Bethesda, Maryland, USA: In September 2019, a mining project in Bastar, Chhattisgarh—contracted to Gautam Adani's flagship firm, Adani Enterprises—was felling trees in Bastar, Chhattisgarh. Protests against this deforestation became a flashpoint for state-inflicted violence.
The police killed two men, describing them as Maoist, a term often conflated with terrorism even though such insurgents typically fight for the economic and social rights of disenfranchised communities. Many local residents and activists alleged that the men killed died in yet another “fake encounter”—a murder justified as self-defence or an attempt to prevent escape.
In the outrage that followed, human rights activist Bela Bhatia emerged as a leading voice. The police retaliated by filing charges against her.
Bhatia had long campaigned for tribal rights and was frequently at the forefront of protests against police atrocities. By this time, she was likely already under surveillance through the Pegasus spyware—a glaring invasion of her privacy, as she later described to The Telegraph.
However, September 2019 was an especially dangerous moment to challenge India’s law enforcement. Starting in January 2018, after a violent clash between Dalits and Hindutva supporters in Bhima Koregaon (a historic village near Pune), Indian authorities had arrested about a dozen activists under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967.
This draconian “preventive detention” law allows police to arrest individuals without well-defined charges and with no obligation to pursue a timely trial. Many of those arrested were renowned for their advocacy of tribal rights, including their recent opposition to projects linked to Gautam Adani.
Bhatia could not know at the time that the authorities had likely framed the activists, as a series of Washington Post reports later alleged. Nor could she know that one of the activists arrested, Father Stan Swamy, would be denied care and die an inhumane death of COVID-related complications in July 2021, and that others would languish in jail for years and even those granted bail would remain in a legal limbo.
Beyond Bhima Koregaon, in March 2021, Hidme Markam, a former school mid-day meal cook and activist protesting against an Adani mine, spent two years in jail on baseless UAPA charges.
But as the months and years rolled by—and evidence of an increasingly belligerent state mounted—Bhatia remained unyielding in her own activism. That determination shines through in her book: India’s Forgotten Country: A View From the Margins (Penguin, 2024). In it, she tracks the increasingly brutal use of the state’s coercive power to support oligarchs and suppress dissent and protest.
The essays span her career, beginning in 1985, when at 22, Bhatia started her activism in Gujarat. And although all essays were written as she experienced events, she emphasises (in footnotes and epilogues to chapters) that nothing has changed; if anything, matters have become worse.
Inevitably, Bhatia concludes that Indian democracy has failed. Without using the term, she, in effect, says totalitarian governance forms have taken root. Alongside, she reminds us, a hyper selfishness—sanctified in the blessed cause of free markets—ensures lack of empathy for others and a consequent disregard for collective welfare. These are moral failures, she says, and as long as they continue, India’s social fabric will keep unravelling.
Bela Bhatia is uniquely positioned to document and analyse India’s coercive state. She has lived that experience as an activist and her training as a lawyer and sociologist (with a PhD from the University of Cambridge) add force to her analysis. Sociologists and lawyers, like Bhatia, engage directly with power relationships—unlike economists and political scientists who reduce actors to mere calculating machines swayed by “reforms” and finely tuned incentives.
The sociologist Charles Tilly describes the state as a “protection racket,” akin to “organised crime with the added advantage of legitimacy.” Less blunt than Tilly, James Scott and Theda Skocpol echo similar conclusions. Among lawyers, the German constitutional theorist and Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt dismisses liberalism, rule of law, and democracy as fanciful ideas; he emphasises instead the centrality of the state’s coercive power. These perspectives are essential to understand the totalitarian tendencies of the so-called “democratic” state.
In keeping with the gravity of her themes, we get glimpses of Bhatia’s austerity and dedication as she trudges through dangerous terrain to bypass police checkpoints. As a scholar though, her main commitment is to tell the countless stories of the Indian state acting to support the rich and powerful or for preserving its power.
Her reach is broad. The phrase in the title, Forgotten Country, is not intended to evoke a particular Indian geography, for she covers a vast swathe of the country—spread over 11 states, starting from her earliest activism days in Gujarat. The Forgotten Country Bhatia writes about is the one we have chosen to forget, hidden by an Indian and international elite engaged in self-serving hype of India as an emerging superpower.
We get an early glimpse of India’s unlawful capitalism in Bhatia’s account of farmers digging ever-deeper wells in Gujarat in the late 1980s. It was the Green Revolution heyday, it was the start of economic liberalisation under a new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Then, as now, the elite exuded hubris. In 1985, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati asked in the New York Times: Is India’s Economic Miracle at Hand? Nearly simultaneously, in Bhagwati’s home state of Gujarat, acting under a permissive law, landowners were digging deeper for water. Behind the facade of India’s miracle moment, a classic breakdown of norms was ongoing: if my neighbour digs deeper, I will dig even deeper, accelerating a fall in the water table. When the young, idealist Bhatia tried to speak with the main perpetrators, the large landlords, she met with hostility.
The practice of unregulated well-digging continued. Nearly three decades later, Rana Dasgupta documented the same dynamic in Delhi. He called it “marauding capitalism.” Kavitha Iyer described the phenomenon in Marathwada in her Landscapes of Loss. Today, Punjab, the cradle of the Green Revolution and endemic water-guzzling, suffers an acute—possibly irreversible—decline in the water table.
The irony in the latest budget’s call for deregulation is hard to overstate. As Bhatia demonstrates repeatedly, Indian capitalism has been essentially lawless, whether in the use of land or other natural resources, the exploitation of those desperately seeking jobs, and the degradation of the air and water.
Not surprisingly, in the mid-1990s, Bhatia made Bihar her focus. Bihar was then India’s symbol of lawlessness. Indeed, the sociologist Tilly would have recognised it as engaged in “organised crime.” But the true center of the state-as-mafia was shifting. In 2006, Bhatia began spending more time in Bastar in the state of Chhattisgarh. In this heartland of lawlessness, the land and natural resources were plentiful, abundant tribal labour was easy to exploit, and no laws could hold accountable those who degraded the air and water.
A “protection racket” emerged. Remember, the Congress-led left-leaning government ruled then at the centre, mouthing the language of social justice. But in a bipartisan consensus, the BJP-led state government and the Congress supported a state-run militia to aid India’s richest business houses in the exploitation of the tribals and their land.
When the Supreme Court ruled such state-supported violence as unconstitutional, the central and state governments essentially disregarded the court, changing the form but not the substance of their violence.
The conflict between the state and the capitalists on one side and the so-called Maoists on the other became a low-grade war, and Bhatia eventually moved to live in Bastar in 2015. There she fights to this day for human rights and justice. Chhattisgarh remains desperately poor and the war between the police and the Maoists continues. In a recent interview, a weary Bhatia concluded that the lives of the poor tribals do not count and the powers that be do not want this war to end.
Although her focus is on economic injustice, Bhatia reminds us of parallel frameworks of state coercion. In April 2002, she returned to her original base of Gujarat in the immediate aftermath of the Godhra-induced massacres of Muslims. Even she, a hardy observer of political realities, was shaken by the wildfire spread of hate-filled Hindutva since she was last in Gujarat. Hindutva’s widening tentacles to this day, she emphasises, relies on state support.
The chapter on Kashmir is not for the faint-hearted. There, as in her history of unrelenting state violence in the Northeast, she points her finger at militarisation that dehumanises and makes peace and prosperity impossible. Her 2010 essay on the demands of Manipur’s hill tribes for economic and political autonomy is a primer for the violence that has racked that unfortunate state since May 2023.
The economist Raaj Sah helps us understand why social and political pathologies, such as Bhatia describes, persist and spread. He calls the process “social osmosis.” When a social or political actor benefits from breaking the rule of law, breaking the law becomes more attractive to everyone. And no self-correcting mechanism stems or reverses such lawlessness; instead, the perverse incentives become more powerful with time. Various threads of post-independence history, going back well before Bhatia starts her narrative, support this logic forcefully.
The osmosis began with Nehru. Shortly before his death, he recognised that he was leaving behind an oligopolistic industrial sector; corruption had crept widely into the interstices of government and society; and a constitutional amendment he had championed made sedition a punishable crime, which triggered state intimidation of dissidents and political opponents. Elite Indians remember those years fondly as democratic. But India even then was not a liberal democracy according to the Swedish think-tank V-Dem since too many Indians lacked economic opportunities and civil liberties.
Indira Gandhi’s totalitarian temptation accelerated the corrosive osmosis. Her personal corruption and that of her son, Sanjay, made corruption in high places normal. And well before she assumed dictatorial powers under the Emergency, the state emerged as a criminal organisation in multiple ways: through “preventive detention” powers under the UAPA in 1967; the innovation of “fake encounters” soon after to wipe out a generation of urban idealists; and the deployment of the military to suppress dissent in Gujarat and Bihar and during the railway strike.
These totalitarian governance forms became a staple of all subsequent governments.
Additional osmotic pressures were piling on by the mid-1980s, when Bhatia’s story begins. Hindutva was taking shape as a friend-versus-enemy political force and the philosophy of neoliberalism was spreading worldwide. Neoliberalism’s call for more competitive markets is unexceptionable except that in practice it morphs quickly into predatory capitalism.
Poor or no regulation, favours for insiders, and a general loss of social purpose leading to the state’s disengagement with public welfare become the modus operandi. The breakdown of society and politics prove unstoppable. If this sounds a lot like the United States, it is. But, the US—a rich country even today—has a lot left to destroy. India has always had much less margin for ruin.
Yet, each successive Indian government has acted more egregiously than its predecessor. A tragic merger finally occurred. More preventive detention laws to stifle dissent and political opposition coalesced with Hindutva’s friend-versus-enemy political ideology and neoliberalism’s grab of economic power. Behind the facade of elections, India was now an autocracy according to V-Dem.
While hard-edged Hindutva remained the preserve of the Sangh Parivar, a soft-Hindutva was seeping into the country’s politics and culture. The presumption of India as a Hindu state was growing. And marking neoliberalism’s march, even Kerala’s Communist government trampled on the rights of fisherfolk and disregarded climate change-induced damage in aid of an Adani port project.
As an intimate observer of these pressures for four decades, Bhatia—detached and scholarly in her essays—allows herself moments of despair in her introduction and conclusion. “Violence,” she writes, “has created new conflicts even as they have left the old ones unresolved.” A “sickness” gnaws at her, and “living is a slow death.” For Bhatia, the betrayal by Indian democracy is the deepest wound. Democratic institutions have not just “failed to resolve the conflicts,” they have been “slanted against the victims of injustice.”
The evisceration of Indian democracy and the infiltration of totalitarian tendencies would not have surprised Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher. Arendt poignantly observed that totalitarian solutions are a “strong temptation whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” The weak Indian state, incapable of delivering jobs, education, health, justice, or a clean environment, hides its failures by projecting brute force.
This projection of power breeds more conflicts and injustice. Be warned, Bhatia says, a violent denouement will follow, as in the film Aakrosh, where the power, lust, and violence of a local politician and his henchmen destroy an innocent family.
Yet, even as despair threatens to overwhelm her, Bhatia pleads for moral regeneration. For her, as for Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, morality begins with sympathy for others. “Only if you empathize,” she writes, “will you be able to understand. Only if you understand, will you be able to act.” Empathy is the necessary lubricant of human dignity and collective welfare.
Everyone who loves India must heed Bhatia’s moral call, especially those who are mesmerised by the mythical market’s magic and achievement of Indian superpower status—and have therefore walked away from their obligations for public welfare. The mirage of the promised miracle will surely recede, and absent a new morality, destructive social osmosis will continue. An Aakrosh-like ending looms.
(Ashoka Mody recently retired from Princeton University. Previously, he worked with the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He is author of EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts and India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today.)
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