Westland Books and Context announces the launch of True Story Awardee Rahul Bhatia’s debut non-fiction The Identity Project- The Unmaking of a Democracy

Westland Books today announced the release of Rahul Bhatia’s non-fiction debut, The Identity Project:The Unmaking of a Democracy. The book has been internationally released as The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy in the UK and will be released in the US in the coming months.

Garnering brilliant reviews in the UK, The Identity Project investigates how nationalist ideas of identity have driven civic unrest and shaped India’s politics for over a hundred years. Bhatia’s work of narrative nonfiction and historic recreation, seven years in the making, explores how insecurities over religion and resources shaped identity politics over time and culminated in the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019. Critically, this book of reportage uncovers new ground to reveal how the Aadhaar project is an offshoot of right-wing identitarian politics. A book that weaves the past and present to show how the past is present in our daily lives, and in our notions of justice, history, and law, The Identity Project has been described as a “tour de force” and “the most important book on India for many years.” The book is an exploration of modern India, and a record of tumultuous times, for it gives voice to hundreds of witnesses and takes readers deep into history through police and intelligence reports during partition, through government cables, private correspondence, diary entries, and oral transcripts, and an astonishing array of sources over four continents.

Both Arundhati Roy and James Crabtree have praised the book as “meticulously researched” and “the most important book on India in many years”, while Samanth Subramanian has heralded it as “one of the defining books of the Modi era.”

Speaking on the launch of his first book, author and journalist Rahul Bhatia said, “Westland’s track record of publishing high quality nonfiction is unsurpassed, and its editors are among the best. For that reason, while writing The New India, a book of narrative reportage that combines history, investigation, and memoir to tell a story about modern India, I hoped that it would find a home in Westland, among other books and writers I admire. I’m delighted that it has.”

Karthika VK, Publisher of Westland Books said, “We are delighted to publish the book in Context and bring it to readers at this critical juncture in India’s political life.”

The Identity Project:The Unmaking of a Democracy is now available at bookstores and online.

About the Book

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ON INDIA FOR MANY YEARS.’ – JAMES CRABTREE

An investigation into the devastating Delhi riots of 2020 and the stories of betrayal and abandonment in their aftermath leads Rahul Bhatia to probe the history and spread of Hindu nationalism, to understand ‘where the poison comes from’, in the words of a survivor. From the emergence of Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj in the 1800s to the early twentieth century, when the first advocates of Hindu nationalism drew lessons from European strongmen, Bhatia traces the evolution of a fundamentalist ideology that silently took root and shaped India itself. His investigation throws startling new light on this movement’s use of misinformation and religious targeting for political ends, and how its extreme ideas sparked the creation of the world’s largest biometric identification project. Today, this citizen database has not only dealt a blow to citizens’ privacy, but also, in combination with the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, threatens to relegate vast numbers of Muslims and other minorities to an inferior class of citizenship.

As a result, a sacred compact between citizens and the state lies broken: electorates in democracies used to choose their government, but in India, the government is attempting to choose its electorate.

Based on seven years of research and on-the-ground reporting, The Identity Project builds— authoritatively, vividly, indelibly—to become the story of modern India. Using hundreds of interviews, letters, diary entries, Partition-era police reports, and an astonishing range of sources, Bhatia shows how history plays a recurring role in the present: in politics, in the choices citizens make, in notions of justice and corruption.

 A monumental work of narrative reportage that illuminates the ways in which an entire country is being remade, along with the minds of its citizens, this book will compel readers to ask what they truly understand about their neighbours and themselves.

About the Author

Rahul Bhatia is an award-winning writer and journalist based in Mumbai. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Guardian Long Reads, and other publications. He won the True Story Award in 2024 and was a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow in 2022-23. His profile and cultural features for the Caravan magazine have been anthologised, and his work on the Reuters global investigations team focused on religion, business, and technology. He mentors writers and journalists as part of the ‘South Asia Speaks’ collective, and was a co-founder of the Peepli Project, a journalism non-profit. A former advertising art director, Rahul Bhatia graduated in communication design from Pratt Institute, New York.

 Endorsements

 “This meticulously researched book is an unusual account of the dismantling of democracy in the world’s most populous country. It is a portrait of how medieval religious sectarianism, modern majoritarianism, deepening poverty, all lashed together by the world’s most ambitious data gathering project is driving India towards an alarming, unique model of authoritarianism. A serious subject, seriously addressed.”

∼Arundhati Roy

 “An important, timely and powerful account of India now. Rahul Bhatia’s book is both rigorously reported and very readable. Highly recommended.”

∼Jason Burke

 “[The Identity Project) is a tour de force, and it will be one of the defining books of the Modi era. Rahul Bhatia’s astonishingly granular and deeply empathetic reporting reveals an India well on its way to being an authoritarian dystopia.”

∼Samanth Subramaian