to keep him in check.

Khan had spent long years auditioning for the military’s favour. His very public conversion from dim-witted tabloid fodder in the West to a chillingly prudish regurgitator of anti-Western bromides in Pakistan eventually brought him the reward he craved. Some argued that Khan was wearing a mask. If so, the mask devoured his face. Khan, like the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, recoiled from the West with the rage of a convert.

In 2005, for instance, Newsweek published a short article on the alleged desecration of the Koran by US soldiers. The story went unnoticed until Khan, sensing an opportunity, read every line of it at a press conference. “This is what the US is doing,” he bemoaned, “desecrating the book on which our entire faith is based.” Khan’s outraged performance provoked days of religious rioting in which 17 people were killed and dozens more gravely injured. The story was later debunked and retracted. But Khan never showed a hint of contrition. Instead, seven years after that inaugural bloodbath, he went to the hospital where Malala Yousafzai was given emergency treatment and advanced a theological defence for the Taliban’s “holy war”.

The public purveyor of iman — faith —struggled in private, according to those around him, with the haram habits he had picked up in the West. One of his ex-wives told Vanity Fair that Khan sniffed huge quantities of cocaine every night during their 10-month marriage in 2015. The momin who never tired of delivering hectoring prelections on human dignity to the West apparently also used racist language in private. He could not have been unaware of the consequences of such bigotry: after all, a kinsman of his had overseen the slaughter of three million Bengalis — a people denigrated by Pakistani officials as “black monkeys” — in 1971.

Nonetheless, as prime minister, Khan pledged to remake Pakistan into a new Medina. He took a third wife, a fully veiled clairvoyant who claimed to have had visions of his triumphs, and subordinated his temporal duties to the task of establishing himself as the champion of the Islamic ummah.

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His reign embodied the confusions that have stalked Pakistan ever since its invention in 1947. Is it the homeland of Indian Muslims? Or is it the truncated residue of the medieval Arab-Islamic invaders of India? No other country celebrates its own despoilers as Pakistan does. The Arabs had stormed Sindh, now in Pakistan, in the 8th Century and spent weeks slaughtering the natives and plundering their riches. But those conquerors are the heroes in Pakistani lore, and the country’s great public works carry their name. Faith has complicated Pakistanis’ relationship to Pakistan: are they natives or aliens, progeny of the soil or foreign implants on it? Are they Indian or Arab? These aren’t academic questions: the massacre of Bengalis in 1971 was animated by the belief that they were, as the US consul-general in Dhaka at the time put it, “heretics” corrupted by veneration for their pre-Islamic customs.

Khan exemplified this crisis of identity. As prime minister, he behaved less like the leader of his country and more like the delegate of a pre-eminent global community posted in its South Asian outpost. His identification with faith eclipsed all other affinities. He radiated contempt for India, the land of his kith, and raised the spectre of nuclear war with it — but claimed kinship with faraway Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the name of faith.

The worsening plight of ordinary Pakistanis became the least of Khan’s concerns in office once he set himself up as the tribune of oppressed Muslims and began routinely lashing out at the West and other non-Muslim governments for their treatment of his co-religionists. But just as the preacher of austere faith could reconcile himself allegedly to the ecstasies of cocaine in private, the champion of Muslim dignity made convenient exceptions to his own rules in public.

The man who decried France for its “Islamophobia” gladly pitched for Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign even as it sought to smear his Muslim opponent as a terror sympathiser.

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Denouncing Indian democracy as a sham and all of India as the 21^st-century avatar of Nazi Germany for the depredations of the Hindu-supremacist regime of Narendra Modi, Khan shrugged off the concentration camps in Xinjiang, where China is torturing millions of Muslims by re-enacting some of the most degrading atrocities from the Nazi repertoire. Heading a system that formally grants its religious minorities the status of second-tier citizens, bans them legally from holding the state’s high offices and enshrines capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam in law, Khan pushed a resolution through parliament castigating Emanuel Macron for victimising France’s Muslim minorities. Vilifying the West for its prejudices, he became the most vocal champion and apologist of the Taliban.

Self-unawareness, the condition of leading a state forged in victimhood, matured into self-destructive delusion. Khan equated tweets and incoherent rants against Modi— another exponent of religious nationalism who wants to turn India into a Hindu facsimile of Pakistan—as diplomatic victories for Pakistan. He received succour from supposedly “liberal” voices whose revulsion for Modi’s brand of nationalism turned them, absurdly, into apologists for Khan’s variant of it.

In the end, it was Pakistan’s military that became unsettled by Khan’s ruinous fixations. Khan, who turned up in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s esteemed guest on the day the Russian president launched the invasion of Ukraine, had become intolerable even for an outfit that has supported terrorism for decades. The ringmasters had treated him as a pliable monkey; but he, addled by power, was going rogue and threatening to burn down the lucrative circus they had built.

The opposition, invigorated by the growing rift between the erstwhile collaborators, called a vote of confidence in April. Khan’s claim that the military was colluding with his political rivals sounded far-fetched because it loathes the Sharifs, who lost to Khan in 2018, even more. But the military did abandon him and refuse to come to his rescue. Orphaned, he became the first prime minister to be thrown out of office by a vote in parliament.

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Out of power, Khan amplified a self-serving backstory: he described himself as the casualty of a sinister plot by America and its agents in Pakistan. Israel, naturally, was added as a co-conspirator. Khan then toiled hard, according to Islamabad, to sabotage a financial package from the International Monetary Fund to help Pakistan after it was devasted by biblical floods.  Once again, the hardships of his own people did not seem to worry the internationalist who was more preoccupied with the welfare of the Palestinians and Indian and European Muslims.

Khan’s gambit began yielding profits: in a country conditioned by decades of anti-Western, anti-Hindu and anti-Jewish rhetoric, a significant section of the society came to view him as a soldier of Islam and a victim of its enemies. His party won a series of by-elections.

Then, in October, the Election Commission of Pakistan convicted Khan of pocketing gifts from foreign dignitaries, disqualified him from membership of parliament, and barred him from public office for five years. An investigation published by the Financial Times in July disclosed that a Pakistani conman currently facing a possible sentence of 291 years in a US jail for financial fraud had funnelled millions of dollars to Khan’s party via a charity. But the revelations only strengthened the conviction of the faithful. And they answered Khan’s call to bring down the government of Pakistan through protests and marches.

Khan has already accused his successor, Shehbaz Sharif, of orchestrating the attack on him — and threatened grave consequences if the prime minister refuses to quit. Khan lives. And we should feel a measure of gratitude for this: he is a husband and a father. But Khan has seldom exhibited sympathy for others and is now threatening to intensify his street protests. So our gratitude must be tempered with some anxiety at what might lie ahead for the country he claims to love. As a Pakistani lawyer who has worked with Khan in the past told me on the day of the shooting: “The only person who benefits from the shooting on Mr Khan is Mr Khan.”

And yet, weeks later, on the highways leading out of Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore and other major cities, policemen were using their batons to rap citizens breaking lockdown rules. Millions of migrant workers, unable to afford rent or food without a daily income, had begun the long walk home to villages hundreds of kilometres away, children and belongings in tow. A sea of people was fleeing cities built by their toil, growing more desperate as the lockdown wore on and transport networks remained shut.

More than 90% of all Indian labour is informal, a lot of it casual, and about 140 million Indians are migrant labourers, living some part of the year in cities and industry hubs located long distances from their homes. The world was introduced to this workforce during April and May 2020, mostly through photographs of them trudging along highways in the blazing sun. Ten workers were arrested from inside the cylindrical tank of the milk van that was their getaway vehicle. One little girl walked 100km from where she’d worked picking chillies before dying 20 km from home. Sixteen men were run over by a goods train — they thought the railway tracks were safer than the highways as no passenger trains were operating.

But public memory is short, and most have forgotten the stories.

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Helping dim the memory of those visuals is the view, among those looking only at Covid-19 infection data, that the Indian government’s response to the pandemic is a success story, despite a fresh spike in cases through the second half of February.

In September 2020, the nation was recording about 100,000 positive cases every day; now, a little over 16,000 are being recorded, less than a quarter of the daily new cases in the United States, which is itself easing restrictions. In total, India has recorded almost 11million infections, second only to the US, but our mortality rate is 1.42%, compared to the world average of 2.21%. More than 14.3 million doses of the vaccines have been administered, in one of the world’s fastest Covid immunisation programmes.

The jury is still out on what shrank India’s Covid epidemiological challenge in comparison to mid-2020, but experts concur that a combination of circumstances deserves credit. Sero-surveys conducted between December and January found that about a fifth of Indians have been exposed to the virus already — up to every second or third person in the big cities. Urban India’s generally lax public hygiene may be a factor. In rural India, where healthcare has historically suffered from neglect, it is likely that many of those infected were not counted, having experienced only mild symptoms. But the government will no doubt congratulate itself for imposing a 70-day near-stoppage of economic activities and penal action against those violating curbs on personal freedoms.

No state administration has yet declared itself out of the woods — perhaps not wishing to jinx the sliding curve — and five Indian states are actually implementing or contemplating fresh lockdowns after a rise in cases over the past two weeks (in Maharashtra, home to financial capital Mumbai, the municipal administration has resumed “sealing” apartment buildings with multiple Covid-19 patients). But public health administrators hope this is not a major setback. The stock market is singing, the Government of India and its top brass have declared the onset of a V-shaped recovery and India’s billion-plus citizens, we are told, are back at work, on public transport and at malls. Five states, including two large ones, are in election-mode, and crowded public rallies outside have begun. In the northern state of Punjab and along the agrarian belt of western Uttar Pradesh, tens of thousands of unmasked farmers are protesting against three new laws that they see as a State sell-out to corporate interests in agriculture.

Just another day in raucous, chaotic India. Business as usual; the old normal is back — or so the economy managers would have us believe.

Some of that is disingenuous, of course — particularly the peaens to the bulls of the equities market. The Wall Street Journal last week accurately described the country’s roaring stock market — 22% up since the start of 2020 — as “disjointed from economic reality”. But one thing we all agree upon is that India is now ready to pose the question: who foots the bill for an endemic coronavirus?

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Extreme poverty in India, defined by the international poverty line as living on $1.90 a day, is estimated to have declined from 21.6% to 13.4% of the population between 2011 and 2015. But, according to the World Bank, half of India is in serious danger of sliding back into poverty. More than 121 million Indians were rendered out of work in the very first month of restrictions, and the unemployment numbers remain troubling 11 months later.

The migrant workers who made headlines walking or hitchhiking back home to rural India are either back in the cities or seeking to return. But many of their previous jobs no longer exist — a direct outcome of the “successful” battle against the pandemic. The manufacturing sector has failed to re-employ about 11.4 million Indians; job losses in the education sector continued to grow in the quarter ending December 2020. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), a private business data provider, 7% of Indians are still unemployed in February 2021. There are now a few million Indians who have been unemployed for nearly a year.

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The service industry is on the rebound, but cannot absorb everyone it once employed. At restaurants, there are QR code menus and fewer waiters. There are fewer bellboys at poorly occupied hotels, fewer sales assistants at department stores, fewer housekeeping staff, gym trainers and salon therapists. The little shops in suburban Mumbai where you could get your shirt pressed for Rs 5 are closed or employing a fraction of their staff — as more people work from home, not everyone needs to be turned out immaculately.

Salary cuts and home working have also reduced demand for domestic help in urban India. This all-women workforce of cooks, nannies and house-help can still be seen doing the rounds of apartment complexes in small groups, looking for employment, for lower wages, while apartment-dwellers are looking to cut corners themselves. This category of casual labour has no representative bodies or unions, their work most unaccounted for in labour surveys. Millions of other casual labourers, such as factory workers, security guards, drivers and street-vendors find themselves pushed further to the margins.

In short, India’s urban poor are more desperate than ever — and, the evidence suggests, more indebted. This class didn’t have savings to last a month, let alone a year. There has been a sudden explosion in personal loan apps offering instant cash, including about 100 that Google removed from its PlayStore for being fraudulent or engaging in coercive recovery practices or shady data mining operations.

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A key phrase in India’s Covid management policy has been Atmanirbhar, or self-reliant. A compendium of initiatives under the Atmanirbhar India programme, announced in May 2020, should have come to the aid of the millions rendered without work and income. It promised, among other things, re-skilling programmes and an employment guarantee for migrant workers returning to villages.

This wages-for-work approach to tackling rural poverty was first introduced in 2006 — a showcase initiative of the regime that preceded Narendra Modi’s. Incidentally Modi, having been in office a year, ridiculed it in 2015 on the floor of the Indian Parliament. But demand for work under the scheme reached unprecedented highs with the urban exodus: the financial year from April 2020 to March 2021 recorded the largest ever workforce queuing up for the public employment programme. It is now sustaining about 20 million Indian men and women; the programme the Prime Minister jeered at is now touted as another policy success in tackling Covid-induced distress.

But this is back-breaking labour, for a daily wage of around $4.10, and work is only legally guaranteed for 100 days a year. If anything, the rising demand for it is indicative of the lack of productive alternative employment. And demand is at the same levels now as it was at the peak of the lockdown. So more Indians than ever are signing up for unskilled labour at minimum wage. Meanwhile, few have heard of the new Atmanirbhar reskilling programmes, and an existing skill development scheme has at best had mixed results.

On March 24, as Modi announced the first 21-day lockdown, India’s Covid death toll stood at 12. Any neglect during those 21 days could set the nation back by 21 years, the Prime Minister warned. And the clock did turn back years for those who faced the humiliation of the long walk home. Upon their return, they have found labour to be more expendable, their shrinking wages and dwindling job opportunities engrained within post-Covid policies, while the state retreats in the guise of market-oriented reform. That is the price, and the poorest have paid it.

The end of secularism is nigh

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In recent decades, the mingled regret and yearning that the memory of Rama’s capital can inspire among Hindus had come to be focused on one particular location in the modern city of Ayodhya: the Ram Janmabhoomi, the ‘birthplace of Rama’. At the moment, nothing serves to mark the sacred spot. But soon enough that will change. A great complex of buildings will rise. As Modi, officially declaring the process of construction begun, put it: “A great temple will now be built for our Lord Rama.”

A fortnight earlier, the President of Turkey had celebrated a similar reconsecration. In 1453, when the Christian capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, its most stupefying building, the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, had been converted into a mosque, and duly served for almost half a millennium as a monument to the triumph of Islam over a defeated and superceded order. Then, in 1935, a decade and more after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement within its heartlands by a Turkish republic, the mosque of Ayasofya was turned into a museum. So, for decades, it remained. Then, this summer, the museum once again became a mosque. On 24 July, Hagia Sophia opened for Friday prayers. “It is breaking away from its chains of captivity,” President Erdogan declared rhapsodically. “It was the greatest dream of our youth. It was the yearning of our people and it has been accomplished.”

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The synchronicity between Modi’s trip to Ayodhya and Erdogan’s to Hagia Sophia is striking, and only flimsily obscured by the fact that the Prime Minister of India is trampling the legacy of an Islamic empire much as the President of Turkey has trampled the legacy of a Christian one. In the early sixteenth century, shortly after the Moghul conquest of the lands that once, so Hindus believed, had constituted the Ram Rajya, the ‘realm of Rama’, a mosque was built in Ayodhya. By the twentieth century, large numbers of Hindus had come to believe that this same mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood directly on the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi. In the 1980s, the BJP — the party to which Modi belongs — began a campaign to demolish it. In 1992 a mob duly tore it down. Communal riots exploded. Thousands died.

Last November, even as the site was formally granted to Hindus, the Supreme Court of India condemned the demolition of the mosque as a crime. But a crime by whose standards? Not, it would seem, by Modi’s. Just as Erdogan justified the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque by “right of conquest”, so the Prime Minister of India, hailing the opportunity to build a temple on the site where the Babri Masjid had stood, invoked the ancient traditions of his country. It was, he declared, “a unique gift from law-abiding India to truth, non-violence, faith and sacrifice.” History as well as justice stood on his side.

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That both developments — the building of the temple and the reconsecration of the mosque — have provoked very similar expressions of alarm from secularists illustrates the degree to which the Hindu prime minister and the Muslim president, despite their many differences, are at war with a common enemy.

Modi, in his speech at Ayodhya last week, made a telling comparison between India’s freedom struggle and what he described as the “centuries-old penance, sacrifices and resolve” of those who had campaigned to raise a temple to Lord Rama on the site of the god’s birth. The comment infuriated India’s secularists — as well it might have done. Modi, in effect, was accusing them of collaboration. The British Raj might be gone, but not so its pernicious legacy. The founding fathers of independent India, who had constituted the country as a secular republic, had betrayed its primordial characteristic of Hindutva: the qualities that for millennia had defined it as Hindu through and through.

In like manner, Erdogan’s real target was not Byzantium, nor the Orthodox Church, nor even Greece, but the secular status of the country which he rules as president. Just as Justinian, the emperor who originally built Hagia Sophia back in the sixth century, had claimed to have vanquished Solomon, so might Erdogan, by abolishing its status as a museum, have claimed to have vanquished Atatürk. The father of Turkish secularism, whose contempt for Islam had been matched only by his admiration for the model of modernity provided by Europe, had consciously sought to wrest his country from the hold of its history. Now, no less consciously, Erdogan is engaged in a mighty effort to redeem Turkey from secularism, and restore it to the embrace of its Islamic past.

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All of which should serve as a wake-up call to the West that it is not only its financial, economic and military muscle that is currently atrophying. So too is its ability to market its culturally conditioned assumptions as universal. The concept of the secular is not, as many in West like to think, a neutral one. Quite the opposite. As the very word betrays, it derives from the distinctive theology and history of Latin Christendom: for ‘saeculum’, the word given by the Romans to the endless flux of things, was counterpointed by St Augustine and his heirs to the religio, the ‘bond’, that, so Augustine had taught, joined the pilgrim Church on its journey through the centuries to the radiant eternity of the City of God.

Over time, these two words had evolved to become words in the language that the British had then exported to India, and around the world. That there existed things called ‘religions’ — ‘Hinduism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Judaism’ ­— and that these functioned in a dimension distinct from entire spheres of human activity — spheres called ‘secular’ in English — was not a conviction native to anywhere except for Western Europe. None of which had prevented it from proving an astoundingly successful export: no less influential in Atatürk’s Turkey than in Nehru’s India. Long after the collapse of Europe’s empires, its colonisation of elites around the world endured.

Yet if the West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had proven itself skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences, then the spread of secularism inevitably depended for its success upon the care with which it covered its tracks. Those tracks, as the era of Western hegemony slips away, are becoming ever more evident. Modi and Erdogan have certainly spotted them. The summer of 2020, notable as it already is, will surely be remembered by historians of the future as a key waystop on what is likely to prove perhaps the key narrative of the 21^st century: the decline of the West and the rise of a multi-polar world. The temple of Lord Rama and the mosque of Ayasofya will stand as monuments to a changing of the global guard.

America’s decline is impossible to disentangle from China’s rise, so it is natural that the rapid climb of the Middle Kingdom back to its historic global primacy dominates discussion of the civilisation-state. Though the phrase was popularised by the British writer Martin Jacques, the political theorist Christopher Coker observed in his excellent recent book on civilisation-states that “the turn to Confucianism began in 2005, when President Hu Jintao applauded the Confucian concept of social harmony and instructed party cadres to build a ‘harmonious society.’” In any case, it is only under his successor Xi’s rule that China as a rival civilisation-state has really penetrated the Western consciousness. “The advent of Xi Jinping as the Chinese president in 2012 propelled the idea of ‘civilization-state’ to the forefront of the political discourse,” the Indian international relations scholar Ravi Dutt Bajpai remarks, “as Xi believes that ‘a civilization carries on its back the soul of a country or nation.’” 

This civilisational ethos radiates from Chinese analysis of the country’s future path. In his influential 2012 book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, the Chinese political theorist Zhang Weiwei observed with pride that “China is now the only country in the world which has amalgamated the world’s longest continuous civilization with a huge modern state… Being the world’s longest continuous civilization has allowed China’s traditions to evolve, develop and adapt in virtually all branches of human knowledge and practices, such as political governance, economics, education, art, music, literature, architecture, military, sports, food and medicine. The original, continuous and endogenous nature of these traditions is indeed rare and unique in the world.” Unlike the ever-changing West, constantly searching after progress and reordering its societies to suit the intellectual fashions of the moment, Weiwei observes that “China draws on its ancient traditions and wisdoms,” and its return to pre-eminence is the natural result.

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The West's monumental crisis

By aris roussinos

It is in these hallowed traditions, of a centralised state with a 4000-year history, of an efficient bureaucratic class adhering to Confucian values, and of an emphasis on stability and social harmony over liberty, that Chinese theorists credit their civilisation-state’s rise, now “seemingly unstoppable and irreversible”. Surveying a West in decline and a Middle East mired in bloody chaos, Weiwei remarks with cool detachment that “if the ancient Roman empire had not disintegrated and been able to accomplish the transformation into a modern state, then today’s Europe could also be a medium-sized civilisational state; if the Islamic world today made up of dozens of countries could become unified under one modern governing regime, it could also be a civilisational state with more than a billion people, but the chance for all these scenarios has long gone, and in the world today, China is the sole country where the world’s longest continuous civilisation and a modern state are merged into one.”

Yet the appeal of the civilisation-state model is not limited to China. Under Putin, the other great Eurasian empire, Russia, has publicly abandoned the Europe-focused liberalising projects of the 1990s — a period of dramatic economic and societal collapse driven by adherence to the policies of Western liberal theorists — for its own cultural sonderweg or special path of a uniquely Russian civilisation centred on an all-powerful state. In a 2013 address to the Valdai Club, Putin remarked that Russia “has always evolved as a state‑civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state‑civilisation model that has shaped our state polity.” In a 2012 speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin likewise asserted that “we must value the unique experience passed on to us by our forefathers. For centuries, Russia developed as a multi‑ethnic nation (from the very beginning), a state‑civilisation bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native for all of us, uniting us and preventing us from dissolving in this diverse world.” 

It is worthy of note that while Russia is frequently characterised by both liberal commentators and far-right enthusiasts alike, particularly Americans, as a breeding ground for state-backed white nationalism, this claim derives from the racial obsessions of the United States rather than the actual ideology of the Russian state. Indeed, for Putin it is Russia’s heritage as a polyglot empire that makes the state he helms a civilisation state rather than a mere nation, explicitly stressing that “the self‑definition of the Russian people is that of a multi‑ethnic civilisation.” 

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By Daniel kalder

In a revealing 2018 essay, Putin’s adviser Vladislav Surkov — who was fired from his role this February — foregrounded this hybridity, part-European and part-Asian, as the central characteristic of the Russian soul. “Our cultural and geopolitical identity is reminiscent of a volatile identity of the one born into a mixed-race family,” Surkov wrote. “A half-blood, a cross-breed, a weird-looking guy. Russia is a Western-Eastern half-breed nation. With its double-headed statehood, hybrid mentality, intercontinental territory and bipolar history, it is charismatic, talented, beautiful and lonely. Just as a half-breed should be.” For Surkov, Russia’s destiny as a civilisation-state, like that of the Byzantium it succeeded, is one as “a civilisation that has absorbed the East and the West. European and Asian at the same time, and for this reason neither quite Asian and nor quite European.” 

This unresolved tension between East and West, Europe and Asia defines the political stance of Byzantium’s other successor state and Nato’s current problem child, Turkey. Like China, a great premodern empire eclipsed by the rise of the West to global dominance, Turkey under Erdogan now cloaks its revanchist desires in the sumptuous mantle of the Ottoman past, reviling the West even as Erdogan depends on Trump’s America and Merkel’s Germany for his regime’s survival. When the new imam of the newly-converted Haghia Sophia mosque mounted the pulpit last month, sabre in hand, to proclaim the rebirth of Turkey and curse the memory of the country’s Europe-facing moderniser Ataturk, it was to underline that Turkey’s glorious future depends on reviving its Ottoman past. The date of the ceremony, the 97th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne which dissolved the Ottoman Empire and replaced it with the Turkish Republic was equally symbolic. Just as Justinian, on entering his great new cathedral, remarked that he had surpassed Solomon, so had Erdogan surpassed Ataturk. The age of pleading to join Europe, as an impoverished supplicant, had ended; the age of conquest had returned.

Trapped in the post-historical dreams of liberalism, many Western observers of Erdogan’s growing aggression had missed these symbolic cues, or dismissed them as empty rhetoric, a luxury not available to Turkey’s former subject peoples in the Balkans and Middle East. When, in March, Turkey attempted to force Greece’s borders open with thousands of migrants assembled from the slums of Istanbul, the Bayraktar drone that hovered above the contested border fence bore the callsign 1453, the date of the fall of Constantinople, just as the drill-ships that constantly threaten to violate Greek and Cypriot sovereignty bear the names of the Ottoman admirals and corsairs who ravaged the coasts of Greece and Europe. 

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When will Germany get off its knees?

By aris roussinos

Turkey’s intent, the country’s interior minister Suleyman Soylu boasted during the border crisis, was to destroy the European Union. “Europe cannot endure this, cannot handle this,” he claimed. “The governments in Europe will change, their economies will deteriorate, their stock markets will collapse.” In a speech this month, at the same time as the Turkish navy threatened Greece with war, Soylu outlined Turkey’s civilisational vision of the new world order: “On this path,” he told the assembled audience of military dignitaries, “we’ll design by embracing the entire world with our civilisation, holding the West and East with one hand, the North and South in the other, the Middle East and the Balkans in one hand, the Caucasus and Europe in the other.”

In the newly-annexed regions of northern Syria, Turkey’s rebel proxy militias, dominated by ethnic Turkmen, name themselves after Ottoman sultans, adopt the Ottoman seal as their logos and give interviews in front of maps of the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent, all while expelling the region’s Kurds and Christians from their homes. In Syria as in Libya and Iraq, Erdogan’s expansionist vision explicitly cites the Ottoman Empire as legitimation for its path of conquest, tracing Erdogan’s “borders of the heart” far beyond the reach of modern Turkey, from Thessaloniki in the West to Mosul in the East. Seizing on weakness wherever he finds it, even the heart of liberal Europe itself lies in the Turkish strongman’s sights. 

When his ministers were barred from addressing crowds of ethnic Turks in the Netherlands and his supporters rioted in The Hague, Erdogan called the Dutch government “Nazis” before telling the Turks of Europe: “Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you.” Alternating, with all the passionate inconsistency of a SOAS undergraduate, between triumphalist Islamic expansionism and accusations of racism and Islamophobia wherever his will is thwarted, the Turkish strongman crows over his starring role in the continent’s decline, boasting that “Europe will pay for what they have done. God willing, the question of the European Union will again be on the table,” and exulting that while “they said a century ago that we were the ‘sick man,’ now they are the ‘sick man.’ Europe is collapsing.” 

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The dark genius behind the destructive creed of Putinism

By Ian Birrell

As with the Netherlands, urging Turks in Europe to outbreed their native hosts and then calling European leaders Nazis when they protest, Erdogan’s civilisational discourse exists in a strange symbiosis with the Western far-right, seen most dramatically in his response to the Christchurch shooting last year. When the killer Brandon Tarrant slaughtered 51 Muslim worshippers in the Christchurch mosque, it was with a rifle on which he had scrawled the names of various European battles against the Ottomans. In his manifesto, Tarrant had explicitly cited Erdogan as “leader of one of the oldest enemies of our people” and threatened Turks, who he described as “ethnic soldiers currently occupying Europe,” that “we will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands. We are coming for Constantinople and will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city. The Haghia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully Christian-owned once more.” In direct response, Erdogan aired Tarrant’s livestream of the slaughter at his campaign rallies, to the horror of the New Zealand government, declaring days after the killings that “you will not turn Istanbul into Constantinople,” and vowing that ”Hagia Sophia will no longer be called a museum. Its status will change. We will call it a mosque,” a promise he fulfilled last month, leading the faithful in prayer in the great cathedral’s second conquest. 

To the horror of liberal European politicians, like the Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, who Turkish foreign Mevlut Çavuşoğlu warned was “dragging Europe into the abyss,” and that “Holy wars will soon begin in Europe,” Erdogan’s AKP party revels in the rhetoric of civilisational conflict. Intentionally or not, Erdogan is doing much to drag the continent’s centrist politicians rightwards. Through his actions, he stokes fear and distrust of Europe’s Muslim minority, and then reaps the domestic rewards of the response his warlike discourse brings. But as with many of his stunts, Erdogan’s short-term gains may have unintended consequences stretching far into the future, both for Turkey and for Europe. 

Turkey’s growing naval provocations in the Mediterranean are fuelling such an angry response from European politicians, helmed by Emmanuel Macron, that the EU’s foreign minister Josep Borrell remarked with exasperation in the European Parliament recently that, listening to the mood of the assembled MEPs, “I thought I saw in the Chamber that Pope Pius V had resurfaced calling for the Holy Alliance against Turkey and mobilising the troops of Christendom to face the Ottoman invasion.” It is not difficult to foresee Macron, tacking right as he heads towards the election season, fusing his campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood at home with an assertive European posture against Turkey abroad. A civilisation, like an ethnic group, is defined as much in opposition to a rival Other as from any intrinsic cultural content, and in each other both Erdogan and Macron may have found the perfect foils for their civilisational projects.

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Who'll blink first: Trump or Xi?

By Helen thompson

Indeed, it is striking that Europe’s soi-disant liberal saviour is the most prominent Western adopter of the new language of civilisation-states: no doubt the former Hegel scholar has discerned the Weltgeist. In an overlooked speech last year to a gathering of France’s ambassadors, Macron mused that China, Russia and India were not merely economic rivals but “genuine civilisation states… which have not just disrupted our international order, assumed a key role in the economic order, but have also very forcefully reshaped the political order and the political thinking that goes with it, with a great deal more inspiration than we have.” Macron observed that “they have a lot more political inspiration than Europeans today. They take a logical approach to the world, they have a genuine philosophy, a resourcefulness that we have to a certain extent lost.”

Warning his audience that “we know that civilisations are disappearing; countries as well. Europe will disappear,” Macron lauded the civilisational projects of Russia and Hungary, which “have a cultural, civilisational vitality that is inspiring,” and declared that France’s mission, its historic destiny, was to guide Europe into a civilisational renewal, forging a “collective narrative and a collective imagination. That is why I believe very deeply that this is our project and must be undertaken as a project of European civilisation.”

There is much here for British conservatives to like, certainly far more than the Global Britain fantasies which neoconservative and neoliberal thinktankers persist in trying to sell the Johnson government. Writing for a British audience in The Guardian last year, Macron remarked that “nationalists are misguided when they claim to defend our identity by withdrawing from the EU, because it is European civilisation that unites, frees and protects us.” Instead, he urged, “we are at a pivotal moment for our continent, a moment when together we need to politically and culturally reinvent the shape of our civilisation in a changing world. Now is the time for a European renaissance.” Yet for Britain, as for the rest of Europe, defining the essential nature of that civilisation is a harder question than it is for China or for Russia. 

Whereas the rising civilisation-states of Eurasia define themselves against the liberal West, the West, and Europe, struggle to define their own very natures, and place greater intellectual emphasis on deconstructing it than on defending it: an urge that is, like the impetus to deny the existence of civilisations as bounded entities, itself ironically a unique marker of our own civilisation. Perhaps a civilisation is merely an empire that survived through and past the age of nation states, yet it is nation states, carved from the bloody wreckage of past empires, that define modern Europe. Perhaps Guy Verhofstadt, the risible butt of Brexiteer mirth, was right after all when he observed that “the world order of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It’s a world order that is based on empires.” 

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

But then, though there are strong political taboos against observing it, we already live as subjects of an American empire, though few would want to claim America as a civilisation; fewer, indeed, than view the struggling hegemon as an anti-civilisation, dissolving the variety of European and other cultures in the harsh solvent of global capital.  Does even the West exist as a coherent, bounded entity? As Coker notes, “Neither the Greeks nor sixteenth-century Europeans… regarded themselves as ‘Western’, a term which dates back only to the late eighteenth century.” Macron urges us to root our sense of belonging to a specific European civilisation in the Enlightenment, yet this is a far from convincing prospect. After all, it was the universalising tendencies contained in Enlightenment liberalism that led us to this impasse in the first place. As Portugal’s former foreign minister Bruno Macaes observed in a perceptive recent essay, it is precisely the global aspirations of liberalism that have severed the West, and Europe particularly, from its own cultural roots. 

“Western societies have sacrificed their specific cultures for the sake of a universal project,” Macaes notes. “One can no longer find the old tapestry of traditions and customs or a vision of the good life in these societies.” Our naive faith that liberalism, derived from the political and cultural traditions of Northern Europe, would conquer the world has now been shattered for good. Instead, it is the defiantly non-liberal civilisation-states of Eurasia that threaten to swallow us whole. Where then, does that leave Europe, and what are we to do with liberalism? “Now that we have sacrificed our own cultural traditions to create a universal framework for the whole planet,” Macaes asks, “are we now supposed to be the only ones to adopt it?”

In 1996, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington observed that ‘in the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, the Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: It is false, it is immoral and it is dangerous. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.” Yet Huntington, like his critics, was writing at a time of unchallenged American pre-eminence. Critics of Huntington’s civilisational thesis, like modern academic critics of the concept of civilisation-states, are challenging a construct that no longer exists, of an all-powerful West arrogantly dismissing the rest from a standpoint of political superiority. Now, however, it is we in the West who are in decline and it is in the universalising myths of liberalism that our powerful civilisational rivals trace the root causes of our failure.

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'Global Britain' is in for a rude awakening

By aris roussinos

In any case, even within the American empire, the collapse of US power abroad and the growing disfavour with which European civilisation is held in the United States itself do not bode well for the longterm survival of a coherent Western civilisation. If the West, like liberalism, is at this stage merely a justifying ideology for the American empire, then we will be forced to replace it with something else soon enough. It is precisely this problem of determining what that replacement will be that will define Britain and Europe’s politics for the rest of our lifetimes. Europe’s ageing liberal ideologues, the fading 1968 generation which has dominated our politics for so long, do not appear to have answers for these questions; indeed, they do not even seem to realise, even now, that these questions exist. 

It is only when we see Macron struggling to rally European civilisation for the coming age of empires, or observe European strongmen like Viktor Orban, hailed by many Anglo-Saxon conservatives as the saviour of Western civilisation, railing against the West with all the passion and fury of an anti-colonial revolutionary, that we see glimpses of a future stranger and more complex than our current political discourse allows. When we see Poland mandating the study of Latin in schools to imbue pupils with an understanding of “the Latin roots of our civilisation,” or the young rising star of the Dutch radical right Thierry Baudet asserting that we are living through a “European spring,” “contradictory to the political spectrum that has dominated the West since the French Revolution,” which will “change the direction that all our countries are going to take in the coming two generations,” we discern, just as we do in the BLM protests or the spread of the American social justice faith in our streets and universities, the political battlegrounds of Europe’s future.

The most perceptive critique of Huntington’s civilisational thesis was always that the bloodiest confrontations were within civilisations and not between them. In the new age of the civilisation-state, perhaps the greatest challenge to our social harmony will come not from the challengers beyond our cultural borders, but from the battle within them to define who and what they defend.

The troop movements that triggered the current crisis have been seen before: what’s different now is the construction of facts on the ground which, if left unchallenged, will become permanent and give one side a military advantage in a contested region over which they fought a war in 1962. The region is Aksai Chin. India says that despite it being controlled by China it is part of its Ladakh region; China counts it as part of its Xinjiang province. The flashpoints are along what is called the ‘Line of Actual Control’ — (LAC) as in the points at which Indian military control of Ladakh stops, and Chinese military control of Aksai Chin begins.

This line can be drawn on a map, but up at 17,000 feet above sea level shifting river flows and snow mean they are less clear — especially if you want them to be. New Delhi says that in early May an Indian Army patrol near Ladakh’s Pangong Lake was blocked by hundreds of Chinese soldiers operating across the LAC in contravention of a 1996 agreement to respect it. Punches were thrown, then stones, leading to injuries on both sides, but no shots were fired. The Chinese then set up camp, dug trenches, and began moving heavy equipment into an area the Indians say is up to 2½ miles inside the LAC.

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Covid-19 is hardening our borders

By Tim Marshall

Latest reports suggest that 5,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army are now dug in, heavy artillery has arrived, and barracks are being built both near the lake and in the Galwan valley. In all there are five locations in Ladakh which have seen confrontations. India has responded by moving several thousand re-enforcements up to the Line of Actual Control.

Aksai Chin is not coveted for its beauty, mineral riches, or fertile soil: it’s a barren, mostly uninhabitable, freezing cold high plain, but it has attributes beloved of estate agents – commanding views, good transport links, and location, location, location.

From Beijing’s perspective India has been behaving aggressively, most notably by building roads to help its military crisscross the high mountain. The road which most concerns China is one which follows the LAC for several hundred miles and connects Indian military outposts. They have also built a new road to reach a military airstrip, which was reopened in 2008, and which has recently been upgraded to allow the Indian Air Force to land its Super Hercules (C-13OJ) aircraft thus boosting its ability to move men and equipment to the region at speed. The airstrip, in Daulat Beg Oldie, is often the only way to bring in supplies during the winter months.

So, for each side, more than just national pride is at stake. Both capitals know their long-term strategies, and military capabilities, will be enhanced, downgraded, or return to the status quo, depending on their next moves.

India needs to find a way to persuade China to fold its tents and move a few miles back east. It is trying dialogue, but if that fails the options are to either accept what would be a humiliation, or try and move the Chinese by force. In the 1962 conflict that didn’t go well for India, and although it is now a far stronger power so is China. However, failure to shift the Dragon will leave it west of the LAC and positioned to lay claim on Indian territory, at the minimum, on the Galwan valley. Loss of the Pangong Lake would made the region difficult to defend, and any Chinese move further west could cut the new roads India has built. That in turn would reduce its ability to support troops in the region which leads up to the Karakorum Pass linking China and India. China has yet to park a tank on the lawn — but it has planted several red flags.

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By Maajid Nawaz

The Himalayas are mostly impassable so China’s focus is not usually on India despite them sharing a 2,100-mile-long border. It is more concerned with the South China Sea, but increasingly it takes a 360-degree view of the world. This is partially due to its growing power, but also because technology allows it, and its neighbour, to now operate in the high ground. This makes China increasingly sensitive about Aksai Chin, which connects the restive province of Xinjiang to western Tibet. It is also close enough to the Karakorum Highway for Beijing to pay attention when India does anything to strengthen its military position.

The Highway connects China with its long-term ally Pakistan, and is a part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It runs from China all the way down to the Pakistan port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, and as such is a key component in the Belt and Road Initiative. Part of the Highway is routed through Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, which some of the wilder elements in the Indian Hindu nationalist BJP government have spoken about one day recapturing. That alarms Beijing, which also took a dim view of India’s decision last year to redraw its map by splitting Jammu & Kashmir in two to create Ladakh as a union territory that included Aksai Chin.

China knows that India is probably not in a position to enforce its claim to Aksai Chin, but is not in the mood to allow New Delhi to make any moves which strengthen that position without some response.

Hence we see what appears to be China’s first attempt to alter the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh since the 1960s. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that this latest flare-up occurred in several locations within days of each other: indeed it follows a pattern of challenging the status quo since President Xi came to power eight years ago. Until now the most serious incident came in 2017 when India and China engaged in a 73-day military stand-off on the Doklam Plateau in the north-eastern Indian state of Sikkim before the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and President Xi came to an agreement allowing both sides to save face.

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Reaching a similar settlement this time looks to be much more difficult, as China does not appear to be in the mood for compromise. With the world’s attention on the Covid-19 pandemic China has been attending to foreign policy. As well as the Ladakh incidents it has sunk a Vietnamese fishing vessel in the South China Sea, harassed a Malaysian oil drilling rig, sailed an aircraft carrier fleet around Taiwan, and tightened its grip on Hong Kong. As China’s Covid-19 pandemic wound down, and others’ intensified, it looks as if Beijing calculated that countries such as India would be too consumed with dealing with the virus to push back against aggressive moves.

President Trump offered his unsolicited help to mediate on the Ladakh crisis but was given short shrift. Celebrations for the 70^th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and India were the opportunity to find a solution but they came and went with any sign of a breakthrough. However, the anniversary was just before the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing opened, and given that the Congress appeared set on projecting China’s strength to the world the timing was unfortunate. Now that it has finished there may be a new opening.

For that to happen, though, requires a desire for an equitable settlement. Not a shot has been fired across the LAC since 1975. If China feels it can cement the new facts on the ground and maintain that record it will be tempted to reject compromise — and that will leave India will a very hard choice.

Electricity is provided by criminal cartels who rig up dangerous connections to the grid. Cooking is done on charcoal fires which poison people’s lungs. People get water from shared standpipes or the river; cholera outbreaks are common. During election periods, anger often boils over into protests.

And with Covid-19 reported in Nairobi, things are looking particularly bleak for the people of Mathare. According to Fred Njoroge, a resident who runs a slum cinema, “the community has come together… People are taking precautions”. But it is not easy. “I am not staying in the house because I have to go find something to eat, people here, they cannot just stay in the house”.

He and his neighbours are taking turns to fetch buckets so that people can wash their hands. But even finding water takes time and effort. “We share the same toilets, all of us”, he says.

On Friday night, a curfew was imposed across Kenya, including in the slums of Nairobi. It was chaotic, with police beating up offenders, some of whom simply hadn’t made it home in time because of the punishing traffic. “They are telling us to choose between hunger or Covid 19”, says Njoroge.

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America can't cope with coronavirus

By Justin Webb

The coronavirus has turned life upside down in rich countries like nothing else in most people’s lifetimes. Millions may die, and even if the measures our governments have taken succeed in preventing that, the hit to our economies will last much longer than the lockdowns. But though this challenge may seem incalculable from our comfortable living rooms, the one facing poorer countries is likely to be much more severe.

In most of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, health systems are bare, governments are weak and people are desperately poor. In cities, large proportions of the population live in slums like Mathare without much access to clean water. In Mumbai; 42% do; in Lagos, the figure is 66%. China has high levels of poverty too of course, but in trying to control its epidemic, it was able to use the full weight of its authoritarian state. The Nigerian state does not have such capabilities.

There is reason to hope poorer countries in Africa and Asia will avoid the worst of the epidemic. Some early research suggests the virus may spread less effectively in hot, humid climates. Populations are generally much younger — in most of Africa, the median age is under 20; in India, it is 27 — and young people do seem more likely to be able to shrug it off. Iran, which was hit early by the virus, has so far reported relatively fewer deaths than other countries in a similar point in their epidemic, despite its considerable poverty.

And for all that their states are weak, societies that are used to deaths from transmissible diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and cholera are resilient in ways comfortable western societies are perhaps not.

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By Ben Gummer

But even if death rates did not reach the peaks seen in other populations, if the virus spread widely, it could still be devastating. There are over three billion people in Africa and the Indian subcontinent; if half were infected, and 0.5% died, that would be 7,500,000 deaths. And we have no idea what the effects would be on people who may already be sick with other diseases. Some 25 million people in Africa are living with HIV. In India 15% of the population are undernourished and half of all adult women are anaemic.

Truly effective social distancing measures might be impossible to carry out, but poor countries have to try them anyway. In India, where the state is more capable than many African nations, Narendra Modi’s government has banned all flights in and out of the country and ordered a 21-day lockdown. South Africa locked down before Britain. In Nigeria, where most of the population live on less than $1.90 per day, the army is reportedly ready to enforce social distancing.

But the results have not been altogether reassuring. Lathi-wielding cops in Mumbai have chased down people defying the measure. And there are unintended consequences to a lockdown. Migrant workers, fearing being trapped in fetid dormitories with no work, have started traveling home to their villages, crowding bus shelters. One financial analyst in Mumbai tells me vegetable prices have soared, even as farmers are having to throw away produce in the countryside.

It is worse still in even poorer places. In Goma, a big city in conflict-hit eastern Congo, it is worse. My colleague Olivia Acland has reported on how food prices have shot up since Rwanda closed its border. Eastern Congo only recently recovered from an epidemic of Ebola. People are worried that they may starve.

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Where criminals win elections

By Daniel Knowles

More than ever today, with public and political debate focusing ever more intensely on how wealth is created and shared, Davos seems like an outlier. For critics of capitalism and the Left generally, Davos is a convenient monster to attack. Its elite set of delegates are only paying lip service to the idea of improving the world; they are simply there to network and virtue signal.

And many of us on the Right share those concerns. We want to see a healthy, dynamic private sector, improving lives and providing better services. We all know that wealth creation from capitalism is the only way known to man of improving the lot of the poorest people on the planet. And seeing it discredited by the Davos circus, with Trump as the ringmaster, is a real challenge.

This year, though, in contrast with the loud posturing of the American President, there was one quiet voice bringing an important message. India’s Narendra Modi was there representing India for the first time in more than two decades. And he issued a strong call for global, liberal free trade to flourish.

I know India, since I created and grew a business there for 15 years, before entering Parliament. And, yes, it would be naive to say it doesn’t have staggering inequality. But it has, as I’ve seen first hand, enabled billions of the world’s poorest to benefit from sanitation, better infrastructure, education, jobs and rising living standards.

At Davos, Modi made it clear that this has not been achieved by pulling up the drawbridge and turning inwards in response to sweeping anti-globalisation sentiments. He knows leaders need to face the future together, embracing advances in technology and data sharing. And he is clear that it is only by having the courage to grasp these opportunities that poorer countries can benefit from shared trade, and investment from other nations. This investment drives innovation and solves problems. It provides better answers to age-old problems. And who is behind those investments? Capitalists and wealth-creators: the Davos crew.

Without the funds to invest in start ups, these new opportunities which are challenging and changing those old inequalities wouldn’t exist – which brings me neatly back to Switzerland. I can trace a strong line from Davos right to life’s realities in my constituency and the challenges I faced as an entrepreneur before coming into Parliament.

Davos is by no means perfect. And it knows its flaws – look at the way it is frantically trying to get more women involved this year. But it also has great power to effect change. As its 76-year-old founder Klaus Schwab says, “We have to recreate confidence in our future. Pessimism has become too much the zeitgeist of our time.” Over to those capitalists…