Review of "A New Idea of India"by Harsh and Rajeev

Indian authorship is coming of age. The quality of authorship is improving and also becoming clearly more contemporary, although, i am not too sure if I could say the same about the readership. 

My generation is more familiar with India getting decoded more by foreign writers - self professed Indologists who’s works, Indians both from the political right of the spectrum scramble to critique, and political left of the spectrum lap up - some in context of their own stated positions that is so inherently divergent and some for political correctness. But, no matter however so much foreign authors endeavour to decode india, the signal noise defies dubbing and their interpretations are sometimes too simplistic. 

The interesting part is that engineer MBAs and investment bankers that both authors Rajiv and Harsh are, trampling the pastures - discussing and defining India -  till date habited by left leaning Lutyen humanists is itself a phenomenon that is mainstreaming what was earlier fringe.

Lot of the content is contemporary. The citations are often of a period just before the publication in 2020. So there is lot of relatability. Some chapters like ‘Saving Secularism from the Secularists’ are quite well written. Beyond malleable motives of political parties, there is enough allusion to court judgements, election manifestoes and government orders of the recent times to establish brazen minorityism that hallmarked governance in India both at the national and state level.

However at many places the content lacks fidelity to the title and betrays the scholarship that authors who have taken upon themselves the arduous task to expatiate upon a title so esoteric should exhibit. 

Not gainsaying the above, I don’t see any 'new idea of India' really emerge in the book. I would hate to say, their primary premise and its exposition both are quite banal and betray the title. Yet the narrative is riveting, the flow and flair are good. Had Shyama Prasad Mukherji or Pt Din Dayal Upadhyaya been alive, they would have felt ideologically redeemed and politically vindicated.

Embedded in the narrative throughout is an underlying approval of the initiatives of the current political dispensation and often the narrative brinks on a smouldering sycophancy that emerges as a persistent thread. BJP is not the epitome of the Civilizational state that India is. BJP is merely an adept encasher of the chronic denial of the civilisational state’ that India is, by successive non-BJP governments.

Having said that, I would recommend even the millennials to read this book, as it does dissect the dichotomous disdain with which the successive political dispensations have espoused minorityism in the garb of secularism. The book does a good job of bringing facts to a reader. It does a good job of propounding arguments that you may choose to agree or disagree but with data.

Given that Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisational states lost to Islam and the Chinese to communism, India is the only civilizational state that still exists today and retains vestiges of 3000 years of age and antiquity that impart and element of continuity and causal linkage with the past.

Overall, I would say the book is a good read and informative. But betrays the title.