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Awakening Bharat Mata | A book that sheds light on the rise of the Right https://www.financialexpress.com/life/lifestyle-awakening-bharat-mata-a-book-that-sheds-light-on-the-rise-of-the-right-1643288/ Rishi Raj July 14, 2019  Post-partition, the Congress remained the only dominant political force and in power for long years, while parties espousing only the Hindu cause were confined to the fringes.
 in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, The Left can no longer be said to be progressive, considering that it advocates status quo on labour issues and opposes reforms which promise jobs to a larger workforce compared to the entrenched labour unions whose interest Left parties espouse. Similarly, to call the Right as conservatives entrenched in tradition and customs doesn’t quite gel with the history of social reforms in Hindu society brought about by the likes of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar or Swami Vivekanand....

Post-partition, the Congress remained the only dominant political force and in power for long years, while parties espousing only the Hindu cause were confined to the fringes. This was largely due to the presence of Hindu leaders and Hindu thought within the Congress. All this was, however, slowly lost as the Congress increasingly started relying on Muslim, as well as Dalit votes, and abandoned the larger Hindu causes. As it vacated this space, gradually the influence of BJP and RSS grew, and the Shah Bano case and Ram Janmabhoomi issue accelerated it 

since the rise of the Left academia on the campus, under the tutelage of Indira Gandhi,... In the early Seventies, Nurul Hasan concentrated on packing all institutions related to social sciences with people of Leftist hue. While political power changed hands after Indira, no party, not even the BJP under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tinkered with the status quo on the academic front.   Right wing historians RC Majumdar and Jadunath Sarkar, noted journalist Girilal Jain, Right wing scholar Sita Ram Goel, conservative writer Nirad C Chaudhuri and social and economic activist S Gurumurthi were sidelined..

Narendra Modi’s Populist Facade Is Cracking 

India is now a testing ground for whether demagoguery or deteriorating living conditions exert a greater sway on voters.
By Robert F. Worth

Narendra Modi’s Populist Facade Is Cracking https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/modi-nationalism-demagoguery-limitations/681094/ Robert F. Worth India is now a testing ground for whether demagoguery or deteriorating living conditions exert a greater sway on voters.  India’s growth has been heavily weighted toward the wealthy, who have become exponentially richer on Modi’s watch. Those who have benefited most are a small cadre of billionaire friends to whom Modi has granted special access for years. That practice was cast in a new light in November, when American prosecutors indicted the industrialist Gautam Adani—India’s second-richest man and a close Modi ally—for his role in a multibillion-dollar bribery-and-fraud scheme. (His company has denied the charges, calling them baseless.) The accusation revived fears about opacity and cronyism—the specter of “India Inc.”—that Modi had promised to address a decade ago.

At the same time, eight in 10 Indians live in poverty. Extraordinary numbers are out of work; one estimate puts unemployment among those ages 15 to 24 at more than 45 percent (though other estimates run lower). Instead of moving from farms to seek employment in cities, as people in other developing countries have done, many Indians—unable to find factory or service jobs—are making the trek in reverse, even as farm income stagnates and drought turns fields into deserts. .. What, in the long run, exerts greater sway on the electorate—the lure of demagoguery, or the reality of deteriorating living conditions?