The New India by Rahul Bhatia

This book is on the New York Times 100 Notable Books list for 2024, and so I snagged it to put on my Kindle and read it while on a recent trip to Southern India. When Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata party to victory in 2014 – the first Indian election in 30 years in which a single party secured a majority – many in India pinned their hopes on him. He had promised to usher in development, citing his performance in Gujarat, where he had been chief minister for just over a decade. Even sceptics, appalled by his handling in 2002 of communal violence that left more than a thousand dead, the vast majority of them Muslims, were willing to hold their noses. They were swayed by his development rhetoric and jaded after 10 years of coalition rule led by India’s grand old party, Congress. But within days of his election, a Muslim engineer was murdered by goons, and other similar incidents began to occur. Modi stayed largely silent, making only feeble statements in response to truly grotesque attacks. His singular economic achievement – if it can be called that – was the 2016 withdrawal from circulation of high-value currency notes equating to 86% of India’s money supply. Liquidity was drained from the system and millions of small businesses folded. The short answer for this review is that whether Modi is a good choice for all of India is still an open question--the author would contend that he is not, and in his Northern India, Hindi centric policy making, there are winners and losers, and the economic powerhouse that is Southern India, more religiously diverse, and Tamil speaking will likely be less satisfied.