I came of age in an India that was already traipsing through rapid social and institutional transformation. I was 19 when the Bharatiya Janata Party came into power for the second time with a sweeping majority in 2019. Shielded by my privilege, life continued albeit not without hiccups. I was 20, when the anti CAA protests gripped the country and I learnt to recognize Hum Dekhenge as a rallying cry. I was 21, when North East Delhi was gripped with a communal riot; students at my alma mater gathered in droves to organize and send relief materials to ease out the pain of those injured. My political consciousness moved and shifted as I studied and witnessed the politics of my country. Friends, family, family friends were suddenly awakened from a political stupor(or so I had thought for a long time). Drawing room discussions quickly devolved into shouting matches and accusatory fingers pointed towards complacent people for their inability to witness the current regime as anything but revolutionary. I was 22, when I first tweeted something about the regime and instead of measured consideration received a barrage of hate in my dms and replies. I was 23 when my well meaning Professor indicated that my application for a scholarship to study the current regime might not receive due consideration because of its political nature. 

As I flipped through The Identity Project on the Shatabdi, I found a carefully researched project of memory making. Rahul Bhatia works through stories of several people who were on the ground during pivotal moments of violence and resistance that have managed to pierce the regime in the last couple of years. Coupled that with his own personal history and a condensed history of hindu fundamentalism in India and South Asia at large, Bhatia roots the current moment in not just institutional excesses but also in the larger culture of violence and impunity that seems to have grounded itself so deeply and viscerally in the country. 

In an approach that borders on reporting and oral history, his interlocutors open up about their struggles of living in a changing landscape. One of the stories he covers(rather briefly) is of J– a queer muslim man living in Delhi. He had had to remove the nameplate of his and his partner from the apartment they shared  in order to protect himself from violence. J, he says, grew up on a coffee plantation in Mangalore but went to a private elite school on a scholarship. There, surrounded by mostly brahmins he saw himself as an outsider– othered and picked out in ways that were culturally ingrained. He at some point adopted an alternate hindu name in order to protect himself, but also to open up newer avenues– opportunities he otherwise would have been unable to access because of his name and identity. J’s story is particularly powerful. He notes that this kind of hate and otherness was not brewed overnight. A large part of the liberal narrative against the politics of hate is that India has been that– India was largely peaceful, but it is the ‘blank’(input colonialism, current regime, political leaders) that advocate and push for communal politics because it is beneficial to them. But J highlights how structural inequalities are built into the way in which identity is understood and perceived. It may have become more politically salient than before, but communal violence is not an aberration in history– it is an outcome of a theatrical, violent form of politics that is not new to India. J lives in the fear of being found out, worried that the state's surveillance and attitudes will make him the next victim. 

Bhatia also works closely with those that witnessed and were present during the 2020 North East Delhi riots. He finds himself following Nisar, a man devoted to the cause of getting justice for the violence he witnessed during that time. He has been in and out of the local courts in Delhi since the event happened, hauling around his file of evidence– of recordings, clippings, photos, and his own eyewitness testimony. Judges are regularly transferred, police question him multiple times, he is intimidated by councilors and policemen and his own neighbors, yet Nisar is adamant. He wants to record the event in judicial proceedings– to memorialize the event of the violence, a violence that has since been heavily debated and questioned not just in the public but also in the courts. Umar Khalid for instance continues to languish in jail under the UAPA, without provision of bail or a fair and free trial. He is not alone in his tribulations against the government. 

The strength of the book is in the richness of its ethnographic insight. As a journalist, Bhatia is trained to interview and to squeeze out every last bit of information from his respondents. This provides a nuanced view of a phenomenon that we have all been feeling, thinking and writing about for a long time. As he closely follows Nisar’s case you see that despite this being a project and a job, Bhatia becomes incredibly close with his interlocutors– understandable given the sensitivity of the material. It is also another matter that most events he covers, at least the ones he writes about in the current moment, all have not yet been resolved. People arrested during the Delhi ‘riots’ continue to languish in jail. It is this matter of continuity that serves as a stark reminder that Bhatia’s work is far from complete. Much that he has attempted to cover is recent, but also continual in the violence that it perpetuates. 

When working and researching on a current political moment, it can often be hard to draw from past trends. Lived experiences can seem unique and precarious to those going through them even if scholarly data might disagree. Two broad strands of scholarship have emerged vis-a-vis documenting the current regime– One that believes the exceptionalism of India’s democracy and mourns the loss of our independence and the other that believes that it was never independent to begin with. Bhatia’s work, though attempts to work through the fractures of the current moment, is squarely placed in the first strand– his opening chapter is a dead giveaway. He writes about the immediacy of the violence, the sudden change in tenor of those that lived around him and the growing pain of coming to terms with the fact that he has been, for all his life, been surrounded by bigots. 

Others who write about this exceptionalism draw from a rich tradition of post colonial theorists, who believed that India escaped the clutches of post colonial tumult because it relied on liberal tenets of secularism. In many respects they are right. Perhaps with our tinted glasses the past is a bed of roses, and since I wasn’t there I must give them the benefit of the doubt. But needless to say even within the book, Bhatia reminds us that the seeds of the current moment were sowed in the past with the advent of the hindu nationalist movement- the titular moment being Gandhi’s assassination. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency mainstreamed Hindutva and since then the Congress’ decline has been marked by the growth of the NDA and ultimately the BJP. The history is obviously not so cut and dry, and as Bhatia reminds us in his book it also isn’t as clean. Regardless, the book's tone is set– the current moment is walking its own special path towards doom. 

You may find some hope and solace in the book, that there are still people despite the humongous system itching to break their backs, fighting for their rights. They are the unseen revolutionaries. You may also find yourself in tears, and that is why I think this book should be essential reading. Rahul Bhatia’s The Identity Project is careful, nuanced and brilliantly researched and I hope it reaches an even wider audience.