More than seventy years after its founding, with Narendra Modi’s authoritarian Hindu nationalists in government, is the dream of Indian democracy still alive and well?

India’s pluralism has always posed a formidable challenge to its democracy, with many believing that a clash of identities based on region, language, caste, religion, ethnicity, and tribe would bring about its demise. With the meteoric rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the nation’s solidity is once again called into question: is Modi’s Hindu majoritarianism an anti-democratic attempt to transform India into a monolithic Hindu nation from which minorities and dissidents are forcibly excluded?

With examinations of the way that class and caste power shaped the making of India’s postcolonial democracy, the role of feminism, the media, and the public sphere in sustaining and challenging democracy, this book interrogates the contradictions at the heart of the Indian democratic project, examining its origins, trajectories, and contestations.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is associate professor in the Department of Global Development Studies and Planning at the University of Agder. He is the co-author of We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is associate professor of South Asia studies at the University of Oslo. Anand Vaidya is assistant professor of Anthropology at Reed College.
 

— Anand Teltumbde, author of Republic of Caste

— Shehla Rashid, Activist