Modi’s India: In Conversation with Kapil Komireddi
I'll be talking about my book and about India at the Frontline Club, Paddington, at 7pm on Monday, 15 July. Click the link to get tickets.
Kapil Komireddi
I am an author, journalist, and book critic. My book, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, was published in May 2019 in India (Context) and the United Kingdom (Hurst). I have written from South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East; and my work has appeared, among other publications, in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, the Spectator, TIME, Los Angeles Times, CNN, the National, the Jewish Chronicle, Foreign Policy, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Tablet, Daily Beast, London Review, New Republic, New Statesman, Newsweek, Guardian, Daily Mirror, the Australian, Le Monde diplomatique, the Independent, the Times of India, Hindustan Times, and Haaretz. This website features some of my published work.
Emergency and the “gangsterisation of Indian politics” under Indira and Sanjay Gandhi
On 25 June 1975, prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution, marking the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Indian democracy.
Hindutva rise must be pinned on historians who told us Hindus, Muslims lived peacefully once
Imperialism, for India’s ‘secular’ historians, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme. Such well-intentioned sanitisation of the past was never, in the long run, going to be able to withstand the awakening of people to their history, or sustain an inclusive nationalism.
The Monocle Daily - Thursday 23 May
Andrew Mueller interviews Kapil Komireddi about his book "Malevolent Republic"
BBC Newsnight
Kapil discusses Modi's victory on BBC Newsnight
"Neoliberalismus und Hindunationalismus sind zwei Seiten der selben Medaille"
Kapil discusses Indian elections and his book on Germany’s Radio Dreyeckland.
Kapil Komireddi in conversation with Andrew Anthony in Islington
I’ll be talking about India and my book with Andrew Anthony of the Guardian & Observer.
12 June | 6.30pm | Waterstones, Islington.
Do come.
Did the secular sanitisation of pre-colonial Indian history allow Hindu nationalism to weaponise it?
Had secular historians been more forthright about India’s violent past, it might have provoked a mature detachment from it, Kapil Komireddi Komireddi writes in a new book
For Indian Muslims, Narendra Modi’s emboldened leadership is a reign of terror
Railing against Modi’s silence is perhaps beside the point because the assumptions of Indians outraged by his silence may already have become obsolete. Modi may have elected to seal his lips because opening them may only expose his inability to contain and control with speech the monster he catalysed and condoned with silence.
Five more years of Narendra Modi will take India to a dark place | Kapil Komireddi
If the Indian prime minister is returned to office, his sectarian politics will make bigotry the defining ideal of the republic
India should not ask Britain to apologise for the Amritsar massacre
For Indians to demand an apology from today’s Britain for what happened a century ago is more than pointless. It is a form of narcissism – the narcissism of victimhood – that supplies a convenient exit from the difficult questions we need to ask ourselves.
Kapil Komireddi's Books of the Year 2018 - Spectator USA
Having witnessed the beginnings of the Syrian civil war up close, I was staggered by No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (Norton), Rana Abouzeid’s hauntingly vivid chronicle of the yearnings and defeats of ordinary people striving to preserve their dignity.
The scandalous swamp of Indian politics
As the economy expanded under Singh, millions of people were moved out of dire poverty and into tolerable destitution. An army of intellectuals, touting this as revolutionary progress, demanded more ‘reforms’, a word that conceals more than it conveys. India devolved into what the Princeton scholar Atul Kohli calls a ‘two track democracy’, where ‘common people are only needed at the time of elections’.
Shashi Tharoor’s book is a polemic, says Kapil Komireddi – beware of Hindu nationalism
Most religions bind their adherents into a community of believers. Hinduism segregates them into castes. And people excluded from the hierarchical caste system — the ‘untouchables’ — are permanently doomed to a life of scripturally sanctioned calvary. This hideousness doesn’t, however, hinder Shashi Tharoor from breathlessly exalting Hinduism as ‘a religion for the 21st century’.
The shattering honesty of VS Naipaul
Any idea of the 20th century formed by omitting Naipaul’s oeuvre is an incomplete and impoverished idea. His works, embodying the triumph of unremitting perseverance against insuperable odds, anticipated the fervours that define our times. They will endure long after Naipaul’s criticasters have faded from the scene.
A memoir of the lowest caste
Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. By Sujatha Gidla. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $28.
200 million Indians belong to a community deemed so impure by the scriptures that they are placed outside the hierarchical Hindu caste system and are commonly called “untouchable”. Upper-caste Hindus traditionally treated untouchables as agents of pollution.
Will the uncomfortable truths of a movie about India's Emergency survive the censor's cuts?
The Emergency, only four decades old, already feels like ancient history. It is not taught in school and many young people have never even heard of it. Such widespread unawareness permits Congress to attack prime minister Narendra Modi as an unusual strongman in Indian history, while proffering itself as the enlightened alternative. But a new film is threatening to complicate matters for Congress.
Three years on, the mood in Modi’s India is less euphoria, more hysteria
India’s traditions of tolerance are being torn down and its resilience tested, by a man who claims above all to love India. Can India contain him?
India and Israel come closer
India was home to thriving Jewish communities long before there was any Jewish presence in Europe. These communities, small but intensely patriotic, produced some of India’s most cherished public figures. Bollywood’s pioneering film stars, Bombay’s most revered poet and its most beloved mayor, India’s most admired general: they were all Jewish.
Revenge of the workers?
Western liberalism is in peril. Europe is disintegrating. America is in retreat. Liberal democracy is shrinking. Russia is on a rampage. China is positioning itself as the de facto leader of the world. How did we get here? In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce advances answers as potent as hand grenades – and he hurls them without a sliver of sympathy at the nabobs who make the annual hegira to Davos. They have seceded from reality, he argues, and their insights are anachronistic piffle.
Load More Articles
