‘Birth of a Nation’: Forming independent India was a brutal exercise in preventing balkanisation

Today, the idea of the modern nation-state is chronically susceptible to a peculiar form of institutional amnesia. Its Westphalian territorial boundaries are fragile, highly volatile accidents of history, but it treats them as ancient, predestined realities. In the popular imagination, the Partition and Indian independence are routinely reduced to high-politics drama. We are repeatedly fed a teleological romance, in books and films and web series, in which the British imperialists packed their trunks, a few men argued over maps in dusty rooms, and a sovereign democratic republic miraculously emerged, fully formed, from the ashes of empire.

For those who spend their lives and careers interrogating the structural anomalies of the Indian state, this smooth narrative has always been unsettling. My own engagement with India’s lack of social democracy has required a constant search for writers who examine the raw mechanics of power. It was this precise need that drew me to the work of the investigative journalist Josy Joseph.

Joseph’s 2016 book, A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India, laid bare the unsparing anatomy of modern India’s corporate-political cronyism and mapped it as an entrenched, highly rational ecosystem. Five years later, The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State offered a deeply constructive...

Read more