Publish Date
9 Sep, 2025
About This Book
India’s democracy, once celebrated as an unprecedented experiment in pluralism and participatory nation building, now faces a grave crisis. In this urgent and penetrating work, veteran journalist Prem Shankar Jha traces how the country’s hard-won democracy—rooted in diversity and tolerance—has been steadily hollowed out since Independence—slowly at first, and since 2014, with determined ferocity. Structural flaws in our Constitution, like the lack of state-funded elections, Jha argues, were made substantially worse by Indira Gandhi’s ban on company donations to political parties. As parties increasingly turned to clandestine donors for election financing, politics became a near-criminal enterprise, facilitating the rise of a predatory state long before 2014. And now, under the Modi regime, the weaponization of state agencies, the serious undermining of electoral processes and the transformation of governance into a tool of political vendetta threaten to tear down the last remnants....
About The Author
Prem Shankar Jha (b. December 22, 1938, Patna) was brought up in New Delhi and educated at The Doon School, Dehradun. He holds a Bachelor’s in economics from Delhi University and an MA in philosophy, politics and economics from Magdalen College, University of Oxford. In 1961, Jha joined the United Nations, spending five years with the UNDP. In 1966, he joined the Hindustan Times as an Assistant Editor, and in 1969 he moved to the Times of India. After brief stints as Acting Editor of the Economic Times (1979–80) and Editor of the Financial Express (1980–81), he returned to the Times of India as its Economic Editor. In 1986, he re-joined Hindustan Times as its Editor. In 1990, he served as the information advisor to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. He received the RedInk lifetime achievement award by the Mumbai Press Club in 2021 for his distinguished career as a journalist. Jha is a regular columnist for a number of national dailies and magazines, and has taught at Harvard University, IIM-Calcutta, the Universities of Virginia and Richmond, and at Sciences Po in Paris. His published books include Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History (1966), The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, China and India (2002), The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos, and War (2006), and India & China: The Battle Between Soft and Hard Power (2010).
Speaking Tiger
One of India's most acclaimed independent publishing companies.
