New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvi, 244 pp. (Maps.) US$16.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-19-997359-0.
This is a curious book. Its publisher has given us many authoritative works on India, full of fresh insights, but scholars will find no new ideas in this volume. Mira Kamdar, an accomplished journalist, aims this account of “What Everyone Needs to Know” about India at non-specialists.
Its 160 sections offer concise answers to an exceedingly wide range of questions. Many cover crucial topics, including “What is Hinduism?”, “What is life like in rural India?”, “What about poverty in India?”, “What is India’s political system?”, and “How will climate change affect India?”. But Kamdar also addresses oddly minor matters: “Did Indians invent the concept of zero?” and “Who was Raj Kapoor?” (a prominent film star). The answers to many of these questions are reliable, but some are seriously under-informed and misleading. Certain sections are strangely off beam. The discussion of South India’s history largely equates the region with Tamil Nadu—a familiar error—and misspells one of the four major southern languages as “Kanada” (there is a second ‘n’). The Malayalam and Telugu speaking regions are omitted. The author blithely informs us that “the caste system … became firmly entrenched” (30) with no awareness that there are no indigenous Kshatriyas and Vaishyas (two major divisions within the system) in the south.
That is perhaps a pedantic point, but two other concerns are more serious since they relate to two of the most important changes to occur in India since independence. The first is the increasing (and increasingly apparent) refusal of Dalits (ex-untouchables) in rural areas to accept the central organizing principle of society there: caste hierarchies. The second is the emergence of a genuine and socially rooted democracy, which is now imperilled.
The author is far from alone in overlooking that first trend. But the threat to the democratic process is plainly evident, and underemphasized in this book. India’s two most autocratically inclined prime ministers—Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi—get off lightly here.
The author briefly notes the damage done to the Congress Party by Mrs Gandhi’s radical centralization of power in pursuit of personal rule, and the excesses of her emergency (1975–1977). But the assault on all democratic institutions—with the strange exception of the Election Commission—during all of her years in power, goes unmentioned. Kamdar’s description of Indira Gandhi as “a towering figure who did much to shape the contours of modern India” is true but so neutral as to be unjustly flattering.
The author’s failure to grasp the scale of Mrs Gandhi’s onslaught against democratic institutions prevents her from recognizing something crucial: the remarkable capacity of those institutions to regenerate between 1989 and 2014, when hung parliaments caused massive powers to flow back to them from the Prime Minister’s Office. It also prevents Kamdar from seeing that Modi’s more systematic centralization of power has revived deinstitutionalization. This time, it poses a greater existential threat to the democratic process.
The author’s assessment of Modi is not entirely inadequate. There is, for example, a solid discussion of the damage done by his demonetization. But the treatment of the prime minister still suffers from understatements, misperceptions, and key omissions.
Kamdar rightly discusses the misuse of sedition charges and defamation suits against opponents and independent voices. The government’s attacks on Indian and international civil society organizations are also noted. But we do not learn of two spectacular examples: sedition cases against two Nobel peace prize winners: Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres.
The author discusses beatings and murders by cow protection vigilantes, but mentions only five cases when the number runs into scores. She states, in mitigation, that Modi criticized a violent attack on Dalits (ex-untouchables, perceived as Hindus) in mid-2016. But she fails to say that he waited until mid-2017—over three years after taking office—to object to atrocities against Muslims, the main targets. He did so only after criticism in the New York Times threatened his international image.
Some police excesses are mentioned, but we are not told of the extravagant misuse of multiple investigative agencies against opposition parties, independent media outlets, and dissenters. We get glimpses of fawning praise for Modi in much of the media, but learn next to nothing about the benefits extended to media owners’ corporate undertakings—and the intimidation of others—which inspire it. No mention is made of the two large teams of media monitors employed by the ruling party and one government ministry to assess the adequacy of positive coverage of the prime minister, to instruct media outlets as to which reports on Modi should be reproduced, and to warn others about critical coverage.
The author also buys into some of the Modi hype. She writes positively of his Make in India initiative “to boost manufacturing” when in reality it has achieved little. She recalls the economic growth achieved in Gujarat when he headed the state government there without noting that it has sagged since he became prime minister. Kamdar warmly welcomes Aadhaar, the government’s universal identification program, apparently unaware that its malfunctions have denied huge numbers of vulnerable people crucial goods and services. She correctly states that the Modi government moved from denunciations to praise for the admirable National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, unaware (again) that funds for it have been squeezed—illegally.
In fairness, it appears that many of the Modi government’s more outrageous actions took place after the text was completed. They include the ruling party’s carefully crafted massive advantage in fundraising; the appointment of a specialist in hate speech as chief minister of India’s largest state; the use of bribes to topple opposition-led state governments; the crippling of the admirable Right to Information Act, etc. This great democracy is not just, in Kamdar’s words, “becoming an increasingly illiberal” one (195). Its survival is in doubt.
James Manor
University of London, London, United Kingdom