The New India is the unforgettable account of the struggle between modern forces and ancient
ideas to shape the young country's destiny. It reveals a picture of a nation on the precipice
of dramatic change. Based on six years of detailed research and on-the-ground reporting the
book builds - authoritatively vividly indelibly - to become the story of post-colonial India.
Using hundreds of interviews and letters diary entries Partition-era police reports and an
astonishing range of sources Bhatia shows how history plays a recurring role in the present:
in politics in the minds of citizens in notions of justice and corruption. Bhatia examines
the connections between the Delhi riots of 2020 and the emergence of nineteenth-century
revolutionary secret societies the rise of Hindu nationalism whose early advocates drew
lessons from Hitler and Mussolini the political use of misinformation and religious targeting
and the Hindu fundamentalist ideology that sparked the creation of the world's largest
biometric project. As Bhatia shows the evolution of this citizen database in the hands of the
BJP now threatens to deny vast numbers of India's 200 million Muslims their Indian
citizenship. Electorates in democracies used to choose their government. Now in India the
government is choosing its electorate. India has rarely been seen as in The New India a
monumental work of narrative reportage that illuminates the ways in which a supremacist
ideology remade the country over decades resulting in the prodigious rise of Narendra Modi
and forcing many to ask what they truly understood about their neighbours and themselves.
