A review of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha, and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, by Martha C. Nussbaum.
About the Author
Šumit Gangulyis a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations and is also Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author (with William Thompson) of Ascending India and Its State Capacity (2017) and the coeditor (with Eswaran Sridharan) of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics (2014).
The principled separation of religious from political claims upon which Indian democracy depends may not be dead, but it is ailing badly. How did things reach this pass, and what…
Creative Hindu responses to modern challenges are a crucial part of the democratic story in India, yet Hindus must guard against those who would politicize Hindu identity.