A year before he ascended to the prime ministership of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that his nation was ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads’. Yet, in the seventy-five years since India’s independence, secularist tolerance of religious and cultural difference has been eroded by a rising tide of Hindu majoritarianism. In this week’s episode of The ABR Podcast, John Zubrzycki reads his commentary on India’s transformation under Narendra Modi’s leadership – a tenure that has seen an increasingly unbridled attempt to establish Hindu hegemony across a variety of domains, from citizenship laws to education to beef consumption.

John Zubrzycki is an historian and former diplomat and foreign correspondent. He is the author of The Shortest History of India (2022).

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.