This book is a necessary compilation that comes from an embattled republic of letters in a nation slowly being desiccated by the philistinism of its politics. The great merit of the book is its comprehensive nature as it focuses expansively on many themes. There is the question of the economy being roiled by adverse global headwinds that the ruling dispensation seems to be gloriously inept at handling. There is the spectacle of reason being ambushed by unreasoning hatred. There are excerpts from writers determinedly ploughing their lonely furrows with their writing––an often-losing battle against the aridity of the times. There are people from the peripheries and margins speaking truth to power structures, that in turn seek to drown out those voices, either by intimidating and outshouting them, or more sinisterly silencing them.
Many have looked at the 2019 elections as a battle for the soul of India and the book’s title invokes something very similar with citizens playing a central role in the rejuvenation of the Republic. It is a battle that is apparently being lost, especially in the arena of the electoral as the BJP rampages home through every single contest. However, in every battle there are many wars and theatres and this book seems in the midst of the heat of the battle to be making a rallying cry. The rallying cry, however seems to be one of retreat as it withdraws from fallen universities, scientific establishments, literary academies and cultural foundations. Perhaps a little ominously Ram Madhav, just the day after the BJP’s massive victory in 2019, wrote that the ‘remnants of the cartel’ of secular intellectuals and liberal critics ‘need to be discarded from the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual landscape’ (‘This Election Result is a Positive Mandate in Favour of Narendra Modi’, The Indian Express, May 24th 2019).
There has been a tremendous outpouring of quality writing in response to the Modi government’s five years in power. That is why this review has invoked the idea of a republic of letters. In the aftermath of the massive electoral victory that the Modi led BJP has enjoyed, it almost seems that the harder people resist, write and speak out, the more such efforts seem to boomerang on those very people as Mr. Modi comes back, each time electorally even more fortified. The one exception to this trend would go back to late 2015, in the immediate wake of numerous writers, intellectuals and scientists returning their awards, the much talked about award wapsi, that this book has quite a bit on. This was followed by a crushing electoral defeat for the BJP in the Bihar assembly election. The BJP seems to have learnt its lessons well after the two crushing electoral defeats suffered in State Assembly elections in Delhi and Bihar in 2015.