The Rise of ‘Moditva’
Surajkumar Thube
GUJARAT UNDER MODI: LABORATORY OF TODAY’S INDIA by By Christophe Jaffrelot Hurst & Company, London, , 556 pp., £ 30.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10

In a public talk organized by the Asian College of Journalism on 18 July 2024, Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s foremost political observers, spoke on a rather benign sounding topic, titled ‘Are we back to democratic politics?’. Implying that democratic India was rapidly ceding space to authoritarian tendencies before the general elections of 2024, Yadav described the tumultuous phase of India under Modi as ‘competitive authoritarianism mixed with non-theological majoritarianism’. This political status of India’s democracy today can be traced back to what Christophe Jaffrelot has called ‘a laboratory of Hindu nationalism’ to describe Gujarat in 2001. It can be argued that it was this laboratory which began churning novel variants of authoritarian and majoritarian rule in the subsequent decades. In his new book titled Gujarat Under Modi, Jaffrelot seeks to explore this laboratory by examining Narendra Modi’s formative years in Indian politics.

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