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.

Radio National • 11th August 2019

Modi moves to take back Kashmir

India and Pakistan have fought four wars over Kashmir and it is the raison d'etre for many of the listed Islamic terrorist organisations operating in Pakistan, Lashkar e Toiba being just one of the largest. Now India has unilaterally withdrawn Kashmiri self-rule, which has raised hostilities with Pakistan and brought claims that Narendra Modi is seeking to bring Kashmir under the umbrella of India and Hindu-ise the predominantly Muslim region. Publication: Malevolent Republic: A short history

Monocle • 11th August 2019

The future of Kashmir, The Foreign Desk 292 - Radio

Somalia: could the world be doing more? It might feel as though the rest of the world has given up on Somalia. This is not, however, something the rest of the world can afford to do: the country’s perch on the Horn of Africa gives it extraordinary strategic…

The Guardian • 6th August 2019

Humiliating Kashmir is part of Modi’s plan to remake India | Kapil Komireddi

On Valentine’s Day this year, Narendra Modi went on a date with Bear Grylls. As the two men set off on an “adventure of a lifetime” in India’s Corbett national park, 500 miles to the north in the valley of Kashmir a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into a convoy of vehicles carrying Indian paramilitary forces. Forty troops were blown to bits in the blast. It was the bloodiest single atrocity suffered by Indian security personnel in the savage history of the Kashmir conflict. A

Frontline Club • 3rd July 2019

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.

Caravan • 29th June 2019

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.

ThePrint • 11th June 2019

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.

Radio Dreyeckland • 4th June 2019

"Neoliberalismus und Hindunationalismus sind zwei Seiten der selben Medaille"

Kapil discusses Indian elections and his book on Germany’s Radio Dreyeckland.

Eventbrite • 3rd June 2019

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.

Scroll.in • 1st June 2019

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

The New Statesman • 29th May 2019

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.

The Guardian • 21st May 2019

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

The Spectator • 15th April 2019

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.

Spectator USA • 9th December 2018

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 Spectator • 8th December 2018

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’.

The Spectator • 6th October 2018

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 Spectator • 15th August 2018

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.

The Economist • 27th July 2017

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.

The National • 20th July 2017

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.

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