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 BJP is ruling with a heavier hand than ever before, attacking opponents and silencing critics. Ironically, these may be the ideal conditions for a democratic revival—if the opposition seizes…
Majoritarian nationalism is a defining feature of our time. If we are to resist ethnonationalist leaders trying to recast our societies into imagined majorities, we must revise our conception of…
India has a long history of elites acting undemocratically. But the current government’s attacks on the media, arrests of opposition, and discriminatory laws are deeper and more alarming.