This is a tale of India’s states, of why they build schools but do not staff them with teachers; favour a handful of companies so much that others slip into losses; wage water wars with their neighbours while allowing rampant sand mining and groundwater extraction; harness citizens’ right to vote but brutally crack down on their right to dissent. Reporting from six states over thirty-three months, award-winning investigative journalist M. Rajshekhar delivers a necessary account of a deep crisis that has gone largely unexamined.

    Ahluwalia played a key role in the transformation of India from a state-run to a market-based economy, and remained a constant fixture at the top of India's economic policy establishment for an unprecedented period of three decades.The book traverses the politics, personalities, events and crises in India's recent history. It goes behind the numbers to bring alive the politics of reform, and how policy change was pushed through—at first, slowly, under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and then much more boldly in 1991 when the opportunity provided by a severe balance of payments crisis was seized for wide-ranging reform. Ahluwalia, who served as commerce secretary and finance secretary during this crucial period, makes a convincing case for why, contrary to the accusations at the time, the reforms that formed part of the conditionality of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme in 1991, were home-grown and not thrust upon a reluctant India by the IMF.Ahluwalia discusses the successes and failures of the UPA regime during which period he served as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, a Cabinet-level position. He presents the story behind India’s spectacular economic growth in the first half of the UPA’s tenure as well as its historic achievements in poverty alleviation. He also candidly discusses the policy paralysis and allegations of corruption that came to mark the last few years of UPA 2. Narrated with wit, humour and remarkable intellect, Backstage is a definitive contribution to India's economic and political history by one uniquely positioned to write it.

    While many reasons have been attributed to the split in the powerful Indian business family, the Ambanis, this book argues that the battle between the Ambani brothers was largely about wresting control over reserves of natural gas that are below the ocean bed along the basin of the two greatest rivers of southern India.With painstaking research, a meticulous perusal of press reports, as well as a few surprising exclusives, Gas Wars highlights cases of crony capitalism that allowed the Reliance group to blatantly exploit loopholes which were consciously retained in the system to benefit it. Even as the book tells the story of how the country’s largest corporate conglomerate has benefited from the way government policies are structured, it lays bare the alarming facts of a natural disaster waiting to happen due to the ruthless exploitation of the country's natural resources in order to swell the fortunes of a few.

    But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country's top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India's new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of yesterday, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.James Crabtree's The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world's most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste.

    The mob has always been a faceless, unidimensional machine. But the act of turning around and looking at individuals from that crowd changes everything. If we see the mob as amorphous and their hate as shifting, given to complex personal motivations and vulnerabilities, we are much closer to understanding it—and to opening up conversations that can lead to change.Revati Laul’s unforgettable narrative, built on a decade’s worth of research and interviews, is the very first account of the perpetrators of 2002—and a crucial new addition to the literature on violence. ‘Choice, however, is a vexing word. What part of choice applies when a tidal wave of anger tears through a state? What part of it is the moment, the madness, the collective, and what part individual, personal history?’

    When, in 1947, the British divided and departed their most prized imperial possession, they handed a huge, diverse, and poor society to a small nationalist elite. For decades this elite would uphold a political construct, an idea of India grounded in democracy, religious tolerance, economic development, and cultural pluralism. Sunil Khilnani investigates the fate of this idea, offering incisive portraits of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian founders and assessing the lively debates among them and their successors over who is an Indian, the meaning of modernity, and India's place in the world.In a new introduction written for this edition, Khilnani reflects on the book's striking relevance to the country's recent developments--from the rise of a new billionaire class to the election of a government with a more exclusivist conception of Indian identity. Throughout, he provokes readers and illuminates a fundamental question as urgent now as ever: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?

    

    Vinay Sitapati's Jugalbandi provides this backstory to his current dominance in Indian politics. It begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism as a response to British-induced elections in the 1920s, moves on to the formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1980, and ends with its first national government, from 1998 to 2004. And it follows this journey through the entangled lives of its founding jugalbandi: Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani.Over their six-decade-long relationship, Vajpayee and Advani worked as a team despite differences in personality and beliefs. What kept them together was fraternal love and professional synergy, of course, but also, above all, an ideology that stressed on unity. Their partnership explains what the BJP before Modi was, and why it won.In supporting roles are a cast of characters-from the warden's wife who made room for Vajpayee in her family to the billionaire grandson of Pakistan's founder who happened to be a major early funder of the BJP. Based on private papers, party documents, newspapers and over two hundred interviews, this is a must-read for those interested in the ideology that now rules India.

    The nation's rise is one of the great international stories of the late twentieth century, and in India Unbound the acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a sweeping economic history of India from independence to the new millennium.Das shows how India's policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through today. As the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, Das offers a unique insider's perspective and he deftly interweaves memoir with history, creating a book that is at once vigorously analytical and vividly written. Impassioned, erudite, and eminently readable, India Unbound is a must for anyone interested in the global economy and its future.

    If they search in the right places and offer the appropriate price, there is always a facilitator who can get the job done. This book is a sneak preview of those searches, the middlemen who do those jobs, and the many opportunities that the fast-growing economy offers.'Josy Joseph draws upon two decades as an investigative journalist to expose a problem so pervasive that we do not have the words to speak of it. The story is big: that of treacherous business rivalries, of how some industrial houses practically own the country, of the shadowy men who run the nation's politics. The story is small: a village needs a road and a hospital, a graveyard needs a wall, people need toilets.A Feast of Vultures is an unprecedented, multiple-level inquiry into modern India, and the picture it reveals is both explosive and frightening. Within these covers is unimpeachable evidence against some of the country's biggest business houses and political figures, and the reopening of major scandals that have shaped its political narratives. Through hard-nosed investigations and the meticulous gathering of documentary evidence, Joseph clinically examines and irrefutably documents the non-reportable. It is a troubling narrative, but also a call to action and a cry for change. A tour de force through the wildly beating heart of post-socialist India, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the large, unwieldy truth about this nation.

    Set in the once-fabled land of Kashmir, Behold, I Shine moves beyond male voices and focuses, instead, on what the struggle means for the Valley’s women and children—those whose husbands remain untraceable; whose mothers are half-widows; those who have confronted the wrath of ‘Ikhwanis’, or the scrutiny of men in uniform, and what it means to stand up to it all.This book also brings to focus the resilience of the Valley’s women and children—of activists like Parveena Ahangar and Anjum Zamrud Habib, who, after debilitating losses, start human rights organizations; of ordinary homemakers like Munawara who have taken on the judiciary; and of a young generation of thinkers like Uzma Falak and Essar Batool who foreground the interaction of gender, politics and religion, and won’t let Kashmir forget.Stitching together their narratives, Behold, I Shine not only memorializes women’s voices—thus far forgotten, unwritten, suppressed or sidelined—but also celebrates the mighty spirit of the Valley.

    Sharma shows what can and must change in India’s policies, its administration and even its attitudes. The answers he provides are not obvious, and require courage. Nor are they all comforting or conventional. Yet they could, in less time than you can imagine, unleash the creativity of a billion hopeful Indians.

    The story of how firmly they were bound in fetters of family, caste and society, and how fiercely they fought to escape, needs to be told. In Lady Doctors, Kavitha Rao unearths the extraordinary stories of six women from the 1860s to the 1930s, who defied the idea that they were unfit for medicine by virtue of their gender. From Anandibai Joshi, who broke caste rules by crossing an ocean, to Rukhmabai Raut, who escaped a child marriage, divorced her husband and studied to be a doctor; from Kadambini Ganguly, who took care of eight children while she worked, to child widow Haimabati Sen, who overcame poverty and hardship—these women had a profound and lasting impact. And in their forgotten lives lie many lessons for modern women.In truth, the compelling stories of these radical women have been erased from our textbooks and memories, because histories have mostly been written by men, about men. In an immensely readable narrative, and with impeccable research, Lady Doctors rectifies this omission.

    

    Crucially, for 2019, it provides pointers to look out for, to see if the incumbent government will win or lose. Written by Prannoy Roy, renowned for his knack of demystifying electoral politics, and Dorab Sopariwala, this book will be compulsory reading for anyone interested in politics and elections in India.