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Top 17 Must Read Books on Indian Politics

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India prides itself in being the largest democratic country in the world. However, since we have fought our way to freedom, the political inclinations in our country has always been complex and intriguing. In this article, we provide you with top 17 must read books on Indian politics to understand its dynamics and long prevailing history.

 

A New Cold War

A New Cold War by Sanjaya Baru and Rahul Sharma

In July 1971, US National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, made a secret visit to China to meet top Chinese leaders. This inaugurated a new phase not just in US-China relations but in contemporary history. That visit and the subsequent US-China relationship, including the US decision to invest in China’s economic rise and admit it into the WTO, combined to firm up the foundations of China’s rise as a world power.

This collection of critical essays examines the impact, consequences and legacy of Kissinger’s first, door-opening visit to China and how it has shaped world order.

No Holds Barred
In No Holds Barred, Narayan Rane looks back on the years he has spent in the dog-eat-dog world of Indian politics. Packed with revealing stories of his encounters with the who’s who of the game in Maharashtra and at the Centre – ranging from the Thackerays, Pramod Mahajan, Gopinath Munde, Manohar Joshi, Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ashok Chavan and Devendra Fadnavis to Sharad Pawar, Ahmed Patel and Rahul and Sonia Gandhi – this is a truly candid and fearless tell-all that exposes the true nature of India’s corridors of power.
The Ultimate Goal

In The Ultimate Goal, Vikram Sood, former chief of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), explains ‘the narrative’ and how a country’s ability to construct, sustain and control narratives, at home and abroad, enhances its strength and position. Intelligence agencies invariably play a critical role in this, an often-indispensable tool of statecraft.

The India Way
The decade from the 2008 global financial crisis to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic has seen a real transformation of the world order. For India, this means optimal relationships with all the major powers to best advance its goals.
A global footprint is now in the making that leverages India’s greater capability and relevance, as well as its unique diaspora. This era of global upheaval entails greater expectations from India, putting it on the path to becoming a leading power.
In The India Way, S. Jaishankar, India’s Minister of External Affairs, analyses these challenges and spells out possible policy responses. He places this thinking in the context of history and tradition, appropriate for a civilizational power that seeks to reclaim its place on the world stage.
35 Days
In 2009, the startling events that had the entire country glued to television screens culminated in the swearing in of Uddhav Thackeray as chief minister on 28 November 2019. 35 Days is a blow-by-blow account of the ups and downs that took place during those thirty-five days that baffled even hardcore political pundits. The goings-on unmasked almost all parties and politicians of the state and changed Maharashtra’s politics forever.
With exclusive reportage and interviews from close observers of the whole drama, this book goes behind the scenes to reconstruct what took place during the Maharashtra elections 2019.
2019
2019 by Rajdeep Sardesai
n his bestselling book, Rajdeep Sardesai relives the excitement of the many twists and turns that took place over the intervening five years, culminating in the 2019 election results, and helps the reader make sense of the contours and characteristics of a rapidly changing India, its politics and its newsmakers. Now available in a paperback edition with a new Afterword that brings the story right up to the present, 2019: How Modi Won India is a book that makes for fascinating, compelling reading.
India's China Challenge

India’s China Challenge tells the story of a complex political relationship, and how China — and its leading opinion-makers — view India. It looks at the economic dimensions and cultural connect, and the internal political and social transformations in China that continue to shape both the country’s future and its relations with India.

Buy Now!

 

Battleground Telangana

Battleground Telangana by Kingshuk Nag

In 2009, the Indian government announced that Telangana would be a separate state, but is now dilly-dallying, worried about the backlash from the Andhra region. At the heart of the problem is the city of Hyderabad, which lies bang in the middle of Telangana but is being claimed by both sides. Is the upsurge in Telangana so strong that the Indian government will be unable to resist it? Is there a middle course?

This book explores the complex issues, and the underlying causes of the Telangana movement.

Buy Now!

 

Hostility

Hostility by Abdul Basit

Hostility is former Pakistan high commissioner to India Abdul Basit’s memoir of his tenure in New Delhi, from 2014 to 2017. The book takes us through perhaps the most difficult era in India-Pakistan relations in recent years. While Narendra Modi’s first prime-ministership began with a new hope of normalising relations between Pakistan and India, subsequent events unfortunately proved otherwise.

India And The Silk Roads
India and the Silk Roads is a global history of a continental interior, the first to comprehensively examine the textual and material traces of caravan trade in the ‘age of empires’. By showing how no single ruler could control the nebulous yet durable networks of this trading world, which had its own internal dynamics even as it evolved in step with global transformations, Lally forces us to rethink the history of globalisation and re-evaluate our fixation with empires and states as the building blocks of historical analysis.
This book has a narrative that resonates with our own times, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative brings terrestrial forms of connectivity back to the fore-transforming life across Eurasia once again.
Peace, Poverty and Betrayal

Skewering the simplistic binaries that often dominate the debate, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal is a fresh and elegant history of British India.

How can we explain Britain’s long rule in India beyond the cliches of ‘imperial’ versus ‘nationalist’ interpretations? In this new history, Roderick Matthews tells a more nuanced story of ‘oblige and rule’, the foundation of common purpose between colonisers and powerful Indians.

Bengal 2021

On 20 May 2011, Mamata Banerjee was sworn in as the first female chief minister of West Bengal, bringing an end to thirty-three years of CPI(M) rule. ‘Poriborton!’ screamed the morning papers, echoing Trinamool Congress’s catchphrase for bringing in change. A decade later, amidst allegations against the TMC of political violence, syndicate rule and institutional corruption, the Bharatiya Janata Party has sent out a new war cry.

Ahead of what promises to be a historic state Legislative Assembly election, Deep Halder met and spoke to Bengal’s biggest stars-turned-politicians, refugees who want to become permanent citizens, and travelled as far as the Bangladesh border to gauge the mood of the people. Bengal 2021 looks at an electrifying election, unfolding in the times of Covid-19.

India's First Dictatorship
India’s First Dictatorship by Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil
India’s First Dictatorship focuses on Mrs Gandhi and her son, Sanjay, who was largely responsible for the mass sterilisation programmes and deportation of urban slum-dwellers. However, it equally exposes the facilitation of authoritarian rule by Congressmen, Communists, trade unions, businessmen and the urban middle class, as well as the complacency of the judiciary and media. Those who resisted the Emergency, in the media or on the streets, were few in number.
The Gated Republic

Seventy years since it became a republic, India has come a long way. But it is still failing on some key fronts.

Piped drinking water for all continues to be a pipe dream; homes and businesses are haunted by power outages; the lack of proper primary health care renders the poorest more vulnerable; millions of children coming out of schools lack rudimentary skills; and the security of lives and enterprises, a source of great anxiety, depends on private contractors.

Indians are seceding from dependence on the government for these most basic of services and are investing in the pay-and-plug economy.  The Gated Republic presents an interrogative view of the history and future of private India.

Inquilab
Inquilab by Rajdeep Sardesai
From the Anna Andolan in 2011 to the anti-CAA-NRC movement in 2019, a fierce spirit of liberty has gripped the nation over the last decade. Across the country, citizens have taken to the streets, petitioned, lobbied and hashtagged their demands for justice, equality and better governance. Their ask: freedom in independent India.
The speeches, lectures and letters collected in Inquilab: A Decade of Protest capture the most important events and issues of the past ten years. The anthology includes the voices of Anna Hazare, Kavita Krishna, Nayantara Sahgal, Rana Ayyub, Rohith Vemula, Kanhaiya Kumar, Romila Thapar, P Sainath, Mahua Moitra, Majid Maqbool, Chandra Shekhar Aazad, Nabiya Khan and Ramachandra Guha.
Messiah Modi
One of India’s most influential columnists, and one not averse to controversy, Tavleen Singh was among the few mainstream ‘Delhi’ voices to see the Narendra Modi wave coming in 2014.
In Messiah Modi, she details her early support for Modi the candidate, followed by a helpless disenchantment with Modi the PM and the cabinet he headed. She tells the story of his first term as it unfolded. From lynchings to demonetization up to Article 370, she gives an intimate account of her subject.
The Khalistan Conspiracy
The author, a former Special Secretary of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), examines a series of interconnected events that led to the rise of the Khalistan movement, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the anti-Sikh violence unleashed thereafter. With a timeline that moves from seven years before to a decade after 1984, the book strives to answer critical questions that continue to linger till today.

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