Although Nehru and Gandhi are absolved, from the 1960s the party became ‘a sump for Nehru’s parasitical progeny to luxuriate in’.

Instead, Komireddi-a freelance journalist from Hyderabad, now based in the West-offers three reasons for his rise.įirst, Malevolent Republic points to decades of Congress Party failings-above all, the corruption, nepotism, authoritarianism and greed of its ruling family. How should we account for the Modi phenomenon? The starting point of Kapil Komireddi’s Malevolent Republic is that Modi should not be seen as an aberration: that would be ‘a self-comforting lie’. At the same time, Modi’s record towards his country’s minorities-imposing martial law on Kashmir, excluding Muslims from the 2019 Citizenship (Amendment) Act, quietly tolerating an epidemic of lynchings, burnings and beatings of Muslims and Dalits-has been qualitatively more brutal than that of Bolsonaro or Trump. The 2019 elections gave him a second term with a commanding majority of Lok Sabha seats. His approval rating was over 80 per cent at the height of the pandemic in April and May this year, with Johnson, Trudeau and López Obrador in the low 60s, while Trump, Macron and Abe all failed to reach 50 per cent. If the opinion polls are right, India’s Narendra Modi is currently the world’s most popular leader.

Malevolent Republic by K.S. Komireddi