Nalin Mehta

The BJP’s meteoric rise to the top of Indian politics has been variously and copiously recorded by several book-length attempts at authenticity. While The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (Bhupender Yadav and Illa Patnaik), How the BJP Wins: Inside the World’s Largest Election Machine (Prashant Ojha), Bharatiya Janata Party Past Present and Future: Story of the World’s Largest Political Party (Shantanu Gupta) and Jugalbandi.


Reviewed by: Roshni Sengupta
Suryakant Waghmore and Hugo Gorringe

We can extrapolate from the title of the book that civility in India is in serious jeopardy. Despite the fact that majoritarian politics and democracy in India are in place, the book discusses the challenges of ensuring civility for its population. Each chapter delves into this duality and critically assesses the obstacles and problems with democracy by looking at caste and civility in the context of several Indian States.


Reviewed by: Nikhil Walde and Vicky Nandgaye
Arun Shourie

Ram Nath Goenka was the publisher of The Indian Express. Arun Shourie was twice its editor. The two were the Dhoni and Jadeja of Indian journalism in the 1980s. It was a truly extraordinary partnership.In 1990 RNG, as he was known, passed away. I was asked to write his obituary by the paper I was working for then. It was quite an honour.


Reviewed by: TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan
Edited by K. Raju

After more than seventy years of Independence, the caste question remains one of the most intractable vices of contemporary India. Dalits’ struggles in particular have been made strategically invisible amidst the call for how the ‘dreams of our nation’ must always supersede ‘sectarian agendas’. Both are politically loaded terms.


Reviewed by: Surajkumar Thube
Mridula Ramesh

Mridula Ramesh’s compelling work traces the trajectory of India’s water over 4000 years to highlight the grave crisis India is facing today. Global warming is a tragic reality and it is being predicted that by 2030 India will fail to meet half its water demand. As the book’s blurb points out, water availability per person in India has been decreasing for decades, leaving parts of the country in a cruel ‘Day Zero’ situation, shuttering factories and pushing farmers over the brink.


Reviewed by: Mohammad Imtiyaz
Himanshu Prabha Ray

The wide prevalence of scripts, languages, architectural forms and iconography with a clear provenance from India in a wide swathe of South East Asia from quite early in the first millennium, has interested many in India almost from the beginning of modern history writing and archeological investigation in the country.


Reviewed by: TCA Raghavan