On 15 July 2025, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study hosted the first installment of its Summer 2025 Virtual Radcliffe Book Talks, featuring independent journalist and author Rahul Bhatia in conversation with Harvard Professor of Sociology Christopher Muller. Against the backdrop of a global audience tuning in via Zoom, Bhatia offered a powerful five‑minute reading from The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy—much of which he drafted during his time in the Radcliffe archives—and then explored with Muller how India’s decades‑long experiments in secularism have given way to a muscular, majoritarian nationalism.

Opening Acknowledgments and Introduction
Claudia, on behalf of Radcliffe’s Executive Committee and the Steiner Dean’s Leadership Fund for Academic Ventures, welcomed members of the Radcliffe Institute Leadership Society and annual donors whose philanthropic support keeps all programming free and open to the public. She invited attendees to submit questions at any time, promising to address as many as possible. With a nod to the event’s sponsors, she then passed the virtual floor to Bhatia.

A Personal Journey into India’s Rising Tide of Intolerance
Bhatia began his reading with a scene set “a decade or so ago,” describing how someone dear to him—once warm, humorous, and unpredictably playful—grew swept up in a tide of communal hatred. He recounted, “He had aligned himself with the fortunes of a political party as if it were a sports team,” and, overnight, began forwarding edited videos and invented headlines that “depicted the country in twisted ways I did not recognize at all.” Drawing on family letters, personal diaries, and on‑the‑ground reporting, Bhatia’s prose tracked the emergence of triumphalist rhetoric, the normalization of disparaging slurs, and the unsettling lexicon by which neighbors turned on neighbors.

Tracing the Roots: From Secular Optimism to Majoritarian Mobilization
In discussion with Muller, Bhatia explained that post‑Independence India was envisioned as a “noble mansion under which all these different people…would live,” an imperfect but earnest experiment in parliamentary democracy and religious pluralism. By the early 2010s, however, “the slogan of a ‘new India’”—popularized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—heralded a break with the past. That break, Bhatia argued, was packaged as India’s moment to “assert itself on the world stage,” yet carried with it an undercurrent of violence: cow‑vigilante lynchings, demolition of historic mosques, and the passage of citizenship laws that effectively excluded millions.

The RSS and the Anatomy of Ideological Indoctrination
A cornerstone of Bhatia’s narrative is the century‑old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Modeled in part on Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the RSS deploys a vast network of daily morning drills, youth camps, and local gatherings to inculcate a mythic vision of Hindu supremacy. “Every day, in playgrounds across India,” Bhatia told attendees, “members salute the RSS flag and hear stories of a glorious Hindu past—stories that travel swiftly through tight chains of communication.” From that base, he traced how political leaders and bureaucrats from RSS ranks have funneled these narratives into state policy, media, and education.

The “Identity Project”: Biometric ID and the Politics of Inclusion
Moving from ideology to technology, Bhatia described how the government’s Aadhaar program—touted as the world’s largest biometric identification system—became another vehicle for defining who “belongs” in India. Although framed as a tool to eliminate welfare fraud and streamline public services, Aadhaar’s architects, Bhatia revealed, harbored deeper ambitions: to “identify infiltrators,” a euphemism frequently understood to mean Muslim citizens. The promise of convenience thus masked a parallel projection of state power, with minimal safeguards on data privacy or legal recourse.

Conversation Highlights and Audience Q&A
— On the parallels with U.S. politics, Bhatia warned that America’s Project 2025 and court‑packing proposals mirrored India’s experience of consolidating executive authority, stifling dissent on campuses, and aligning billionaires with political elites.
— On secularism’s fate, he cautioned that India’s experiment never fully delivered economic opportunity for all, allowing organizations like the RSS to fill governance gaps in underserved communities.
— On paths forward, he urged citizens not to take democratic norms for granted: “Our opponents see this as a hundred‑year project. We must treat it as our lifetime’s work.”

Looking Ahead
The recording of this session will be posted on the Radcliffe Institute website one week after the event. Participants interested in further exploring the themes of The New India—from Partition‑era archives to frontline accounts of communal violence—are encouraged to visit Radcliffe’s online calendar for upcoming installments in the Summer 2025 Virtual Book Talks series.

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