India has always been a land of great contradictions that Indians, far from finding a burden, revel in, feeling they make the country unique. The new India that has emerged perfectly illustrates this. When India won freedom, many western experts predicted the country would not survive. Now it is the world’s fifth largest economy, having outstripped Britain, its former conqueror, and the country that had in the 1960s waited for handouts from the Paris-based Aid India Club and received surplus US wheat to feed itself is courted by the West, eager to attract its investment.
Yet there is also a very dark side to this new India. An India where the country’s Hindu majority has turned so viciously against its Muslim minority – the third largest Muslim population in the world – that they are portrayed as foreign interlopers, out to destroy Hindus. To further emphasise the threat from Islam, much is now made of “love jihad”, where Muslims are portrayed as preying on Hindu women, seducing them in order to convert them and help produce more Muslim babies. Being outnumbered by Muslims is a constant Hindu fear. Add to that the increasingly autocratic rule of prime minister Narendra Modi, which has shackled the once vociferous media, and what emerges is very far from a shiny India.
It is this forbidding India that is the subject of this book. It has an opening sentence that gives the volume, which is based on extensive reportage, the feel of a novel. “A decade or so ago, people I loved began to go mad.” Author Rahul Bhatia, a journalist based in Mumbai, goes on to describe how, two years ago, a relative who used to be very funny and would often shave wearing sunglasses no longer joked, but railed against Muslims, and when Bhatia defended them, said to him, “Why don’t you convert to Islam?”
The first part of the book documents how the Modi government has fuelled this anti-Muslim feeling, exemplified by the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which provides refuge for persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. However, these people had to be Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian or Parsi. There was no mention of Muslim refugees and, in the classic style of governments seeking to disguise their true intentions, the minister told the Indian Parliament that Indian Muslims had nothing to fear.
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But they had much to fear, in fact – as became evident when there were protests against the Act. As Muslim students of Jamia Millia University of Delhi gathered, police blocked the gates with yellow metal barriers, beat the protesters mercilessly with batons and rods, and fired tear gas. At one stage, police entered the university and assaulted a postgraduate student so badly that he lost an eye. When he took the police to court, they produced a doctor’s report saying he had been hit by a stone. When Bhatia met him two years later, he could no longer cross the road without help. Other protesters lost their lives and victims of riots were accused of being rioters.
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Bhatia’s many chilling stories include that of Imran, a Muslim who encountered a rampaging Hindu mob in Mustafabad, a town on the eastern edge of Delhi. A bullet fired from among the mob ripped apart his groin. The police accused Imran of being a rioter and threatened to jail him. When his father took him to a doctor, a Hindu, he asked, “Are you sure you didn’t tear up your son by yourself?”
Nissar had his house burnt down by Hindu mobs, making him homeless, and he lost savings of $60,000 he had built up over 30 years. He was willing to testify against the rioters, as he could identify them, but the labyrinthine process of Indian justice meant he was repeatedly summoned to court for more than two years, but never made it to the witness box.
History in all countries can be lethal, as the debate about slavery in Britain shows. In India it is even more so
Bhatia’s description of how the Indian judicial system works reads like something out of a Bollywood script. At one hearing, while Nissar waits, the prosecutor shouts at the judge, accusing him of behaving like a headmaster and turning the school into a court. The prosecutor threatens the judge, “All of us public prosecutors are going to boycott the court.” The judge, trying to calm him down, smiles and asks, “May I speak?” Eventually, even Nissar gets a chance to speak, but before he can finish his evidence the court is adjourned. By the time Bhatia wrote his book two years later, the case was still rumbling on.
Underlying all this is the belief, encouraged by Modi’s ruling BJP party, that the Hindus have lost their country, a slogan Modi cleverly used in 2014 to win power. Unlike my generation, born just as India won freedom in 1947, when the talk was of India freeing itself after 200 years of Angrezon ki Ghulami (Urdu for enslavement by the English), Modi’s Hindu followers see India’s status re enslavement going all the way back to the first raids of the Muslim invader Mahmud of Ghazni at the start of the previous millennium – 1,200 years.
History in all countries can be lethal, as the debate about slavery in Britain shows. In India it is even more so. Long before Modi, Hindu fanatics had been busy rewriting history. Back in 1976, in a Delhi restaurant, I met PN Oak, who ran the Institute for Rewriting Indian History. He claimed the Taj Mahal had originally been a Hindu palace that the Muslims had appropriated and renamed.
He also claimed the Coronation Stone was really the Hindu God Shiva’s penis; Shrewsbury was an old Sanskrit name. And that the Hindus had once had a world empire with England as one of the colonies. When I asked how he could make such an outrageous claim, he said, “Do you know why in Britain midnight marks the change of dates? Surely that is a very odd time to do that. It is because midnight GMT is 5.30 in the morning in India. For Hindus, sunrise marks the start of the day, and when the Hindus had their world empire, as the sun rose the call would go out from the Ganges all over the world, and the British, then under Hindu colonial rule, would change their date, even though for them it was midnight.”
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Since Modi came to power, some of these fantasies are being expressed not in a Delhi restaurant over cake but in some of India’s most respected places. In January 2015, at the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai, Captain Anand Bodas described how during the Vedic Age ancient Hindus had invented aviation technology, with planes flying from one planet to another and capable of mid-air stops.
Bodas explained, “There is official history and unofficial history”, adding: “Official history only noted that the Wright Brothers flew the first plane in 1903.” This the first time in its 102 years that the Indian Science Congress had held a symposium on such a subject and the session was attended by Prakash Javadekar, the environment minister. He commented, “Ancient Indian scientific theories were based on minute observations and logic. That wisdom must be recognised.”
Rahul Bhatia, who wrote his book before the election, could not have anticipated the result. But it shows how the electorate, despite many of them being illiterate, value their freedom
Bhatia interviews many Hindus who share Javadekar’s outlook, including the lawyer who tried to disprove Nissar’s evidence at the trial. He believed electricity had been invented by the Hindus, claiming there was a Sanskrit word for it. Besides aircraft, the ancient Hindus also had missiles and plastic surgery. The basis for his beliefs were Vedas, the Hindu religious texts, and Ramayana, one of Hindu’s greatest mythological stories, written some 2,500 years ago.
Bhatia, who has a beautiful writing style, chronicles all this very well. Where the book loses its way is in the last third, when he discusses how the Modi government introduced Aadhaar, a 12-digit biometric individual identification card which serves as a proof of identity and address. Critics saw it as providing intrusive government control over people’s lives, but failed to persuade the Supreme Court to outlaw it. Yet, long before Modi came to power, Indians needed a pan card for all financial transactions. Aadhaar can be seen as a further such development, and Bhatia does not quite prove how Aadhaar is much worse.
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The recent general election could have further consolidated Modi’s power and made India a Hindu nation. But contrary to his own predictions, Modi did not get the sort of supermajority that British prime minister Keir Starmer has won. Had he done so he could have amended the constitution, which declares India is a secular country, and made it into a Hindu Raj – which his followers so fervently want. Instead, he now presides over a coalition where his ability to make such fundamental change is limited.
Bhatia, who wrote his book before the election, could not have anticipated the result. But it shows how the electorate, despite many of them being illiterate, value their freedom. Back in 1977, they ended Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule through the ballot box. They have similarly shackled Modi, suggesting that while this new India has a dark side, its redemption may lie in the innate sense of its people.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie, Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British
Further reading
Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority 1947-77, by Pratinav Anil (Hurst, 2023)
An excellent study of India’s Muslims written with great clarity, insight and humour.
Why I Am a Hindu, by Shashi Tharoor (Aleph, 2018)
A book that shows Modi’s effect on Indian politics. Congress during its long rule never talked about religion, considering such talk bigoted. Now a leading Congress politician feels it is necessary to do so to keep up with Modi.
Gujarat under Modi, by Christophe Jaffrelot (Hurst, 2024)
This book shows how Modi’s rule in his home state of Gujarat has been a laboratory for his rule of India.
Savarkar and the Making of Hindutwa, by Janaki Bakhle (Princeton, 2024)
A study of the man who is promoted in Modi’s India as the great Hindu hero and the chief ideological source of the right-wing Hindu nationalism which is now the ruling creed.
