How History Plays a Recurring Role in the Present: The Story of Modern India

A key area of study among contemporary social scientists is the worldwide shift towards the Right, accompanied by both populism and autocratization, and the implications of this shift for the health and future of democracy, especially its conception of civic citizenship and political accountability. On the one hand, revanchist nationalism seeks to instate ethnic/religious basis for citizenship and on the other, the deep sinews of governmentality equipped with new technologies and in alliance with data-driven capitalism has undermined the traditional rights-based compact between citizen and state. Rahul Bhatia’s The Identity Project traces the journey of these two identity projects—of religion-based nationalism and biometric identification system—in India and shows how this remaking of Indian identity or the making of The New India (also the title under which the book has been released outside India) is also the story of the unmaking of the post-Independence constitutional secular democracy.