This book is a narrative derived from the author’s personal engagement with India and covers issues relevant to anyone with an interest in the country, particularly in the light of a new government being elected to power, following the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The work vigorously uses personal anecdotes and experiences, existing documentation and literature, first-hand interactions with individuals in public life as well as people from disparate walks of life and a strong reliance on historical evidence to illustrate themes and forces that move India today. Many long-held political presumptions currently face elaborate debate and rethinking in the altered political milieu. Among them, debates about philosophies and principles that have been defining characteristics of Indian culture, history, philosophy and politics. Questions over whether ‘Secularism’ is at all relevant in a right-wing polity or if the Indian National Congress; one of the largest and oldest democratic organisations in the world, matters to India’s politics any more. Can a diverse composition of culture survive - does it even need to - in an era of majoritarian rule? All these and more require an understanding if India is to be understood; for nothing is a given any more.   
This book seeks to examine a range of such and similar questions, debates and themes as well as the different arguments they propound and the history that has created them. All these themes have long been assumed cornerstones of India’s identity as a democratic nation-state and as part of a heritage that precedes India’s geo-political identity as a modern state. Do these long-held, and accepted principles, traditions and identities still matter, or are they irrelevant now, in the face of a challenge from resurgent radical political forces and the change they in turn potentially hold?    
This is not a linear narrative punctuated by descriptions of seminal events but a panorama of India’s landscape that zooms into some features, particularly when those features are rooted in Politics, Culture and History. This work follows the thinker Perry Anderson’s view that, “Politics is not a self-enclosed activity, organically generating a body of concepts internal to it. What counts as a set of ideas with a bearing on the political conflicts of a time varies according to epoch and region. Today it stretches far beyond the purview of political science, traditionally conceived.”  Indian politics, even more so, is a far from aseptic field. It is a wide, amorphous and complex movement of many dynamics in rapid evolution. As Dr. Amartya Sen argues,   
“India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly disparate convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. Any attempt to talk about the culture of the country, or about its past history in contemporary politics, must inescapably involve considerable selection.”  The State of India addresses these themes basing itself on thorough research while remaining accessible and readable for the non-academic reader.  This work is not just a study of the Indian State; it’s laws, politics and people, but a detailed analysis of the state in which India currently is and more importantly, the ground towards which it is likely headed.   

Agent: Anuj
Edit: Sharvani