In early February 2020, a group of women in northeastern Delhi launched a sit-in against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act. The law, passed at the end of the previous year, allowed undocumented immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to become Indian citizens—provided they are not Muslims. This restriction, critics claimed, meant that the CAA ran afoul of India’s constitution, which prohibits religious discrimination.
The women in Delhi’s northeast were hardly the first people to protest the CAA. In the weeks after its passage in December, thousands of people across India demonstrated against the bill. But this group attracted the ire of a particularly provocative politician. Speaking not far from the sit-in, Kapil Mishra—a former legislator from India’s governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—declared that protesters had “created a riot-like situation.” He gave the Delhi police three days to evict the demonstrators. If the police failed, Mishra said, his followers would take matters into their own hands. “We will have to hit the streets,” he threatened.
Mishra’s followers did not wait. Within 24 hours of his speech, Hindu mobs arrived at the sit-in and other Delhi protests. It is unclear who struck first, but soon, Hindus and Muslims were brawling. The former mobs, enabled by the police, quickly gained the advantage. They then spent three days rampaging through Muslim neighborhoods. They vandalized mosques and burned down houses. Chanting “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail, Lord Ram), a religious-phrase-turned-attack-cry, they assaulted and injured hundreds of people. When all was said and done, at least 36 Muslims were killed, as were 15 Hindus. To this day, only a very small percentage of the more than 2,000 people arrested for the violence have been convicted.
Although it has received relatively little American attention, few global stories are more significant than the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism. Ever since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, the world’s most populous country has set about passing laws that strip rights from its 200 million Muslims. The government, for example, divided Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, into two and then stripped it of statehood. It has promised to implement a law that could revoke the citizenship of many Muslims. The BJP’s tenure has been accompanied by a spectacular rise in hate crimes against minorities. The result is a country where a politician could openly incite a religious riot and face zero repercussions.
Since the BJP took charge, many reporters and commentators have written about how the country has changed. The New India, by the journalist Rahul Bhatia, is the latest entry into this field. Over the course of more than 400 pages, Bhatia tells readers about a state where “the old norms of secularism and equality—however flawed their execution—were being cast off.” He examines how India’s various institutions were “hijacked by religious and commercial interests.” He looks at why people adopted an ideology many previously ignored.
For Americans, The New India will resonate. India and the United States are very different countries with unique political dynamics; India, for example, does not have the same amount of polarization. But many of the forces that Bhatia describes are also found here. The New India, then, is both a chronicle and a cautionary tale: an illustration of how easily societies can be poisoned.
The New India is different from many works of political journalism. It does not proceed chronologically, and it does not primarily focus on how laws were passed or how they work. Bhatia does discuss the history of Hindu nationalism, going back to 1824, when the Hindu philosopher Dayanand Saraswati was born. As he does so, he examines the many connections between the Hindu nationalist movement and European fascists. But ultimately, Bhatia is less interested in blow-by-blows or policy minutiae. (An exception is his chapter on the history of Aadhaar—the controversial, biometric national identification numbers that Indians have been largely made to obtain.) Instead, Bhatia is mostly focused on what India’s transformation has meant for people’s lived experiences.
His chapters on the Citizenship Amendment Act, for example, speak less about the history of the law itself and more about the violence it helped provoke, describing what it meant for many Muslims to lose their belongings and to see friends and family maimed or killed. He chronicles the story of one young man, Imran, who was shot while fleeing the riots in his neighborhood. Imran’s family managed to get him into a local, half-built hospital, where a Muslim doctor patched him up while trying to help a mass of other victims. The doctor then sent Imran to a government hospital for more treatment. But Imran was turned away by an admissions staffer who accused him of “firing bullets and throwing stones.” He still struggles to walk, Bhatia writes, and his father is going bankrupt paying for his medications.
Bhatia also spends time with Hindus who supported and defend the killings. He visits a lawyer who is representing, pro bono, a group of young men charged with destroying the house and belongings of a Muslim man, rendering him destitute. Bhatia asks the lawyer, Rakshpal Singh, why he opted to take on the case for free. The answer is revealing. “It is my belief that when Hindu society was under attack … these boys stood like soldiers and stopped them,” Singh explains. “If they hadn’t stopped the violence, there would have been greater damage.” Defending them in court, he continued, was his “moral duty.”
This notion—that Hindus are under attack by Muslims—is present throughout Indian politics. It is propagated by many of the country’s leaders, who seek to whip up the population into an anti-minority frenzy that they can use to maintain power. Truth, Bhatia notes, is a weak obstacle to these aims. Ethnic entrepreneurs can almost always find anecdotes that inspire enough fear to overcome the broader factual picture. Muslims, for example, are not any more violent than Hindus. They do not aspire to displace India’s overwhelmingly large Hindu population. But revanchists are skilled at finding anecdotes in which a Muslim did attack a Hindu, and then amplifying these stories across the entire nation.
Such actors, of course, also succeed by spreading outright disinformation. Hindu nationalists, Bhatia writes, are adroit at “creating an atmosphere of suspicion through the publication and repetition of rumours and suggestions”: that Muslims engage in ritualistic animal slaughter, that they are intolerant of other religions, that they are marrying and forcibly converting thousands of Hindu women. By constricting the free press, the BJP has made it hard to dispel these rumors. In India, most major media outlets are dependent, at least to an extent, on advertising by the government or companies close to it. The BJP is thus able to bring journalists in line simply by threatening their finances.
Bhatia’s book is understandably focused exclusively on India. But his insights have comparative applications, including to America. The U.S. does not face the same degree of political violence as does India (although rates are rising). Its demographic divisions have not yielded pogroms since the end of Jim Crow. But over the past 10 years, the United States has been swarmed by exclusionary rhetoric and misinformation. The targets are primarily minorities—in particular nonwhite immigrants who, according to many politicians, are stealing jobs, murdering citizens, and committing other atrocities. In the aggregate, these claims are incorrect: Research shows that immigrants create jobs and commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But no matter. Anti-immigrant politicians and activists can find enough anecdotes to tar newcomers as violent. They can then bolster this narrative through, as Bhatia put it, the publication and repetition of rumors and suggestions.
Although it has received relatively little American attention, few global stories are more significant than the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism. Ever since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014, the world’s most populous country has set about passing laws that strip rights from its 200 million Muslims.
Consider, for example, one of the most recent and outlandish claims: that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are hunting and eating their neighbors’ pets. It is baseless. But it gained substantial currency among a segment of the population by being posted, again and again, on social media. It was then elevated by J. D. Vance and Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s vice presidential and presidential nominees, respectively, including at the September 10 presidential debate.
Bhatia’s exploration of the personal effects of such hate will also likely resonate. The book opens with stories of how the author’s friends and family, as he describes it, “began to go mad.” When Modi rose to power, a relative he adored for his humor began speaking “passionately about Muslims, arguing that they were less than human.” Another close relative, who had previously avoided politics, told him India needed a dictator. “Reasonable people said worrying things about democracy and minorities,” Bhatia writes. Millions of Americans would relate.
The New India does not delve into how one can deprogram these individuals—let alone a whole nation. (“Trying to change their mind was pointless,” Bhatia writes of his close relations.) The book does not have a happy ending. But India may not be consigned to a future of illiberalism. In June, not long after The New India went to press, the country released the results of its monthslong 2024 national elections. To everyone’s shock, the BJP lost its majority. After a decade of untrammeled rule, it has now been forced to govern in coalition with parties not committed to Hindu nationalism. As a result, it has had to shelve many policies that would have further remade the state.
The notion that Hindus are under attack by Muslims is present throughout Indian politics. It is propagated by many of the country’s leaders, who seek to whip up the population into an anti-minority frenzy that they can use to maintain power. Truth, Bhatia notes, is a weak obstacle to these aims.
This shift may ultimately mean little. It is unclear why, exactly, the BJP underperformed, but it is more likely that the party lost seats over widespread joblessness than over its treatment of minorities. The media remains largely friendly to the government, although there is now a little more space for critics. And the country’s opposition is deeply divided on almost everything except for the need to evict Modi. They have yet, as one journalist told me, to create a compelling and coherent alternative vision.
Still, the result is a reminder that few victories are permanent. Politics can shift. But it can take time and thus require great patience. “There are battles history cannot win in the arc of a single human life,” Bhatia writes. “A reckoning with our beginning comes only towards the end.”
