India Is Rising, But Is Its Democracy Quietly Dying?

India is the world's most populous country and a rising power courted by Washington, Moscow, Brussels and the Gulf at once. It is also, in the words of this week's guest, a democracy dying "slowly, quietly." No tanks on the road, no takeover of the TV station. A silent coup.

Josy Joseph has spent thirty years reporting on India's security establishment and its corruption. He is the founder of Confluence Media, co-producer of Black Warrant, the hit Netflix crime series set in Delhi's Tihar prison. His new book, Birth of a Nation, draws on newly declassified archives to tell the story almost nobody outside India knows: how 565 kings and ruling families surrendered their thrones in a matter of months in 1947, what he calls the largest handover of hereditary power in history, and how close India came to breaking apart at birth.

He joins Jim Stenman and Suzanne Kianpour to connect that violent founding to the India of today: why the wound of Partition never healed and still drives the standoff with Pakistan; Gandhi's final defeat, accepted in silence on the backs of five old envelopes; how an estimated four million security and intelligence personnel became political weapons; Hindu nationalism and what it means for India's 200 million Muslims; why foreign investors are pulling back from Modi's India; how Delhi reads Pakistan's new role as mediator of the Iran war; and why, despite everything, he calls this the golden era of Indian investigative journalism.

Josy Joseph is the author of A Feast of Vultures, The Silent Coup (published internationally as How to Subvert a Democracy), and Birth of a Nation.

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