‘We must push back, otherwise we’ll live in a police state’: Siddhartha Deb

The author of Twilight Prisoners on India’s democratic erosion, failures of postcolonial promise, and need for resistance against authoritarianism.

Siddhartha Deb. | Photo Credit: Nina Rubin (courtesy of author’s website)

In one of the essays in Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India, Siddhartha Deb describes a “violently authoritarian version” of India wherein a government would not refrain from using draconian laws to put ideological opponents behind bars for an indiscriminate period in the name of the “war on terror”. Deb tells Frontline that “despite the compromised system, we have no choice but to fight back”. Twilight Prisoners is a collection of his journalism and essays over the past one and a half decades. As it documents India’s descent into authoritarianism, the book reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy.

Journalist and author of novels such as The Point of Return (2003), An Outline of the Republic (2005), and The Light at the End of the World (2023), Deb’s 2011 work of non-fiction, The Beautiful and the Damned, received the PEN Open Book Award and was a finalist for the prestigious Orwell Prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Republic, among many other publications. In a candid interview, Deb talks about how he came to write about Hindu nationalism, what the 2024 Lok Sabha election results mean for Indian democracy, the crisis journalism faces in India and globally, and more. Excerpts:

In the introduction, you write that the pieces in Twilight Prisoners attempt to intersect politics and aesthetics, and show how “Hindu nationalism and global capitalism reinforce and feed off each other”. You also call this collection a conversation with your fiction, especially your last novel (The Light at the End of the World). Could you tell us about the process of putting together this book?

The pieces were written and reported over a decade. I’ve always been interested in India, and all my books are about India in various ways. However, writing about Hindu nationalism wasn’t something I embraced initially; I fell into it reluctantly over the last 15-20 years. After finishing The Light at the End of the World, I began looking back at my non-fiction. This was partly prompted by an Indian journalist requesting a PDF of one of my stories about Burmese refugees in Manipur. As I reread it, I realised the quality and relevance of my work on the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Most of these pieces were published abroad in the UK and US, limiting access for Indian readers. I wanted to correct that. People would occasionally find my work online and reach out, asking for more. This external interest, combined with my own reflection, led me to consider compiling a collection. I saw a narrative in how things had changed over the last 15-16 years, even before the rise of the Hindu Right. I’m critical of various political entities, including the Congress party, as seen in pieces about Bhopal and Burmese refugees. These stories deal with the erasure of memory and history, and the marginalisation of democracy and egalitarianism in favour of realpolitik and strategic interests.

My fiction, particularly The Light at the End of the World, deals with similar themes but in a more sublimated, playful manner. The non-fiction in Twilight Prisoners is more direct and carefully researched. Both forms allow me to explore dark currents of Hindu nationalism, colonialism, and various forms of violence, including the often overlooked complicity of neoliberalism and capitalism. That’s how Twilight Prisoners came into being—as a way to preserve these pieces, make them accessible to a wider audience, and tell a coherent story about India’s recent political and social evolution.

You’ve called this collection a “report from the frontiers of the unravelling of India’s flawed national project”. Considering you also say that the very same national project also held the “midnight promise of decolonization and Third World liberation”, in what sense do you call it flawed?

I call it flawed because it didn’t really culminate, even before the rise of Hindu nationalism. This isn’t just about India; it’s about the broader promise of decolonisation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The idea was that we would be different from the Western European colonial powers, which were extremely violent, hierarchical, racist, sexist, and environmentally destructive. The promise of postcolonialism, embraced to some degree by Indian elites like Nehru, was that we would have more egalitarian, inclusive national projects. This wasn’t just about minorities, but also about addressing the violence of patriarchy, caste, and the treatment of refugees and indigenous people. We aimed for social justice, a welfare state, and equitable sharing of resources.

However, the postcolonial project in India veered away from this vision quickly. This deviation ultimately gave Hindu nationalism such power. The Congress party is also culpable, as seen in the 1984 targeting of Sikh minorities. But the issues extend to the treatment of Dalits, tribals, and Kashmiris as well.

The “freedom at midnight” that Nehru spoke of wasn’t really freedom for many people. As a child of the Partition, I’m acutely aware of the violence and displacement it caused—with 12 to 20 million people displaced and about 1 million killed. This trauma was largely suppressed and forgotten in the national narrative. So when I say “flawed”, I’m referring to the failure to realise the promise of a more equitable, inclusive, and just society that was supposed to emerge from decolonisation. The Indian national project, like many others, fell short of its lofty ideals.

Towards the end of the chapter “Nowhere Man” (on Prime Minister Narendra Modi), you write about “the astonishing, amazing phenomenon of a world that can still produce, from the crushed bottom layers of Indian society, people who, with every bit of the dignity and courage they can muster, resist the lure of their silent, lonely, aloof, admired, and unloved leader”. Do you think that the mandate of the 2024 election was a moment of reassertion for these people? And what does it mean for Modi going forward?

Absolutely. Those words are some of the happier ones in what is otherwise a dark analysis of Narendra Modi and the Hindu Right’s authoritarianism. I wrote that piece in 2016, as an early critique of Modi, just before he was invited by the Obama administration to address the joint US Houses of Congress. Based on my reporting and time spent with people, I believe that the further down you go socially and in terms of caste and class, you find a stronger sense of democracy and justice. This isn’t unique to India; I see it to some degree in the United States as well. The poor understand suffering because they experience it directly every day. While this can be channelled by right-wing forces, there’s also resistance within the broader Indian population to the most egregious violence and authoritarianism.

The current election results show that people have begun to catch on and express themselves. However, this alone isn’t sufficient. The opposition political parties must respond to this historical opportunity by avoiding selfishness, hunger for power, soft Hindutva, or aligning with neoliberal capital. I wrote in The New York Times just before the election that the Hindutva project has begun to run aground because it’s mostly based on violence and hatred. It lacks a vision for India beyond that. There’s talk of development, but it’s limited to shopping malls, airports, and military hardware. There’s no vision for addressing inequality, food security, or public health, as we saw during the pandemic with the Modi government’s non-response.

This is a wonderful moment, but many challenges remain. Democratic forces in the country, both at the grassroots level and in opposition political parties, must seize this opportunity. They need to represent the better side of the Indian people and their hopes and aspirations.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the pran pratishtha rituals at the Ram Mandir, in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024. Deb says that the Lok Sabha result in Faizabad shows that the promise of the Hindu Right’s civilisational project is wearing thin, even among Hindus who previously supported the BJP. | Photo Credit: PTI

In the chapter on the Bhopal gas tragedy, you write: “In India these days, 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.” Forty years on, do you think India is yet to learn any lessons from the disaster?

No, India hasn’t learned any lessons from the disaster. This is due to the nature of the Indian elite and their colonised mentality, which fetishises a certain kind of Western science, progress, and capitalism. Construction is big money everywhere, making it hard to challenge such projects or the extraction of fossil fuels. India as a nation struggles with the past and memory, as seen with the Partition and Bhopal. Unlike Chernobyl or Fukushima, Bhopal affected poor, brown people, though Western capitalism was culpable through Union Carbide. The Indian elites are complicit as a comparator class.

India remains enthralled by this model of capitalist development, as seen with the Narmada dams. Despite protests and prescient writings by activists like Arundhati Roy, the damage persists with little benefit for farmers. There’s also pressure from entities like the World Bank or IMF to push through huge projects, as the Western powers are caught up in a certain idea of development. Even with climate collapse becoming evident, it’s hard to change this approach due to the profit and power it generates.

You document the change in India’s approach to Burmese dissidents from the late 1980s to the 2000s in the chapter “Nowhere Land”. Do you attribute that change to India lacking a refugee policy or not being a signatory to the global Refugee Convention (1951) or Protocol (1967)? Or is it a logical end to the neoliberal turn that India underwent in the corresponding period?

I don’t think it’s about not being a signatory. Some countries harbouring the largest refugee populations, like Egypt, aren’t signatories either. Western countries, despite being signatories, often let in very few refugees or undocumented people. I believe it’s more about India’s embrace of neoliberalism and its aspiration to be a big power, focussing on realpolitik rather than ideals or ethics. This shift represents a departure from the initial post-colonial solidarity, which supported democracy in Burma, anti-apartheid in South Africa, and the Palestinian cause. Realpolitik means aligning with whatever suits immediate strategic and fossil fuel extraction interests, behaving more like Western powers. This explains the dramatic shift in India’s approach towards Burmese refugees and pro-democracy activists.

In the chapter about Assam’s CAA-NRC exercise (“Manufacturing Foreigners”), you write about how one individual, whom you describe as “perhaps Assam’s best-known progressive intellectual”, saw the NRC (National Register of Citizens) completed in August 2019 as the best solution to an inherently complex situation and necessary for “any hope of reconciliation”. He also felt that people designated as “foreigners” should be allowed to go about daily life until they were resettled but they shouldn’t be allowed to vote. What did you make of these “humane” alternatives/solutions?

These ideas are actually very inhumane. It’s sad that Assamese nationalism has allowed itself to be hijacked into the project of Hindu nationalism. While I understand the fears about demographic changes, many of the Bengali Muslims being targeted are not recent refugees but have been there since the 19th century.

It’s fascinating that this “progressive” intellectual’s views align closely with those of an RSS man I interviewed in Ayodhya, who expressed similar ideas about Muslims in India. Both suggest that certain groups can stay and work but shouldn’t have voting rights. This similarity, despite their opposing political stances, illustrates the relationship between the NRC and CAA. It’s tragic to see such convergence of thought.

Regarding the Ayodhya temple, you write that the Ram temple “is 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”. But we saw what happened in the 2024 Lok Sabha election when the BJP lost the Faizabad seat by over 50,000 votes. How do you interpret that verdict and what does it mean for the Hindu Right’s so-called civilisational project?

I think it’s a wonderful result to be celebrated. It shows that the promise of that civilisational project is wearing thin, even among Hindus who previously supported the BJP. As my Ayodhya piece makes clear, beneath the shine of the temple and new infrastructure, there’s deep poverty, inequality, and suffering.

The Faizabad result suggests that reality is beginning to outstrip the fantastic past and future the Hindu Right has been projecting. It’s a moment that must be seized upon by progressive democratic forces. We need a vision of the past that’s complex and equitable, not a fantasy of endless harmony, and a vision for a more just future.

Siddhartha Deb’s Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India (published by Context, an imprint of Westland Books) is a collection of his journalism and essays over the past one and a half decades. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

In the chapter “Impossible Machines”, you write that India’s success has been “built on effectively mimicking Western business practices and technological advances rather than by coming up with anything original of its own”. What is the reason behind the inability of Indians to innovate or create something groundbreaking from scratch?

We don’t value creativity or what Tagore called “the quality of play”. The middle class, in particular, is very attached to a certain kind of bourgeois safety. We force everyone into the same box—engineering, medicine, or civil services—whether they want it or not. This stifles creativity and innovation. As a fiction writer, I feel this strongly. We don’t value imagination, which plays a big role in scientific and technological innovation. Our education system focusses on rote memorisation over hands-on experience. There’s also a casteist element in this resistance to creativity: we don’t value weavers, cobblers, or cooks unless they become celebrities.

It’s ironic because we have great traditions of textiles, architecture, and cuisine. We’re creative people, but we don’t value creativity at the state or societal level. Instead, we’ve become amazing consumers, flocking to shopping malls, because possession is easier than creation. This is why we haven’t produced groundbreaking innovations, not even a great smartphone. Even China does better than us in this regard, which is fascinating.

To paraphrase your words from “Killing Gauri Lankesh”, you write that the enemy seems to be information itself, along with transparency and critical thinking. Given the falling value of journalism and corporate pressures prevailing over public interest, what’s the future of Indian news media?

The mainstream media in India has largely collapsed, becoming a propaganda wing of the government. This is a stark contrast to when I began in 1994, when journalists were courageous and challenged the government. However, some alternative media platforms like The Caravan, The Wire, and Scroll are doing good work. Journalism is in crisis globally, which means democracy is in crisis. The conjunction of fascism and corporate interests in India has compromised journalistic standards. However, there’s hope in younger, diverse journalists using social media as a platform. I’m not entirely pessimistic, but I think Indian democracy might need to change before journalism does.

In the chapters on the Bhima Koregaon case and Arundhati Roy, we see an authoritarian India using draconian laws against ideological opponents. Is pushback possible against a legal system where the process becomes the punishment?

We must push back, otherwise we’ll live in a police state. This authoritarian approach has expanded from areas like Kashmir to urban centres. Fascism constantly needs new enemies, and it won’t stop with current targets. The courts are notoriously colonial, casteist, and easily co-opted by the government. We see this in the persecution of the Bhima Koregaon-16 and in anti-labour rulings. Despite the compromised system, we have no choice but to fight back.

The pieces in Twilight Prisoners present a grim portrait of India’s democratic backsliding. For those who believe in the constitutional “idea of India”, what’s the way forward?

I’d separate the idea of India from the Constitution slightly. The Constitution is largely progressive, which is why the Hindu Right wants to change it. I’m not a nationalist; my attachment to the subcontinent doesn’t end at India’s borders. I hesitate to prescribe a way forward, as I believe we need to figure it out together. The bottom line is respecting, loving, and embracing difference and diversity. This can start with gender, religion, or caste. We need to understand and appreciate our differences. There’s a kind of churning happening beneath the elite layers of society, and I think that’s the way forward—to truly appreciate and embrace difference.