Technology and Democracy in the New India

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In July 2023, the editors of the Journal of Democracy posted an essay under the question, “Is India Still a Democracy?” Considering the country’s precarious politics, they wrote, “At a time when the world’s autocrats are increasingly assertive, and the world’s democrats increasingly diffident and inward looking, the cause of democracy can ill afford a loss of India’s magnitude.”

Today’s guest is Rahul Bhatia, the author of a book that is part journalistic account, part history, and part memoir, that tries to get at the root causes of the country’s situation. It’s titled The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy.

Reviewing the book in The Guardian, Salil Tripathi writes that “Bhatia’s remarkable book is an absorbing account of India’s transformation from the world’s largest democracy to something more like the world’s most populous country that regularly holds elections.”

Bhatia considers the role of technology, including taking a close look at Aadhaar—India’s national biometric identification program, in order to consider the role it plays in the modern state and what the motivations behind it reveal.

The New York Times called The New India one of the ‘100 Notable Books of 2024, NPR selected it as one of the best books of the year, and it was named best non-fiction book of the year by the Kerala Literature Festival, which is Asia's largest literary festival.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Rahul, before we jump into the book, can you tell us a little bit about your career, how you got to this point before the book?

Rahul Bhatia:

Before the book, I was an art director for a long time in advertising and wanted to do something meaningful with my life, so I became a reporter. I started writing, I always loved writing, and after doing the rounds of a few agencies and newspapers for a little while, I ended up at long form magazines in India. From there on, I joined Reuters, I became an investigative journalist, and that stint at Reuters I think helped me decide that what I really wanted to do was write a book and all of this took place over two decades.

Justin Hendrix:

And that book has come along in the form of The New India, citizenship, conflict and identity, a big tome, but it's not just a kind of book about politics and history. There's also a narrative here. You take us through your own travels in the country, you introduce us to a variety of characters. When did this book come into your mind, the way that it would be structured, how it would blend both ideas and narrative? When did the idea for it essentially take shape for you?

Rahul Bhatia:

I remember it was the middle of 2016. That's significant for me because in the middle of 2014, we had the election of Narendra Modi, he became prime minister. Shortly after that, we felt that India was starting to change. When I say we, other reporters, myself, it was things that we were seeing on the ground. We were seeing people commit horrible crimes and get away with the implicit backing of the government, essentially. And it got gruesome. It was against people of a certain religion, which is Muslims in this case. And at the same time, we saw, at least I noticed that there was this big tussle about a biometric identification project going on in the courts. And I didn't quite understand it, but in conversations with people who knew more, legal scholars, people who studied the constitution, I kept hearing this one thing over and over again, which was that this identification system was significant and it could have a significant effect on India's democracy. I did not understand why.

I started thinking about the book when I realized the limitations of reportage for a new service or a media outlet. There are advantages that you have, but there are also significant disadvantages, which is that there's this feeling of constantly chasing history of what has already happened, and you are really unable to describe and show the context in which certain events happen. To do that, you need to slow down. To do that, you need to really explore these subjects in great detail and that requires time of the kind that news organizations consider a luxury. And so, it became clear to me this dissatisfaction. I wanted to describe what was going on in the courts and I knew in some way that it was connected to these larger events filled with violence all around me, and I wanted to write about it all, but I couldn't do it for a news organization. So I took the decision to leave work in January 2018 and got started on the book.

Justin Hendrix:

You variously refer to this book as investigative memoir, a reported elegy, a Tale of the roots of Hindutva and the hateful ideology that has emerged there. How would you characterize India's position at the moment? We've had, I suppose, since your book was finished and another election result, things have changed.

Rahul Bhatia:

I think we are further along that path to control. I think you certainly see a lot more disenfranchised people. In fact, just now just before these major state elections, there's an exercise in what people claim is a mass disenfranchisement where you have people who've got to go up and prove their own identity. And it turns out what it appears to be is that Muslims and other minorities are being left out in disproportionate numbers. And so, you see this kind of thing happening. You have certain states that now have new rules about criticism, essentially making it illegal in some ways. And so, you see, what you're seeing is this comfort within exercise of power, of extreme power, which really leaves people with fewer options and the reduced ability to voice their discontent. So I think that's where we are right now. Where do we go from here? I'm always optimistic, but to be honest, I don't know.

Justin Hendrix:

There's a character that appears throughout this book. You call him the protagonist at one point, this character Nisar. Tell us about Nisar and why you chose this individual to follow throughout the book.

Rahul Bhatia:

To tell you a little about Nisar, I've got to go back a bit. Now, in December 2019, India passed this legislation which would allow people of certain religions from its neighboring countries in South Asia, they could become citizens. They were essentially, it was like a refugee legislation and people could come on over and everybody could, except for Muslims, they weren't allowed. And so, what people thought over here was that this legislation was in fact just half the story. The other half of it was something called the NRC, which is the National Register of Citizens, and that was like this giant database in which all of India's citizens would be put in. Now, to get into the NRC, you had to show your papers, pretty much like what I described about the state elections. And who's looking at these papers? Bureaucrats with their biases and their religious biases and social biases and caste biases.

And so, what happens is there's a certain level of scrutiny, therefore say for example Muslims, if you have a bias against Muslims. There's a certain level of scrutiny when it comes to, and rather an intensified level of scrutiny when it comes to Muslims or to Dalits or to anybody you really don't like. You may decide to look at their identification and say, "Your name is Muhammad with an A on these documents that you've given me. However, the Muhammad that we have in our registry has an E, and so therefore you are a doubtful citizen."

Now, if you consider these two things, people from our neighboring countries would be granted citizenship if they applied for it. And over here, you have this legislation that essentially exists to disenfranchise people. When you put the two together, any Hindus who were disenfranchised could then apply under this refugee law to be considered Indians once more, only Muslims could not. It was a discriminatory law.

What happened then was students took to the streets in protest. Their mothers, their grandmothers, their grandfathers, you saw entire neighborhoods in Delhi, in Bombay, in Bangalore, and other places just come out and say this was absolutely wrong. And this was people across the spectrum but primarily Muslim. As it ticked over into February, there was pushback from the government and its arms and legislators and this rhetoric got more and more heated. They were turning up the temperature. They were telling people, "Listen, you need to get off the streets. This is becoming an inconvenience and you are hooligans."

And you know the language. You've seen it in protests everywhere, rather with counter protesters everywhere. And at a certain point, it all tipped over into violence in Delhi and it was intense violence. It was violence of the kind that I think we'd not seen for about almost, I would say, 36 years. We last saw the 1984 riots, which were huge. And then, what happened in February 2020, when armed mobs went across Northeast Delhi just attacking Muslims wherever they were found. And one of these Muslims happened to be a guy named Nisar Ahmed who I was introduced to the following year. I was at a hospital talking to a doctor about his experiences with the horrific injuries that he had seen. He's a Muslim doctor and he had set up this Muslim hospital in a neighborhood primarily for Muslims. And I had seen some truly horrific pictures from there.

So I was sitting there with him and saying, "What happened? Tell me more, tell me more." And he says, "Listen, there's this guy, I'm going to introduce you to him." So he calls up this guy Nisar Ahmed, who walks in and proceeds to tell me about how he had been in this neighborhood for 20 years or so, and he had seen many of these children around him, Hindus grow up from the time they were little kids. And he knew their parents, they ate together. And then, something happened in February 2020 when these very kids turned up at his door and came for him and his family. And he escaped, I think, by the skin of his teeth.

After that, I was intrigued by what he would do. The reason he became significant for me was he was one of those people that you find on occasion in India where there's a lot of compliance. He stood out for being rebellious in this way that I thought it sometimes was admirable and sometimes really unwise. He decided to take the matter to court and pursue it, and meanwhile he was getting threatening calls. People were going to his sister's house and asking his sister to call him up from there. So you saw this little pressure campaign. People were calling him up and saying, "Why don't you recant and we'll give you a ton of money."

And he's a poor guy with his own little business. All his assets were either burnt down or stolen. So he literally had nothing, and I found him really just poignant, his story, I found really poignant because of all the people I had met until then, I had not heard of anybody or not heard anybody talk about the constitution with such reverence. And I thought at some level, society had disappointed him so much that all he was really left with was this faith in this document that it would lend them certain protections which the police weren't. The court seemed to be taking their own time, and all around them was this atmosphere of hostility.

And I felt I have to write about this guy because there is a story about India that can be told through his experiences, and I hung around with him for 18 months and we still talk. We in fact just spoke yesterday about his political career. He took me on this journey through the justice system. I think just following him around, it was incredible. I don't think I would've seen the way the justice system works if it wasn't for him and the details I knew about his life.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you about another character that appears multiple times in the book. Of course there's the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, but Nandan Nilekani. We've talked about this figure on this podcast in the past. We've talked about Aadhaar and universal ID and some of the various other machinations of the technological apparatus of the Indian government. But how would you describe Nilekani's role in your narrative and in India's narrative?

Rahul Bhatia:

I think Nilekani is one of India's business success stories. He was part of a group of people who started this company called Infosys, which your listeners are familiar with, one of the world's largest outsourcing firms and as much else now. And he was also seen as this man who was really behind a lot of the generation of a lot of wealth, especially when the company he co-founded went public. Instant millionaires were created. What followed him was this reputation for competence, for being completely honest and uncorrupt in a certain way because the assumption was here's a man who's made lots of money, he doesn't need any more money, and so he should be tasked with this responsibility for all kinds of responsibilities in the public interest. He is thinking of India and Indians.

He wrote a few books, a couple of books, if I remember correctly. One of them was about imagining India, like what kind of country could India be? And he was saying all the right things that India needed to offer its youth employment, serious good employment. And he seemed to be one of those technocrats that comes along maybe once every generation, who you think, here's a person who's going to take us forward for the next 20 years.

Justin Hendrix:

At one point in the book, you do talk about him in those terms, in the lineage of other technological figures involved in India's space age or other aspects of it. Almost seems like his face goes next to those great figures.

Rahul Bhatia:

The perception of him. And I think for me, I'm always wary of these, how would you say, these depictions of anyone really, especially people who have an enormous amount of power and wealth. When I hear their stories, especially when it comes to a fawning press, the question I always have is, what are you hiding or what do I not know about this person? And so, I tried to find out more about him. And I think as I wrote his story and I discovered more about him, I started thinking of two things. One is in India especially, and I think overall, it's become more and more clear that you really need to scrutinize, you need to subject people with the means and the power to essentially create a new kind of country or who caused these seismic shifts in society. You need to be able to scrutinize them and you should be scrutinizing them a lot more.

This unfortunately did not happen in India. Because he was seen as a technocrat, because he was seen as a person with India's best wishes at heart, I think at some level people switched off their brains and they said, "Here's a person who is going to do right by me and he's going to create this identification system and this identification system is going to be great." And he was very good with a few things. One of them was he had what one of his people told me was a simple message and a large number. I found that really compelling. And wherever I looked now, whenever I look at people who talk about these big ideas that automatically make me go, "It's inevitably a simple message and a large number." They'll come to you armed with numbers that show you savings, how much your country will save.

For example, it'll save you like $3 trillion. It'll reduce the government debt, and all it takes is this one little department. We had something like that in India 15 years ago. It was called Aadhaar. And what it was supposed to do, what he said it would do was essentially reduce wastage when it came to the delivery of benefits and other welfare. Meanwhile, people were like, "Hang on a second. That's not the big issue over here. The big issue when it comes to welfare is actually somewhere else. It's cheating." It's what happens at the last mile. It's in 1,000 other places. But this particular thing about making sure that this money or this amount of food goes to the right person, it's not the way you say it. And then, of course, there was also the fact that this problem may have been, or rather the amounts that you could save may have been slightly overstated.

We still don't know where these numbers, I think it was $50 billion if I remember correctly, where that number actually came from. I might be off by a few billion here and there, but it was a very large number. And when I spoke to economists, they had no idea where the number came from. So as I was looking at Nilekani, I was looking at a guy who had obviously made a lot of money, who people entrusted to do the right thing. And then, as I was talking to his people and people who had encountered him and met him in meetings and had debates with him privately, a very different picture started to emerge. I started to see a person who I think did not think this through. He didn't think through the fact that you can create a really powerful identification system with one purpose in mind and really not think of the other users of the system and not even acknowledge the fact that it can be misused and in a meaningful way.

I don't mean paying lip service to it, which I think he did. He said at one point, if I remember correctly, somebody shared recordings with me of a conversation and he said something like, "Yeah, it can be misused, but there will be a law for that." And as I heard it, I thought, that sounds really callous. I've thought about what he might have done instead of taking the approach that he did. I've drawn a blank, I don't know, but I do think that stopping, slowing down, and taking on the opinions and the learnings of people who've studied what happens when large identification systems are made in history in the past, I think if you had slowed down, you might have had a very different kind of system.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to come back to some of those ideas in just a second, but I want to ask you in particular, there are so many anecdotes, so many vivid experiences in this book I feel like was in some of these places with you. Just to bring up one example of some of the phenomena you've just talked about, you go to Jharkhand, am I saying that correctly, to Jharkhand?

Rahul Bhatia:

That's right.

Justin Hendrix:

You talk about the story of Premani Kunwar who passed away in 2017. Can you tell us her story and how it illustrates some of the things you're talking about?

Rahul Bhatia:

Premani Kunwar died of hunger when the system created to make welfare delivery more efficient stopped working for her. That was it. That's what I knew before I went to Jharkhand and I met her son who I think was 10 or 11 years old at that time, and he was sitting by himself in a hut in rural Jharkhand. Now, if you go to Jharkhand, one of the first things that hits you is that, my God, this is a poor place. When you go to rural Jharkhand, that is where people truly have nothing. I mean, nothing.

And so, I walk into this boy's house. His mother has died just two months before, and there's nothing. Somebody has given him a gift of cut, rather chopped firewood for to burn his mother's body for the cremation essentially. Somebody has given him a government, I think a minister or somebody has given him a blanket as compensation for his mother dying.

What happened was money that was showing up in her account every month that she was entitled to because she was below the poverty line, a digital infrastructure was put in place, and because of the engineering choices made somewhere by someone. We still don't know whom. Her money was diverted to a different account. And this is a woman who I think didn't know how to write her own name. She showed up at her bank branch, local bank branch, a really small place, and she said, "Where's my money?" And the man said, the manager over there said, "It hasn't turned up."

What happened was for a few months, she didn't get her money, so she couldn't buy anything. At the same time, the system of welfare delivery, physical welfare delivery where food was given to her, that stopped working for a couple of months for her. And so, she didn't have anything to eat. She borrowed a bowl of rice from her neighbors, and shortly after, I think it just wasn't enough. She just grew weaker and weaker and she died.

Now, here's what happened after she died. After she died, an autopsy was done very quickly, like within a day or two of reporters finding out that there had been a starvation death because of Aadhaar not working, because of the welfare system not working, and they found a certain amount of viscera in her stomach and they said, "Oh, it couldn't have been hunger because there was this tiny thing in her stomach, and that's what happened. She died."

Meanwhile, across Jharkhand, people were protesting direct benefit transfers. They said, "We didn't sign up for it." And this was when, in my interviews with people, they told me that when money doesn't come in, when their rations don't come in because of this electronic net that's been created, they really don't know who to complain to because they would go to their own representatives and the representatives would say, "I don't know how the system works. Why don't you reach out to somebody in Delhi?"

People were not getting money. They were standing in line at banks giving up a day's work, and this is a really poor place. And so, every little bit that you earn matters. And so, if you don't go to work for one day, you're literally giving up 100 rupees, which is at this point about $1.20 a day. That's the kind of poverty we're talking about, and those are the kind of people who are really affected by the system in Jharkhand. And it still goes on. It's still happening.

Justin Hendrix:

You talk a lot about civil society experts, various characters appear including Apar Gupta who's been a friend to Tech Policy Press in the past and who I've had the pleasure of meeting on more than one occasion elsewhere in the world. You talk about the fascination among many critics of Aadhaar with a book, and that book is of course the title of it, IBM and the Holocaust. Can you talk about what are the concerns? Why is that book resonating so much with activists in India at the moment?

Rahul Bhatia:

Yeah, I think this one's really easy because I think when the BJP came to power, there was a certain sense that, all right, the fascists are here. Are they the Nazis? Are they fascists? What are really? The sense was it was a bit of both. And so, what they were really looking at was this can happen here. You have an immensely powerful identification system. You have people who are by default violent and who will, without a moment's thought, trample over your rights. And so, when you put the two together, this could happen in India, you could have mass violence, you could have targeted killings, you could have people whose bank accounts could be shut down at a moment's notice just because they don't like the look of your face, all of those things. But as I worked on this and I unraveled these connections, I was quite excited because I could see that the identification system that people believe began with Nilekani actually predated him.

And it was connected in fact, to the Hindu right wing back in the year 2000 or 2001, when at least the person in charge of India's internal security, a man named LK Advani, an extremely powerful politician, told people that he needed it to identify infiltrators, and everybody took infiltrators to mean Muslims. So you can see why it resonated with them. Therefore, you were living through a period of extreme Hinduism, which is Hindutva, and you had a very powerful identification system come together at the same time. And what was on everybody's mind was how are they going to misuse this extremely powerful tool?

Justin Hendrix:

I have so many different types of questions that I want to ask you. One is about what to make of, but something that I feel like India deals with in a somewhat similar way that the US deals with it, although not quite as extremely, which is that so many of these ideas are so popular. And the common narrative as I understand in India is that the prime minister has been responsible for an extraordinary economic miracle and has really brought many people out of poverty. He's helped improve India's standing in the world, has secured its position in the geopolitical stage.

I feel like in the US, I slightly sometimes struggle with this as well. Donald Trump was democratically elected, but yet again this time by a solid margin. Maybe not a large margin and not something nearly as extreme perhaps as Prime Minister Modi, but to some extent it's a similar choice. Economic success, that's what we want and we're willing to buy the hateful arguments along the way. I don't know, how do you square those things or think about them? I'm not even sure I've asked you a question, but how do you think about those things?

Rahul Bhatia:

There is a question implicit in all of this. I think it's this, and I've really thought about this so much. I even speak to people about this in the book, and again, it connects to Aadhaar in a certain way, why Aadhaar was actually allowed to happen. And I don't mean allowed in the sense that the government allowed it to happen, but why people allowed it to happen and why they didn't protest it. I think it really depends on what your priorities are as a population. I think in India, you always lived with a certain amount of corruption. You know it. You've got to go to a government office for something, you have to pay money. You get caught at the traffic signal by a cop who's hiding behind some bushes somewhere, you've got to pay him 200 bucks and he will scold you and say, "Please don't do that again," but he's hoping you do it again and such things.

So when you encounter government, it tends to be two ways. One is you are automatically breaking laws, and two, there is always a way out through unofficial means, and those unofficial means are corrupt, and most people don't see themselves as part of that system. They see corruption as aside from them, it's something else and it's the larger country, and I want this to be an honest nation. So you saw a lot of that happen. That conversation was bubbling up slowly.

But then, around 2010 to 2013, you had a burst of stories in the Indian media about spectacular scams, which you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars at a time. And each day, there was some new expose, some new scam run by the Congress government. And what this led to was really what they now call an anti-corruption movement. And this anti-corruption movement was really interesting because it brought together right-wing political parties and newspapers who were essentially playing off each other and really going hammer and tongs at the government.

And so, you had people saying, "Oh my God, we are corrupt and when the BJP comes to power, it'll mean the end of corruption across the board. Black money, that'll disappear." This corruption also played into the whole Nilekani, Aadhaar narrative. It was an integral part of that narrative. So people said, "There is corruption." Now, they're not willing to look at the sort of these systemic failures and these choices that make up this larger mosaic of corruption. They're looking at corruption as a thing that will disappear, systems will improve. One man will come in and take care of all of us. And so, you saw that one man who will save us narrative with Nilekani. You saw it with Modi.

And I think at some level what that allows people to do is really turn their minds off and not be engaged with the democratic process that has allowed them to come to this point. They leave it to this one person because the problems around them just seem so insurmountable. But what's clear from America with Donald Trump, with Narendra Modi, and I was just telling a friend the other day, I think to a certain extent with Zohran Mamdani is I feel like it's part of the same arc at some level, and the arc has less to do with them than it has to do with what people are looking for, which is really a certain end to the status quo. If it didn't happen through Modi and Trump and the current mayor of New York, can it happen with this fresh new contender? And I think that certainly joins the three of them, as does the fact that they're seen at a certain point as the fresh choice.

Modi certainly was the fresh choice. Trump certainly was the fresh choice for a lot of people. He'll say it like it is, and the same goes for sort of Zohran Mamdani, I think at least watching him from a distance. Certainly seems that people are looking for a better life. I've had a conversation with a lot of people about this. I think about hatred versus economic rejuvenation and all of that. I think when you talk to people hatred or bigotry, this exists at some level, but when you talk to them about money and what they'd rather see, I think the answer you always hear is, I think I'd like a little more money. And I think those twin messages came through with Modi, here it'll be a Hindu nation and you will make a ton of money. I think we've become a more Hindu nation, but I'm not sure if people have seen much more money.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you another question that occurs to me in the book and also listening to you talk today, which is I guess there's in some ways this fear of the combination of authoritarian governance with technology. On the one hand, you paint a picture of very much of the type of top-down concerns, the ability to control populations, maybe even excise populations, but there's also this picture of essentially a crummy infrastructure that is itself somehow authoritarian. You talk about the idea that technology replaced governance with absent customer service. So there's almost this crumminess to it alongside the threat of this death star capacity. So I don't know. I don't know quite how to fit those two things together in my head, but I thought I'd point it out to you as a little bit of a tension and see what you might say.

Rahul Bhatia:

Yeah, we really don't press people on the details, and I think we're seeing this with AI as well, a lot of the coverage of AI, the breathless coverage. It's that you have these visionaries come in and describe what this fantastic piece of software will do, and its world-changing abilities and how it'll put people out of jobs and all of that stuff. But how does it work? What does it do? When it's implemented on the ground, you've got OpenAI says it's got a hallucination rate of 15% or something like that, which is gigantic. Aadhaar has a failure rate of about, what was it, 2%, 10%, which is literally tens of millions of people, if not 100 million people.

So I think what is this sense of, oh trust us, technology will solve everything. Meanwhile, it's these engineers who are dealing with real life issues, with real infrastructure, making real engineering choices, and they're doing constant cost-benefit analyses, which you as a citizen are not aware of. You don't even know what they're thinking of. All you deal with is this giant infrastructure. You don't know how it's going to connect to your taxes, your tax returns, how it's going to connect to your bank account. There is these pipes, this plumbing.

And what I found is that in the case of Aadhaar, and I really wanted to bring it out in a lot of detail because I was feeling it all the time all around me. I think I write in the book that it was like this immense, invisible cosmic drape that just fell over the country all at once, and it connected everything, and you really had no choice. What I, as a citizen, as a resident of India was contending with, was not Aadhaar in that electronic sense, but I was dealing with the sharp end of bureaucracy, bureaucrats who were calling me up and saying, "Hey, if you don't give us your number, if you don't connect it, if you don't connect your Aadhaar number to your phone number, we will disconnect your phone service. If you don't connect it to your bank account, we will freeze your bank account. You won't be able to access your own money."

So I felt coercion, I felt force. And so, when it fails, when a system like that fails, you realize that really with the government buying into this thing and your technologists buying into this thing and your newspapers buying into this thing because of their relationships with, say, a Nilekani or the government, they're not being critical, they're not doing that job for you of examining how this thing works. You feel like you are in a universe of one. Your miseries are entirely your own. You don't realize that people actually share these miseries with you.

And so, I think that's the sense you have when I say that there's really no customer service, what I am describing is a sense of alienation and loneliness. And this is something that I never spoke to her, but I can guarantee you, Premani Kunwar who died of hunger, would have felt that. I felt it when I picked up the phone two, three times a day and was told, "You've got to do this or else." It's just different degrees and you really don't know who to talk to because everything seems really unreasonable and the world seems very unfair at that moment.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you about a little vignette in the book that I felt contained some wisdom, which was again, with Nisar, who is asking you at one point, "When will you finish this book, this analysis of India's democracy, et cetera." And he urges you, he seems to say, "Sure, great, keep working on the big book." But he has another suggestion for you, which is to write a children's book. He says it should teach them to love. I thought that was quite nice. On some level, I almost take that he's saying, we know the problem here and we need to work on a different future as opposed to understanding the past maybe, or maybe we need to do both. At least I felt that's what he was saying to you.

Rahul Bhatia:

So the thing with Nisar is he believes in communicating with everybody. He doesn't want anybody to miss out on seeing what this country is about. He wants them to see how deep the poison has seeped. He wants them to see people who are fighting the system. He wants people to really stand up and defend the constitution. He's told me this many times. He said, "If there were five more people like me in this country who could do this, imagine the change we could bring." I think there's something to be said about that. I love the guy. What he was saying to me was, take it to children. Give them an abridged version, let them read it, and let them decide for themselves if this is the kind of country they want.

Now, an interesting thing happened, the book's a big one. It's filled with tons of original reportage. I know this because I went out and did it while my kids were growing up, and they did not hear bedtime stories from me while I was doing this. After the book came out, I had a number of children come up to me at book readings and say they had read the book, not all children, but also I would say undergraduates, people who were 16 or 17 coming up to me and saying, "I did not know the story of Aadhaar. I did not know how it was connected to Hindu nationalism, essentially the roots of it."

And I thought that was really interesting. That told me that books like this and the ones written by reporter historians who are currently interrogating technology and India's history and right-wing thought in India, we could all do a better job of making our work more accessible to people. I think it really comes down to that because we are all living in a really information-poor environment as India's fact-checkers will tell you. They find themselves fighting this uphill battle against the mainstream papers, against the media that people consume, and there just aren't enough people doing it right now. Nisar had a point, and that's what we are doing. We're taking the book into different languages and putting it out there before people.

Justin Hendrix:

I'll ask you a last question. You talk in the book about the fact that it's becoming harder to do your work as a journalist talk of, of course, fear of reprisal of other journalists who have unfortunately encountered the blunt end of the state of self-censorship. And I wonder how you think of those phenomena right now. Is it getting better, getting worse, staying the same?

Rahul Bhatia:

I haven't been part of a news organization for a while now, but my sense of it is that it stayed the same at some level. I think the news ecosystem just shut down a while ago. You have websites, new websites that have been around for 10 years now that have really settled in and they're doing great work. And if I can name them The Wire, News Minute, Newslaundry, Scroll, they're all doing really good work. And these are the ones in English. There are several others that are doing stuff online, circumventing India's publication regulations. The newspapers have been a real disappointment. That has continued. If you were to only read India's newspapers, you would walk around in a state of confusion because the reality you read about is not the reality you're experiencing, and you wonder if you're just cribbing and if you're being ungrateful and ungracious for everything that's being done for you. So that's the kind of role that these newspapers have played over the last 10, 12 years now.

As far as journalists go, it's gotten a little harder because even some of the outlets that are independent and speak truth to power in a sense are going through a difficult time financially, and they don't pay freelancers. I know of one who I think had a bit of a nervous breakdown when they weren't paid for something they took six or seven months to do, a proper investigative report. I know another one who was told after he submitted the story and after it was published by a news magazine, he's got to find the funding from somewhere else after it was all done.

So these are the sorts of things that people are dealing with. Journalists are doing journalism in this country really at serious cost and serious personal expense and serious risk, and that infrastructure to take care of them has just grown weaker over a period of time. It's something that I've been talking to a lot of people about, a lot of journalists about, about how do you strengthen the system, how do you create this system that essentially makes journalism a viable option for people in the future. And you don't really have to rely on corporate funding, you don't have to rely on readers because subscribers and subscriptions go up and down, just taking the uncertainty out of the business as much as you can. And there are a few ideas floating around. Hopefully, you'll be able to build something for journalists in this country.

Justin Hendrix:

Rahul Bhatia, The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy, which is from PublicAffairs, an imprint out of New York. Rahul, thank you so much for speaking to me.

Rahul Bhatia:

Thank you so much.