Lineages of the present: ideology and politics in contemporary South Asia

Abstract

In March 1998, India broke 25 years silence when it detonated a series of nuclear devices in the Rajasthan desert. Having announced it possessed the requisite credentials for membership in the nuclear club in 1974, India quickly disavowed any desire to join, pledging not to develop its capability further. The Pokhran explosions revealed that promise to have been broken. The principal beneficiary of its breaking was a right-wing government seeking to shore up its shaky base with committment to the Hindu bomb. While most in the West were taken unawares by this sudden bellicosity in the land of Gandhi, more scrupulous observers on the Indian scene insisted it had a clear history. In this book, the author untangles many of the intertwined threads of an important story often poorly understood in the metropolitan West: that the right-wing nationalisms now flourishing in many regions of the world did not emerge fully formed and as if by accident. Their complex genealogies hold the key to comprehending them. Such an understanding is urgently required in India where, the author argues, the BJP's road to power, far from being a temporary detour from the path of secular democracy, may well become a more permanent feature of the country's politics.

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