Twilight Prisoners collects a rich range of essays on the damage capitalism and the Hindu right is doing to India, finds Unjum Mirza

As a kid, one of my favourite Nasrudinⁱ stories had the Mulla searching for something on the ground. ‘What have you lost, Mulla?’ asks a passer-by. ‘My key’. Having joined the search for the key, the passer-by turns to the Mulla, ‘Where exactly did you lose it?’. ‘In my house’. ‘Then why are you looking out here?’ The Mulla replies, ‘there’s more light here than in my house.’

Twilight Prisoners: The rise of the Hindu Right and the fall of India has Siddhartha Deb step aside from the glare of Modi’s ‘India Shining’ and instead illuminate the country’s (many, many) darkest regions in search of the ‘difficult stories running counter to the received myths about India as a flourishing democracy’ (p.207). In this short book, a collection of essays composed over the past decade or so for various publications, Deb aims to demonstrate how ‘Hindu nationalism and global capitalism reinforce and feed off each other’ (p.8).

As if to prove the point, the benchmark Sensex index surged to record highs as exit polls showed the BJP on track for a landslide victory in the Indian general elections earlier this year. Modi ran the election on the slogan ‘Abki Baar 400 Paar’ (This time surpassing 400) – the target to win more than 400 of the 543 Lok Sabha (People’s Assembly) seats. As the live results came in, $400 billion was wiped off Indian stocks across the whole market. In the end, the BJP won 240 seats, short of the 272-seat threshold needed to give it a majority in the 543-seat Lok Sabha and a far cry from the 303-seat majority it attained in the 2019 elections.

In Faizabad, the constituency in which Ayodhya is located and where the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid was demolished, the BJP were left shell shocked, having lost by over 50,000 votes. The destruction of the Babri Masjid and the campaign for the construction of a Hindu Temple on the site had been central to the BJP and Sangh Parivar (the network of right-wing bodies dominated by the right-wing RSS and VHP movement) Hindutva objectives since the early 1990s. Deb describes the construction of the Ram Temple upon the ruins of the Babri Masjid as ‘only the beginning of an effort to construct a past that never was, in the hope of devising a future from which India’s Muslim inhabitants can be erased’ (p.138).

In illuminating ‘this darkest of turns in India’s history’ (p.8), Deb covers a lot of ground, far too much for this review to cover. The first chapter charts Modi’s rise to power in 2014, the Gujarat communal riots in 2002 when Modi was in charge as Chief Minister of the state, the key organisations (and complex relations) of the Hindu Right – RSS-VHP-BJP.

Capitalism and toxic nationalism

Chapter 2 re-visits the Bhopal Gas Disaster in 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Madhya Pradesh where ‘most of the safety devices at the factory… were inoperative by the time of the disaster’ (p.52) Conservative estimates note 3-4,000 deaths within 24 hours, while a report in the Guardian noted the office of Bhopal’s medical commissioner ‘registered 22,149 directly related deaths up to December 1999’ (p.47). The Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre, estimates that 500,000 people suffered ‘agonizing injuries’. 

India’s elites have not learnt the lessons of the Bhopal disaster. Worse, they don’t give a damn. Deb states, ‘there are fantasies of a hundred more Bhopals in the form of secrecy-shrouded nuclear plants and river-damming projects, of pharaonic, Ozymandian monuments rising from the valleys and the mountains’ (p.59).

Chapter 3 turns to the crackdown on Burmese dissidents in Manipur while the important Chapter 4 addresses what Deb refers to as the ‘symbiosis of Assamese nationalism and Hindu nationalism’ (p.105). The BJP’s aim to extend the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to all India, combined with the Citizen’s Amendment Act (2019) presents a clear and present danger to all of India’s Muslim population.

In Chapter 5, Ram’s Temple, Deb warns that Ayodhya and the demolition of Babri Masjid ‘is only the start of the liberation the Hindu right envisions for India … There is even talk that the Taj Mahal is really an ancient Shiva temple appropriated by Muslims that must be returned to its former glory’ (p.137).

Chapter 6 addresses the Hindu supremacists’ obsession with Vedic ‘technology’ apparently found in ancient Hindu scriptures. For the Hindu Right ‘ancient India is a far less complex place of “pure Hinduism”, created by “Sanskrit-speaking people” with a “unified, homogeneous religion and culture”.’ As Deb says, ‘In this paradise of the past, there are no Buddhists or Muslims or Christians or Jews or left-wingers or women’ (p.152).

Political repression

Deb dedicates Chapter 7 to Gauri Lankesh, the Indian left-wing activist and journalist murdered outside her home in 2017. She was fierce critic of right-wing Hindu extremism, campaigned for women’s rights and opposed caste-based discrimination. Deb says, ‘since the 2014 election of BJP leader Narendra Modi as prime minister, India has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter’ (p.157). He continues, 

‘whoever the killers turn out to be, Lankesh’s death has to be attributed to more than the men who pulled the trigger and rode the motorcycles, or even those shadowy figures who planned the assassination. She was killed by the culture of impunity promoted by India’s Hindu right, which goes all the way up to political leaders of the Hindu right, including Modi’ (p.172).

Chapter 8 deals with the persecution of the Bhima Koregaon-16, ‘sixteen people arrested since June 2018 for their part in an alleged Maoist conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and foment an uprising against Modi’s government’ (p.176).

Deb says, ‘There are thousands of political detainees currently held in India’s prisons, but more than any other mass arrest, the Bhima Koregaon case shows the way Modi’s government cracks down on criticism of its Hindu-nationalist ideology and disguises its harsh repression as part of a war on terror’ (p.177) Moreover, the ‘arrests had been planned and prepared for by the establishment of a massive project of surveillance, entrapment, and incarceration’ (p.190).

Arundhati Roy is the subject of Deb’s final chapter. Roy needs no introduction to Counterfire readers. She is a trenchant critic of Indian capitalism and an outstanding and principled fighter against human-rights abuses, oppression, exploitation, imperialism and war.

On 7 June 2024, Modi confirmed the support of 293 MPs to the president of India, inaugurating his third term as prime minister. On 14 June 2024, Delhi’s Lieutenant-Governor, an appointee of the BJP government, endorsed Roy’s prosecution under the ‘anti-terror’ legislation, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or UAPA, in order to circumvent the statute of limitations that governs prosecutions under normal Indian Penal Code (IPC) provisions. The move against Roy (which could result in up to seven years behind bars) is coupled with moves to prosecute Dr. Sheikh Hussain, an international law professor, who spoke alongside her at a conference on Kashmir entitled Azadi (Freedom) – the Only Way Ahead.

This is a reminder that while Modi’s position may be diminished and the BJP weakened since the elections, there can be no place for complacency. The BJP is still the single largest party. Modi is still the prime minister, now for a third successive time. The only other time this occurred in India’s history was with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1962 (albeit, unlike with Nehru, Modi has secured his second term with the assistance of coalition partners).

The newly dubbed ‘Modi 3.0’ government’s 2024-2025 budget – presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as India becoming ‘Viksit Bharat’ (Developed India) by 2047 – has reinforced its pro-big business policies, including massive corporate tax cuts, a fire-sale of government assets to billionaires, austerity in social spending, and the further expansion of ‘business friendly’ Special Economic Zones.

But the constraints are more apparent. The Financial Times reports, ‘In the run-up to the election, Modi instructed his ministries to come up with 100-day action plans to push through the BJP’s legislative and administrative programme in its first three months. These included proposals to create “super-ministries” for areas such as technology, with the aim of streamlining the government’s work. Officials no longer speak about a 100-day agenda.’

It adds: ‘More ominously perhaps for the powerful and popular prime minister, some leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist mass movement behind the BJP, made remarks that Indians interpreted as expressing impatience with Modi since the general election result was announced on June 4.’

Clarifying the big picture

To end, I’d like to highlight two areas that could have strengthened Deb’s book. Firstly, in the recent elections, the opposition party alliance INDIA made reasonable gains. This may act to curb the pogroms, but there should be no doubt that the alliance sits under the neoliberal umbrella. It offers the poor of India nothing.

Deb holds no illusions. In his opening chapter he explains: ‘There is also much continuity between Modi’s India and what preceded it, including the way in which the Congress stood aside during the 2002 massacres and their aftermath, selectively exploiting the culpability of Modi and his government but never genuinely interested in justice; nurturing Hindu majoritarianism under the guise of nationalism; promoting the enrichment of a select few’ (p.42).

Deb adds: ‘By the 1980s, the Congress, dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family, had begun to dabble in sectarian politics and Hindu nationalism. When Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh separatists in 1984, senior Congress leaders, joined by RSS members, directed a pogrom against the Sikh minority that resulted in the death of 2,700 people, according to official estimates. Rajiv Gandhi, the next prime minister, took his mother’s sectarian politics further while also beginning India’s tilt toward the United States and toward information technology and a market-driven economy’ (p.21).

Indeed, Arundhati Roy adds further historical depth in an example about the concessions to the Hindu-Right during the struggle for Independence. While preparing a new introduction to The Annihilation of Caste written in 1936 by B. R. Ambedkar, Roy becomes ‘increasingly dismayed with what she saw as Gandhi’s regressive position.’ Gandhi wanted to abolish untouchability but not caste. Ambedkar, in contrast, saw the entire caste system as morally wrong and undemocratic.

These are important insights. And I think both Deb and are right. It is a shame that this was not expanded upon in the book.

Lastly, an additional chapter on the successful farmers’ protests in 2020-21 could have opened a broader discussion on the collective struggles of workers and farmers and strategies of the Left (beyond parliamentary coalitions and manoeuvrings). The spectre of the potential independent collective power of the struggles uniting all the oppressed and exploited at the base of Indian society, particularly in light of the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh – the first leader to visit Modi after his re-election – haunts Indian rulers. This is the key that eludes us. The search continues.

i The Mulla Nasrudin is the hero of thousands of humorous and satirical folklore tales shared across the entirety of the ‘Muslim world’ dating back to the thirteenth century.