A review of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, by Ramachandra Guha, and The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, by Martha C. Nussbaum.
About the Author
Šumit Gangulyis a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations and is also Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author (with William Thompson) of Ascending India and Its State Capacity (2017) and the coeditor (with Eswaran Sridharan) of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics (2014).
India has a long history of elites acting undemocratically. But the current government’s attacks on the media, arrests of opposition, and discriminatory laws are deeper and more alarming.
When it comes to backing democracy and human rights in international forums, the behavior of the world’s six most influential rising democracies ranges from sympathetic support to borderline hostility.
