Book review - Shadow lengthens: The ‘Gujarat Model’ has gone national

By Dilip -

I have been reading a new book on the Gujarat riots of 2002 titled Undercover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva. It is written by Ashish Khetan, who did some excellent reporting on the aftermath of the riots, particularly on the process by which the perpetrators went unpunished. Undercover is an important resource for scholars seeking to understand a bloody pogrom that occurred two decades ago. However, it also speaks directly to the present, since the regime that ruled in that state then is now in power at the Centre. 

Undercover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva by Ashish Khetan

Reviewed by Ramachandra Guha

“In Modi’s Gujarat,” writes Khetan, “if a bureaucrat or a police officer wanted to rise up the ranks, he had to implicate himself fully in the system’s deceit.” With Narendra Modi as prime minister and Amit Shah as home minister, this has become true of the Central government as well. And not just of bureaucrats and police officers either. Before 2014, official economic statistics issued by the Government of India were admired the world over for their reliability. Now, scholars don’t trust them anymore. In every sector, whether economics or health or education or electoral funding, deceit and dissembling, rather than truth and transparency, characterize the behaviour of this government.

Another consequence of the Gujarat Model being adopted countrywide has been the shrinkage of space for debate and dissent. To quote Khetan again: “Tools honed and deployed over twelve years in Gujarat are now being used on a national scale to subvert, harass and demonise dissent, with critics of Modi characterised, and often jailed, as opponents of and threats to the nation.”…

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/the-gujarat-model-has-gone-national/cid/1812132

As the dead pile up in Gujarat, the state’s media is on a warpath with the government over Covid-19 // Soutik Biswas: How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave

Bharat Bhushan: Burden of bigotry may break Indian democracy's back

Sankarshan Thakur - Compliant and complicit: Indians are living the funereal carnival of their own dispossession

Chakshu Roy: Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law

Bharat Bhushan - Himalayan chessboard: India fishes for advantage in unstable Nepal

Bharat Bhushan: No one critical of the government seems to be innocent any longer / Delhi Police arrests 22-year-old environmental activist, calls her key to foreign hand

Rihanna and Greta prompt an MEA outburst — and a hashtag firestorm

Avay Shukla: Acts Of God And Follies Of Man

Kunal Kamra and the Elasticity of Justice. By Avay Shukla

Avay Shukla: THE FINE ART OF LOSING FRIENDS

Avay Shukla - ARE THE FARMERS MAKING DELHI IRRELEVANT ?

Reflections of an American living in India...

Popular resistance to undeclared Emergency// Ghazipur Border: Rakesh Tikait के लिए यूपी -हरियाणा से रातों रात आ गए किसान

The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS

A whiff of evil

The emperor's masks: 'apolitical' RSS calls the shots in Modi sarkar

एक बात हमेशा ज़हन में सवाल खड़े करती है A question that stays with me... / Ravish Kumar's Speech at Berkeley (2019)

The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)

The Abolition of truth

Mukul Kesavan on the connoisseurs of the unavailable

A Final Warning by George Orwell

Book review: Peter Pomerantsev's 'This Is Not Propaganda' is quietly frightening. By Steve Bloomfield

Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating farm households and family labor

STATE OF RURAL AND AGRARIAN INDIA REPORT 2020. By the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies


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