The Wire / by Anand Teltumbde

Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane’s ‘To Kill a Democracy’ deals with the question how democracies get killed and dismisses the commonplace perspective of the “breakdowns”.

“Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic…”
∼ B.R. Ambedkar

The title of Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane’s book, To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, implies that India was a democracy which has been killed and transformed into despotism under Narendra Modi. Not quite; it rather argues that the current state of degeneration, though representing a kink in the slow-paced rhetorical liberalism of plutarchy, is not entirely brought about by the Hindutva dispensation.
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