Ten years ago, the journalist Rahul Bhatia started hearing people revive centuries-old communal disputes and openly target Muslims with venomous hate. How was it, he wondered, that the old norms of secularism and equality, however flawed in practice, were being cast aside?

His new book, The Identity Project: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy, is an attempt at an answer – tracing the sources of this poison by speaking to both the perpetrators and victims of a virulent strain of Hindu nationalism that has swept through India. In doing so, Bhatia provides a clear-eyed account of the unmaking of the world’s largest democracy since 2014.  It also sounds the alarm on how the push for a national identification project – ostensibly aimed at curbing corruption and improving welfare delivery – could instead be used to deliver oppression more efficiently.

The transcript below is from an episode of Himal’s Southasia Review of Books podcast from April 2025, in which associate editor Shwetha Srikanthan speaks with Rahul Bhatia about The Identity Project.

The episode is available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This is an edited excerpt of the full interview. Please listen to the corresponding audio before quoting from it. 

Shwetha Srikanthan: A decade or so ago, the people you loved began to change. A genial man told you to be wary of Muslims. Others wished for a benevolent dictator. It’s a story familiar to many of us – we’ve all lost family members and friends to this condition.

Reasonable people started spewing disturbing and hateful things about Muslims and other minorities, amplifying the Hindu nationalist messaging of the BJP and Narendra Modi. Trying to change their minds is a source of endless frustration. But for Modi’s BJP, weaponising history and old injustices has become a source of influence.

Tell us about the journey of writing the book in response to this new and poisonous India that was emerging? 

Rahul Bhatia: Shortly before 2014, I saw what so many other people saw, this cleavage emerging in society. Maybe it had been there for a long time, but it became more apparent, more blatant. It was out in the open.

What seemed to be happening was that people who felt aggrieved, who believed they had been held back from what they wanted for this country, began expressing it in ways that really took me by surprise. I was disturbed by it, but I didn’t quite know what to say about it at the time. I wasn’t really writing about it yet. I was writing about media takeovers – Reliance had taken over Network18 – and I was trying to understand what that meant, especially alongside the rightward shift at the network.

At the same time, Aadhaar was really the other big story in the country. I knew technology, and I also understood that Aadhaar had an extremely authoritarian bent to it that many people did not recognise. A lot of people felt it was simply something handed down from above – that you must have an Aadhaar card. But there was a coercive element to it, and I didn’t understand why that didn’t register with people who were willingly signing up for it. So I started looking more closely at Aadhaar, primarily to understand why it was considered so important.

As I was doing that, this drumbeat of nationalism kept growing louder. I was having increasingly fraught conversations with family members and friends. We were constantly butting heads, and eventually you just began to feel: what’s the use? You keep thinking of strategies to convince people, to bring them over to your side, but there’s a sense of hopelessness about it.

At some point, these two strands converged for me. I had left my job and was working on the book when I spoke to somebody involved in designing an earlier version of Aadhaar – something he and others on that project believed eventually became Aadhaar. He mentioned that it was L K Advani who had commissioned the study for this identification project.

For me, L K Advani meant Babri. He meant riots. He represented this definitive event in Indian history that really I don’t think we’ve recovered from even today.

So when I realised Advani was there at the origin of this project, these two interests – Hindutva on one side and technology on the other – suddenly had a focal point. That was when I began looking at the RSS, at riots, and then working backwards from there.

The most recent large-scale riots, of course, was in Delhi. And I hesitate to even call them riots, because these were targeted attacks and targeted killings, with Muslims getting it in the neck. I wanted to draw out that episode of violence and understand what it revealed.

So I felt like I was moving across several timelines while writing this book – one contemporary, one moving into the past, another into the near past. At the same time, I kept asking myself: how do you bring all this together coherently? How do you make readers come away feeling that it all makes sense? 

As for my own relationships with people, I wouldn’t say they’ve deteriorated. I think we’ve just recognised that it’s a bridge too far. For whatever reason, they’re not going to change their minds, and I’m not going to change mine. Maybe it will take time before we meet somewhere in the middle.

SS: Right off the bat, in the book you describe the home minister Amit Shah’s nonchalance as he introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill in Parliament, which soon became the Citizenship Amendment Act. It passed, as expected, on the basis of the BJP’s comfortable majority in Parliament. This was followed by the National Register of Citizens, which rendered nearly two million people in Assam stateless.

It has essentially become state policy to choose who to help based on religious choice. Just a few days ago, at the Rising Bharat Summit, Amit Shah challenged the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to prove that a single Muslim had lost citizenship since the notification of the CAA.

Tell us about how the law and the register together create insecurity around the citizenship of Muslims in India today? 

RB: If you look at these two things separately, some would argue that we need that. On the one hand, you have a refugee law for persecuted minorities – though, those persecuted minorities do not include Muslims. So some might say: well, yes, it’s humane to offer a home to people persecuted in neighbouring countries. And on the other hand, what could be wrong with a register of citizens? I know technologists in Bangalore have argued that it’s no different from a social security number. Why shouldn’t a country know who its citizens are?

But the problem here is: who is this coming from? How is it being interpreted? And how does the political bureaucracy – the machinery that takes its cues from the politics of the day and from the government itself – understand these measures?

The CAA offers refuge to people who fall through the net of the National Register of Citizens, but only if they are Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and certain others – not Muslims.

I keep thinking about what that actually means. It’s not just about the law itself. It’s about who is making the law, who introduced it, and what they say when they are not speaking directly about the law. These are people who tell crowds to “press the voting machine button so hard that the protesters at Shaheen Bagh feel the current”. Their public speech is full of dog whistles.

And when Amit Shah says at a public forum, show me one Muslim who has lost citizenship – what happens next? A journalist hears it and doesn’t push back. The statement gets disseminated unchallenged. It’s framed as a partisan, higher-level political debate.

Meanwhile, people working on the ground have long warned that these policies weaken rights and make people’s lives miserable. There’s a reason the NRC process in Assam was effectively halted – because both Hindus and Muslims were affected, and political trouble emerged from the fallout.

So when I look at the CAA and NRC, I don’t just see citizenship laws. I see them flowing from a much older stream of thought – one that imagines India as a Hindu country in which Muslims have no rightful place. I also see something profoundly callous and deeply unconstitutional. It runs against the idea of this country. And when I hear these arguments made publicly without immediate challenge – when interviewers and journalists don’t push back – that takes my breath away.

There’s something dangerous about letting these claims circulate. Narratives spread, stories go viral, and then we spend months trying to debunk them, when they could have been shut down within ten seconds at the moment they were made. That’s not a good place for this country to be in. 

SS: In the book, you trace how the peaceful student protests at Jamia, JNU and other university campuses against the discriminatory CAA and NRC were met with shocking violence, including police brutality and the Delhi riots of 2020 that left more than 50 people dead.

You recount the experiences of several victims, including an apolitical student who lost sight in one eye after a brutal police beating inside a library, and Nisar Ahmed, who narrowly survived the Delhi riots and later became a key witness in court cases against the alleged perpetrators. In the book, you write that to come forward as a witness in India is an act of extreme bravery, possibly madness, because witnesses themselves are put on trial.

And then there are students who have simply felt defeated. As the student who lost his sight tells you: “They just keep beating us so that we would never protest again.”  Tell us about what it means for people like this to bear witness and fight back in India today.

RB: The two people you’re referring to are Nisar Ahmed and a student by the name of Minhajuddin. Minaz and I met at some staff housing in Jamia, and we walked around this little park.

It was late at night, we sat on a bench and he told me the story of what had happened to him. And I was struck by a couple of things. One was that years had passed and he was still fighting for justice. He was still trying to get the cops and the courts to take action against the people who had hit him.

And he wasn’t involved in any protests. He was sitting in a library studying. But there was such wanton violence in those days, especially on campuses, that even apolitical students were hit, they were affected. After he lost his sight, his father came from Bihar and said, there’s no need for you to be here anymore, why don’t you come home where you’ll be safe? But Minaz said he wanted to continue his work there, he didn’t want to go back home.

Violence like that leaves a mark – not just the physical mark – the act of blinding somebody is such a huge thing. Can you imagine the mind of a person who swings a baton at somebody’s face knowing very well that they could blind them? And then there’s the infrastructure that essentially hides these people behind layers and layers of formality and bureaucracy. It’s cruel.

With Minaz, I felt the effects of what happened to him had really spiralled outwards. It’s not just the person who has been hurt and who wants justice who ends up on trial. It’s also their family, who are on edge about this person, about their actions, and about their place as Muslims in Delhi and in this country at this moment.

You see these effects spiral outward. People begin behaving differently. His sister was somewhere nearby when we met, and he didn’t want to introduce me to her because she was already nervous about him speaking to a reporter. And as you talk to people, you realise how deep these wounds really are. And with people like Minaz – and there were many others I reached out to – you realise there are hundreds of victims. It’s not just about the dead. It’s about the scars you see and the scars you don’t. Entire neighbourhoods are filled with people who will shut the door on your face the moment you say you’re a reporter. They don’t want to talk. There’s something they’re carrying.  And these cleavages then show up in society. 

But where does this sense of isolation come from, this feeling of having to do everything alone? As I was going through North East Delhi, people kept telling me that I was the first reporter they had seen in a very long time. Sometimes the first reporter they had spoken to at all. And these were people to whom major things had happened. When I hear something like that, I think we’ve really not done a good job of going back and checking in on people. We haven’t told their stories properly. We haven’t told them with the intensity and force they deserve. We haven’t investigated the police the way we should have. We haven’t investigated the right-wing groups – how they were bussed in, what they did. 

And then there’s the question of witnessing itself. What does it mean to keep showing up? With Nisar, I spent much more time. His wife supported him, but at some level both of them knew this was not really to their benefit. But they weren’t doing it for themselves. Nisar and his wife genuinely believe that if you don’t stand up to these forces, if you don’t inconvenience yourself in the way the justice system forces you to when you say something wrong happened, then society becomes poorer for it. I found that admirable. But my god, it is punishing.

The trips to court. The waiting outside. Going through the turnstiles. Sitting in court only to be told nothing is happening that day and to come back tomorrow, or next week. The summons themselves are aggressively written – I know that’s just the language of the courts, but when you receive one of those letters it really feels as though you’ll be jailed if you don’t show up. It’s intimidating.

And Nisar had this pile of letters. Every single time he was called, he showed up. I felt he was taking on a kind of invisible labour for society at large, and people didn’t even recognise he was doing it. Any rational person would probably tell him not to do it. But he wasn’t approaching it rationally. He really wanted justice. He wanted accountability for the people who nearly harmed his family and burned down his house.

SS: During one of his visits to India from the United States, the senior BJP politician L K Advani became fascinated by the idea of the American Social Security card. He began asking in meetings: why can’t India have something like that? As you mentioned earlier, by August 2000, Advani’s ministry had announced plans to consider registering citizens in a new database.

You reveal that very few people knew the origins of the identification programme before it was later reframed as a tool for welfare delivery. Even fewer knew that the project was first articulated within the home ministry as a tool for internal security under Advani – whose diabolical campaign in the 1990s mobilised Hindus, claiming thousands of lives and the tearing down of the Babri Masjid.

Tell us more about this surprising origin of India’s identification project.

RB: So there are a few things that happened at the same time. One, there was Kargil, and then you had the hijacking. And when these events happened, I was told by A S Dulat, who was in the intelligence services at that point, that Advani was quite upset by the fact that this was happening to India. And he wanted an identification card for every citizen in India. At the same time, he was also in Assam talking about how they would identify infiltrators – Muslims, basically. Then his brother or brother-in-law comes down from America, shows him his Social Security number, and Advani looks at it and says: why can’t we have something like this?

Now while all this is happening, there’s also this constant interaction between the World Bank and similar institutions and the Indian government. At that point, the World Bank and others are pushing the idea of a smart card – a card that essentially carries your data, that can be used for transport, payments and all sorts of things. It had started spreading through Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and you could see that discourse slowly coming to India too. So when Advani says he wants somebody to build a plan for a national identification project, technology companies get involved. A bunch of them draw up proposals and present them to Advani, who eventually picks one by TCS and says: that’s the one.

I met a consultant from TCS and asked him what it was like attending these meetings with Advani at the home ministry around 2000 or 2001. And he told me Advani himself was cool, but the people around him were not. They kept asking things like: how is this going to help us identify infiltrators?  And so you see these different threads coming together. One is these new high-tech cards. Another is Advani’s focus on internal security. And then there’s this ethno-nationalist concern with identifying Muslims in border states like Assam.

The consultant told me that whenever one of the officials pushed too aggressively on the “foreigners” question, Advani would quickly silence him. But everyone in the room understood there was something more driving the project. One of the people involved told me very plainly: they wanted every Indian to have this kind of identification. But what would make people accept it? What was the carrot? And he said the exact phrase they used internally was: “The carrot is welfare”.

Then the project goes quiet for a while. The BJP-led NDA government thinks it’s going to win the next election, but it loses, and the plan more or less disappears. But then by around 2006, you see something very similar emerging again under the name “Unique Identification”, which eventually becomes Aadhaar.

Now, can I conclusively prove that the Aadhaar system was directly built from the exact plan drafted in 2000? No, I can’t. But the people who designed that original identification project told me Aadhaar looks remarkably similar to what they had proposed – a central identification number connected to multiple pillars of information like welfare, passports, driving licences and so on. Even the enrolment process and the way the number would be assigned were quite similar. Which is why several people involved told me this doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

SS: The national rollout of a biometric identification card – essentially a corruptible data-tracking tool with chilling surveillance capacities – was pioneered by the billionaire technocrat Nandan Nilekani. In your conversations with Usha Ramanathan, the legal researcher who is one of Aadhaar’s chief critics, she says that “in the last 10 years, no one has done more to spread the idea that citizens are criminals than Nandan Nilekani. And for this, I cannot forgive him.” Tell us more about the dearth of scrutiny that powerful technologies and their inventors face in India.

RB: This comes back to one of my favourite subjects. Look, where does pushback really come from? Public pushback comes from an informed population. And an informed population is only as informed as the information it actually gets. If that information is compromised, or if people are not told what is happening around them, or if they are told there is no shared reality and that they should doubt the evidence of their own eyes, then you have a large population working blind.

Now, what happened with Nandan Nilekani? As I was investigating him, I became very interested not just in where he came from, but in the kind of relationships he had with the press. How does a man who is great at marketing, who is great at pushing ideas in an extremely succinct and catchy way, relate to journalists? And as I spoke to journalists, I realised he really knew how to play that game very, very well. He was on a first-name basis with journalists. He would answer their calls or call them right back. He made people feel special. If they were visiting Infosys or at a campus or attending a press conference, he would point to them and call them out by name. He would make you feel special.

One journalist told me that you’d be invited to a meal and it would turn into this intimate chat where he really made you feel like he was listening to you and that you had something important to say. Now, what does that really mean? It means that when you sit down to write a story for a newspaper, are you really going to criticise this man? I don’t think so. I learned so much about how power works through this – especially when it comes to building relationships with people who control the flow of information: editors, reporters, journalists. And how that ultimately leads to the reader not receiving the exact news of what exactly happened. 

So when I look at how Aadhaar’s rollout was covered, it was always from the perspective of Nilekani and the technocrats saying this would be good for India. Why? Because it would supposedly stop corruption. There were all these claims about “leakages” amounting to billions every year, and once Aadhaar came in, those leakages would stop. But who stopped to ask where those numbers came from? “Oh, it came from the World Bank.” Fine, but did anybody then go and check where the World Bank got those numbers from? Because the moment you start tracing them, you realise there are maybe three or four sources all citing one another, basically playing ping pong with the same statistics. Those numbers begin to stick in your head: it will save 50 billion dollars over this many years. You have no basis for it, but by sheer repetition, what happens is the discourse then becomes about how technology is going to have this net benefit. Meanwhile, nobody is asking whether it’s been audited, who’s designing it, where the data flow is.

These are critical discussions in a country that is going digital in a huge way. What is the security of our data? We don’t know how the UIDAI’s security council works. We don’t know how often it met or what was discussed in those meetings. I obtained minutes from two meetings and honestly, when I read them and spoke to people involved, I laughed. If these are the people looking after our data security, we’re really in trouble.

But these are conversations we should be having openly. Technology – especially projects this large – should not be administered behind closed doors with the public simply told: trust us, this is good for you. That’s not how decisions that fundamentally reshape the relationship between citizens and the state should be made. It’s honestly a travesty.

It’s not just people with technology. You see similar things with other industrialists too. What we’re seeing playing out in this country – so much of it has to do with the fact that you can’t write about a zoo that Reliance doesn’t want you to write about, you can’t write openly about a construction project in Dharavi and talk about what’s been going on behind the scenes because Adani is a huge advertiser. These are decisions that someone is making. The idea that we are not going to carry this news is deliberate. And I think the political economy behind these decisions and the information we see today really needs to be studied

When I was writing this book, I felt like these exceptions were not made for Nandan Nilekani, he simply exploited weaknesses that already existed. Others do it too. It’s just that my book focused on this particular billionaire, this particular project and this particular moment.

SS: You also raise the interesting point that Aadhaar’s proliferation was initially not guaranteed. In fact, its existence was threatened just when Modi became prime minister in 2014. Modi’s opposition to the programme actually took many of its critics – many of whom were themselves ideologically opposed to the RSS – by surprise. 

Soon after, Modi became India’s undisputed leader. Nilekani asked for a meeting with him, and everything changed. Modi was no longer an Aadhaar septic and instead asserted his control over the project. Aadhaar was renewed and became more hungry than ever for data.

What happened here? How did Nilekani change Modi’s mind about Aadhaar?

RB: I think there are two sources for my information. One is, of course, the news reports that came out at that point. And the other is a reporter’s notes from when he had gone and met Nilekani. What I came away with when I went through those things was that there was clearly some kind of discussion, but we don’t know exactly what happened in that room where they met. Shortly after it ended – within days – Aadhaar started being rolled out for all sorts of other things. And of course, the prime minister himself began saying that it would save us money. If I remember correctly – and I could be wrong on this – I think he mentioned a figure of INR 50,000 crore, which I believe was also a number Nilekani had been using.

Now, the problem with accounts like these is that you maybe have one or two people in the room who will later tell you what happened. And there’s really no way of knowing for certain. All you know is that this was the ideology and point of view before the meeting, then the meeting happened, and afterwards everything changed. It suddenly became much bigger.

So I don’t know exactly what happened in that room. But Nilekani is known for his powers of persuasion. I have been told this over and over again. One of the things he used to say – I don’t know if he still says it – was that when you make a pitch, there should be a big number and a simple message. And when I heard Modi talking about the savings and using these very large figures, I just thought: okay, large number and simple message. It fits with this idea I have of how these guys spark ideas off in the public mind.

SS: Let’s also talk about your own resistance to the programme and its demand for identification. You write that “the act of refusal felt heroic one minute and utterly pointless the next.” The project’s critics – whether journalists, economists or activists – found themselves constrained. An editor who heard you pitch a story on this called the fears around the system “theoretical”. If something had not been caused by it, there was nothing to report.

But you point out that, “in a country where violence was inescapable, where it was present in the marrow of lived experience, how could it be theoretical?”

Tell us about the different ways in which India’s imposition on choice and expression, especially around identification, has grown heavier over the years.

RB: This was all supposed to be voluntary. That’s how they get you – “it’s not mandatory”. And then when enough people sign up for it, because it is kind of quasi-mandatory for the services they want, it then actually becomes mandatory for everybody else. And you just find yourself slowly painted into a corner. It’s happened so many times now that I think this is a legitimate approach that is used – first take away the fear that something is coercive, and then slowly bring people on board.

For me, in my lifetime, Aadhaar is that one big coercive project. In the initial days it was supposed to do everything. It would save money, bring banking to the poor, find lost children, find criminals – basically solve every problem. And then at some point, when people start pushing back and asking questions, the message gets disciplined a little bit. Suddenly it becomes: no, no, it’s actually about welfare. And welfare is the safest possible thing. Who gets welfare? The poorest among us, the weakest among us, the most vulnerable among us. Most people don’t think very much about welfare recipients. But what was really happening was that it’s an attack on people’s rights, these systems were imposing new obligations on people, and most others didn’t recognise it because it wasn’t affecting them directly.

So it starts with welfare. It becomes mandatory there. Then it slowly seeps into other things. A school asks why your child doesn’t have Aadhaar. Then a friendly phone call from your bank saying they need Aadhaar linked to your account. It comes in dribs and drabs. Not full-on rain, just a drizzle. And before you know it, you’re completely drenched in this demand for technological compliance.

Where does it really come from? A lot of people genuinely believe Aadhaar is doing something useful. There’s this belief that it identifies people superbly, that it helps governance. So Aadhaar officials go to states and talk about building “State Resident Data Hubs”, which are essentially 360-degree views into every person living in a state. And all this was happening while they were simultaneously telling Aadhaar critics that the system was not mandatory. Well, if it’s not mandatory, then on what basis are you building surveillance databases for the state that I live in? You also had administrators and bureaucrats saying this was good because it made their workflow more efficient. So different people were reading different meanings into the technology.

Meanwhile, anybody who pushes back against this idea – that a card should determine who you say you are – was treated almost like they were irrational. But really, what does it mean when so much trust is invested in a number? To me, it reflects a very low-trust society. The default position you begin with becomes mistrust – that you are corrupt, that you are going to steal my nation’s money. I’ve never bought that. I think there are other ways of dealing with these problems.

But quickly it became about the technologists pushing India forward. And the reason they were given importance was because they were rich. There’s really nothing more to it. They were rich, made other people rich through IPOs, and promoted this extremely technocratic idea that every social problem has an engineering solution. Any problem is society? There’s a fix for that. You can write it in code and by tomorrow morning it’s done. Crime problem? Install CCTV cameras. Security issue? Build a criminal tracking network. Something happens at a hotel? Fine – now everyone who checks into a hotel has to show ID, and that information goes into a database accessible to law enforcement.

So increasingly you’re living in a society that sees you not just as a citizen, but as an outright or potential criminal, or someone who may commit a crime someday. That’s not helpful for this country. 

I think we’ve seen it flipped around – whatever should be happening. This technology has put so much power into the hands of people who should theoretically be answerable to us. As I spoke to activists like Usha Ramanathan and others who have such a fine understanding of how technology changes society, I realised something fundamental had shifted. India has been this testing ground for technology in ways we still have to recognise. Certain powers you once had as a citizen were being slowly taken away because of this technocratic belief that every Indian is a potential thief. That’s where the coercive aspect comes in.

You see it with things like FASTag at toll booths becoming mandatory. You see it in so many places. And I think the dangerous thing is that the more it happens, the more people become conditioned to the idea that this is inevitable, and that there’s really nothing you can do about it. And for me, that’s where the danger lies.

SS: The RSS became the fastest-growing group in an expanding pool of extreme Hindu outfits. The RSS and its affiliates were reinforced by an operational structure that deeply impressed one of your interlocutors – a former RSS volunteer turned tech entrepreneur in Bangalore, whom you refer to as “R”. 

He described it as “a nice neural network” that conveyed messages and coordinated financing activities at surprising speed. Even 30 years later, he remained struck by the RSS’s organisational ability. He tells you: “I can only imagine how scarily the infrastructure has evolved with the infusion of technology into the system. If one was to use the same infrastructure for violence, I imagine it could happen really quickly.”

Tell us about the present-day implications of this.

RB: I was walking around East Delhi one day interviewing people for the book when I got a series of panicked calls and messages from Nisar. He said: “Look, something’s happened. There’s been an incident somewhere here. Where are you? Can you come quickly?”

I think Bajrang Dal and a bunch of other outfits were protesting outside Gokulpuri police station in Northeast Delhi. And I asked him what had happened. He said there’d been a stabbing or a killing or something like that. Earlier that morning I’d been interviewing people, and one of them – this guy who ran a tabela – had told me there’d been some incident where a Muslim guy had stabbed a Hindu guy after some drunken argument. The man was in hospital. But the previous night, it had already started feeling like this could become a communal incident.

So I quickly went over to where Nisar was, maybe a 10-minute walk away. We hadn’t met in about a year, and the first thing he said to me was: “This incident has become bonkers. Out of nothing, they’re producing a riot.”

We got into his car and drove to Gokulpuri police station. Outside, I saw a BJP councillor whose name had come up several times during my reporting on the 2020 violence in Northeast Delhi. I asked him what had happened, and he immediately framed it as a communal incident – this Muslim guy had killed a Hindu guy. Aaj Tak or one of the other news channels had already run one of those screaming headlines naming both men – something like “Adil ne Rahul ka katal kar diya”, he’s finished him off. It was very clearly framed to inflame the situation.

So we went inside and I spoke to the SHO, the station house officer. I asked him what had happened and he said: “Nothing happened. The guy was stabbed, he’s in hospital, he’s recovering fine. But you know how it is, all these jobless people came out.”

I asked him what he meant, and he said: “All these Jai Shri Ram people came out wanting to take matters into their own hands.” And while we were talking, a bunch of these guys walked into his office. They had dark glasses, saffron scarves, all of that. So I sat quietly at the back of the room and watched. At first these men and women were demanding updates – have you found the guy who did the stabbing, what are you doing, why hasn’t he been arrested? The SHO had clearly been up all night working this case and trying to keep peace in the area, and he kept telling them they were investigating and would find the man responsible.

These people try to take matters into their own hands. They started issuing ultimatums. And they didn’t realise there was a journalist sitting behind them writing everything down.  At one point, they overdo the storytelling and the cop suddenly interrupted them and asked: “Wait, what did you just say? How do you know that?”  And you could literally see them shrink in their seats the moment they were scrutinised.

Two things struck me there. One, exaggeration is fuel. Inflating what happened is what gives them energy. And two, with immediate pushback – especially from somebody in authority – they shrink back completely. 

Eventually he told them that if they interfered with the investigation, he would put his pen down and stop working the case. And strangely, that seemed to frighten them more than anything else. They eventually calmed down and left.

Afterwards I wandered through the neighbourhood where the stabbing had happened and had conversations with the shopkeepers. They showed me video clips of what had unfolded.

Here’s what happened. Within about an hour of the stabbing, different Hindu militant groups had called each other out and coalesced. Maybe 100 or 200 people – I could be off on the numbers – but crowds from different groups had gathered. Some looked like Bajrang Dal, some Kranti Sena, others I couldn’t identify clearly. But they had all come together and started pouring into the alleyways of Mustafabad, which many Hindus there referred to as “mini Pakistan”. There was general chaos. You could see the crowd moving in that distinctly violent way – people surging forward, others hanging back, everyone agitated and looking in the same direction – there’s this agitated state of the crowd.  And all of this happened within an hour.

The reason I’m telling this long story is because over and over again we’ve heard that these groups use WhatsApp and messaging platforms to communicate and coordinate across places during moments of unrest. There was that Kattar Hindu WhatsApp group active during the 2020 Delhi violence where transcripts showed people saying things like: “I have men, I have bullets, I have guns, tell me what you need and I will supply them.”  So there is clearly an electronic component to this coordination and messaging occurring at these moments.

And when I spoke to R – the former RSS man who is now a tech entrepreneur – he could already see where this was going. The RSS already had this disciplined messaging structure, this rigid hierarchy about who says what, when and how messages spread. Technology simply accelerates all of that.

And I think we’ve already seen glimpses of it – during the Delhi violence, and in moments like the one I witnessed personally, with the riot that wasn’t. I found it quite frightening. 

SS: Going back to the start of your book, an opposition lawmaker disputed the basis of the CAA by saying: “It has consequences that you cannot even imagine. Those who have no idea of India cannot protect the idea of India.” And one of your interlocutors said that this poison was always there. It just wasn’t visible.

Do you think India is past the point of no return, or is there still hope for salvaging this idea of India?

RB: I think not having hope is not an option. It’s not really something most people I know think about. In your own way, you’re trying to create a better country. And not in some dramatic sense that “I will make a better country” and all that. It’s just through your actions, through what you support every day. That country shows up when a mass of people act in a certain way.

Right now, I would just say that the cycle turns. You have the BJP at the moment, backed by the RSS, but we don’t really know how large their support really is. We don’t know how much of it is real and how much of it we are made to feel is real. While everybody feels these days like they’re extremely conservative, people still vote in surprising ways. They act in surprising ways.

I think the idea of India is something many of us have tasted. Its benefits have not reached everybody, but as an idea, it’s a fine idea. The idea that you have the opportunity to partake in what this country can offer you is frankly an amazing one. And we have so much going for us over here. 

I get asked this question a lot, especially by people who get to the end of the book. They ask: is there really no hope? And I don’t know – you have to participate in it to shape it. You’ve got to participate politically, you’ve got to shape people’s minds, you’ve got to report, write, express.

I think people who wander around scared for themselves and for what speaking out might mean – there’s not much you can do about that except hope they find the courage to express themselves in some way or another. And I think participating in this project and getting across your own idea of India, your own ideal state, you have every right to put that on the table, just as the RSS and the BJP are working hard to make real their own idea of India. But you’re not alone in this. 

I think my book is actually a positive and optimistic book because it shows people who, regardless of what has happened, regardless of the propaganda and the odds stacked against them – whether it’s an Usha Ramanathan who can barely get her ideas into newspapers anymore, or a Nisar who is struggling to get justice – they just keep going at it, at it, at it.

And it was actually Nisar who got me thinking when he asked, where does the poison come from? I really wanted to understand that. That spurred me into thinking about the RSS, about how all this connects to the present. There are readers who’ve written to me saying that it helped make sense of the reality around them. I’ve heard this especially from college students.

Nisar once told me: what if there were just five other people like me? Just five. How much would change? It’s a vanishingly small number of people you really need to effect change. Pessimism just cannot enter the picture.