How the World’s Largest Democracy Slid Toward Authoritarianism

THE NEW INDIA: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Rahul Bhatia

Rahul Bhatia’s new book began from bewilderment: He wanted to know what was happening to the people he loved.

In the opening pages of “The New India,” Bhatia recalls how one relative went from being an affable goofball to angrily disparaging Muslims as “less than human.” Another relative transformed from an apolitical humanist into someone who insisted that India needed a “benevolent dictator.” An aunt started calling Muslims “savages.” Bhatia was startled by such vitriol. He had been taught that secularism and equality were the bedrock of India’s mainstream political culture. “Our elders had raised us with values that they had abandoned themselves.”

Bhatia, a journalist based in Mumbai, set out to learn more about the virulent strain of Hindu nationalism that has swept through India in the last decade. The result is this kaleidoscopic account of “the unmaking of the world’s largest democracy” since Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.

Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when Hindu mobs took murderous revenge on Muslims for a train fire that killed Hindu pilgrims. Over the course of nearly three months, more than a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslims. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) were accused of negligence and even complicity. One horrified federal official called it a “state-sponsored massacre.” Since then, Modi’s ascent to the country’s highest office has given national license to sectarian violence.

Considering the urgency of Bhatia’s subject, it’s only appropriate that he brings a multitude of methods to bear in “The New India.” The book showcases his skills as an investigative journalist and memoirist, an intellectual and storyteller. He was stunned when the people he knew started to resuscitate centuries-old disputes and spout venomous slurs about Muslims. “This unfamiliar country had begun to justify even murder if the occasion demanded it,” he writes. He needed to find “where the poison was coming from.”