ABSTRACT

In A Suitable Boy (1993), Vikram Seth writes with affection of a placid India’s first general election in 1951, and the egalitarian spirit it momentarily bestowed on an electorate deeply riven by class and caste: ‘the great washed and unwashed public, sceptical and gullible’, but all ‘endowed with universal adult suffrage’. India’s sixteenth general election held in May 2014 against a background of economic jolts and titanic corruption scandals, and tainted by the nastiest campaign yet, announced a new turbulent phase for the country – arguably, the most sinister since its independence from British rule in 1947. Back then, it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist former chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the United States, came to occupy India’s highest political office.