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11 July 2025 - Chanaz
Rahul Bhatia's The New India is thick book, journalistically styled. The first part follows victims of the 2020 Dehli riots, telling their stories and following their quest to get justice. The 2nd part jumps back in time and details the founding of the RSS, which would one day spawn the BJP as its political arm. Bhatia clearly lays out the RSS as an emulator of the Nazis and especially the Fascists in Italy: India for the Hindus. The 3rd sections picks up at the Partition, when British India was split into the countries of Pakistan and India. It was a violent affair where millions left their homes by force or fear to migrate to the new country where their religion was a majority. Then Gandhi was murdered by a man who saw violence, not nonviolence, as the only way to a Hindu India. The RSS was banned temporarily, and spawned the BJP, the current party leading India, to gain control of government to create a Hindu India. Bhatia then details the ascendence of the BJP and the destruction of the Mosque in Ayodhya that helped them to power. And Bhatia even attends RSS meetings to give firsthand account of what the people there are really like, although his bias against them is a bit too much. The 4th part details the creation of a unique ID number for every Indian, which Bhatia clearly paints as a plot to exert control over people's live. He details how once implemented it enabled they very fraud it was advertised to prevent. The 5th section briefly returns to the topic of the first, to show it remains unresolved. Thoroughly polemic, the book nevertheless elucidates the role of the Hindu right in today's India.
I left it behind in Chanaz for the next person to read.
