To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism
With a unique narrative combining moving life stories and scholarly insight, a journalist and a political theorist have teamed up to offer a radical re-appraisal of Indian politics and society. They discuss India’s passage to despotism not just in terms of shrinking civil rights and captured and broken governing institutions, but also from the perspective of welfare provisions and economic and social well-being.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane reject the belief that India was once a beacon of democracy but is now being ruined by the destructive forces of Modi’s populism. Their book details the much deeper historical roots of the social and political dysfunctions that have now reduced India to a phantom democracy.
DEBASISH ROY CHOWDHURY
Debasish Roy Chowdhury has written extensively on Indian politics, society, and geopolitics. A journalist based in Hong Kong, he has lived and worked in Calcutta, Sao Paulo, Hua Hin, Bangkok, and Beijing. He is a Jefferson Fellow and a recipient of multiple media awards, including the Human Rights Press Award and the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award
JOHN KEANE
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and the WZB (Berlin). He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy, and is the author of a number of distinguished books including The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2009), When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017) and The New Despotism (Harvard University Press, 2020). He was nominated for the 2021 Balzan Prize and the Holberg Prize for outstanding global contributions to the human sciences.
