How music, machines and myth turned Hindu nationalism into a mass aesthetic A new book argues that India's ruling ideology has embedded itself less through doctrine than through spectacle For most of the four decades that Indian journalists have covered the rise of Hindutva, the Hindu-nationalist project has been analysed the way political scientists analyse most things: through manifestos, election results and organisational charts. Brahma Prakash, a professor of cultural studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, thinks that lens misses the point. In his book, Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture , and in a recent interview on the online outlet The Federal , he argues that Hindu nationalism's most effective vehicle in the past decade has not been ideology at all, but sensation: sound, colour, motion and touch, deployed at a scale and with a coordination that has no real precedent in Indian public life. This is a claim worth taking seriously, and one worth int...
Process as punishment A six-year wait for a trial that has not begun raises hard questions about India's anti-terror law — and about the state's confidence in its own evidence IN THIHAR JAIL, on the outskirts of Delhi, a prisoner has spent six years waiting for something that has not yet happened: the start of his own trial. Umar Khalid, a historian arrested in September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in connection with riots in north-east Delhi that year, has aged from 33 to 39 behind bars without charges being formally framed, let alone a verdict reached. His case has become the most closely watched example of a broader pattern that critics call "process as punishment": a system in which the ordeal of prolonged incarceration, rather than any eventual conviction, becomes the real sentence. This is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon — pre-trial detention is used and abused in democracies from Brazil to the Philippines. But the scale and d...