A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MODERN INDIAN NATION, MALEVOLENT REPUBLIC IS ALSO AN IMPASSIONED PLEA FOR THE RECLAMATION OF INDIA.

The ‘invisible threads’ that Nehru said held together an ‘improbable union’ divided by language, religion and ethnicity have today snapped under the burden of the Hindu-supremacist rule of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party.

In this blistering critique of post-Independence India from Nehru to Modi, K.S. Komireddi charts the unsound course of Indian nationalism. He argues that the missteps of the nation’s founders, the mistakes of Nehru, the betrayals of his daughter and her sons, the anti-democratic fetish for technocracy inaugurated by Narasimha Rao and carried to the extremes by Manmohan Singh—all of them laid down the road on which Hindu nationalists rode to absolute power.

Hindu bigotry, ennobled under Modi as a healthy form of self-assertion, has reopened old fissures that threaten to devour India’s hard-won unity. Yet, there are also multitudes who now realise how extraordinary and brave the idea of India was to begin with and a resurgent struggle against its extinction.