Rahul Bhatia

Hope - not as something you have, but something you practice into being.

It is what the philosopher Jonathan Lear has called “radical hope” - “directed towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.”

Vale Professor Jonathan Lear (1948-2025)

Indian tech firms had processing power to spare after Y2K, and so they turned to digitalising ID for a government focused on identifying Muslims at the border.

What if AI doesn't pan out as envisaged? What unexpected thing will its capabilities be turned to without hesitation as the bills mount?

Everyone in academia should read this piece about our dear, brilliant colleague @durba.bsky.social

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Thank you. That's very nice of you.

To anyone who followed Aadhaar’s rollout in India, the language is uncanny. Aadhaar’s ‘savings’ were derived from welfare denied. Countries need to pay attention to the language around surveillance tech in other countries. We’re all stumbling over different iterations of the same problems.

The earlier one was on Adani. This one is about the Reliance zoo. thewire.in/environment/...

Adani’s Defamation Injunction: How a Delhi Court Order Threatens Press Freedom A Rohini district court’s ex parte “John Doe” order grants Adani Enterprises sweeping takedown powers, turning defamation into a tool of prior restraint. The implications for investigative journalism,...

Not a bad couple of days for India's largest corporations in the courts. Too bad if you're a journalist, or the Indian public, or care for accountability and transparency. frontline.thehindu.com/columns/adan...

thewire.in/environment/...

Thought about my life choices in Bandra traffic yesterday.

"I see every ideal that I have held fading away and conditions emerging...which not only distress me but indicate to me that my life's work has been a failure."
"It is this inner rot that is the most distressing symptom of today."

-Jawaharlal Nehru, 1950, quoted in The New India by Rahul Bhatia

Opinion | The U.S. Wooed India for 30 Years. Trump Blew That Up in a Few Months.

"The New India" by Rahul Bhatia is also recommended reading. The parallels are too obvious to ignore.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/o...

That is one heck of a coincidence. I don’t know much about him. But Savera, Polis, and HHR might. And thank you!

‘Nobody knows what I know’: how a loyal RSS member abandoned Hindu nationalism The long read: As a young man, Partha Banerjee was on course to become a senior member of the RSS, the organisation that has pushed Indian politics towards extreme religious nationalism. Then, after 4...

Last year the Guardian carried an excerpt from my book on how Hindu supremacist indoctrination works. I spoke with a man who blew my mind with his story of life within the RSS. www.theguardian.com/world/articl...

This is what I know of him from a distance: he was deeply and refreshingly sceptical of power, as a writer he hunted for poetry in the mundane, and as an editor he sustained a brave newspaper. He only spoke four words to me, long ago, when I was getting started in journalism. I’m in his debt.

Oh no!!!!

Why the BJP’s propaganda machinery is so formidable.

India’s Courts and Legislature Fail to Rein in Speech Crackdown | TechPolicy.Press India’s state governments are taking steps with adverse implications for speech and expression, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Prateek Waghre.

India’s courts and legislature are enabling, not restraining, the executive’s speech crackdown. Institutions meant as checks are turning into enablers, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre.com) . www.techpolicy.press/indias-court...

Do it for the researcher four centuries from now: bsky.app/profile/laur...

(Generally not in favour of mauling books with a pencil, but now and then a great academic book comes along and that’s it. For eg. My copy of Alok Rai’s Hindi Nationalism is more graphite than ink.)

A passage about how middle class technocratic attitudes are utilised in service of politics in ‘The Backstage of Democracy’, a fascinating book.

This reminds me: 25 years ago, in a land far away, Indian officials wondered if an identification card would help identify unauthorised migrants. From my book THE NEW INDIA.

I’ve procrastinated writing this book review for so long that I, too, have become a metaphor for unrealised potential.

This reminded me: Every few years the papers I read growing up propelled some unsuspecting thing (tea, coffee, eggs) on to the eternal roundabout of damnation and salvation (good for you, no wait, bad for you, no wait…). After a while one point of view stuck and we called it science.

And baby, baby, baby: the book, now in paperback. Finally.

Questions to authority Two nights ago I attended the launch of [In]Complete Justice?, S Muralidhar’s book of essays about the state of India’s Supreme Court, which turns 75 this year. The hall at India Intern…

rahulbhatia.com/2025/08/29/q...

Over the past few days, I’ve learned of three fine reporters/editors building their own publications because Indian newsrooms have turned conservative.

Times are hard now, but there are people quietly building for the future. Every newsletter done right is a potential institution. Defiance adds up.

Beyond the immediate peg of the government ban on online betting, M Rajshekhar goes deep into India’s online gaming industry and emerges with a story of lack of opportunity, opaque algorithms, lobbying, politics, and huge sums of money. Great journalism. m.thewire.in/article/busi...

The Guardian asked me to recommend some books. Here are three I think about all the time.

Technology and Democracy in the New India | TechPolicy.Press A conversation with journalist Rahul Bhatia about his book, The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy.

.@justinhendrix.bsky.social and I discussed my reporting on the hidden history of the world's largest ID project, how it inspired me to explore India's history of riots, extremism, and organised disinformation, and why I left a great Reuters gig to write it.
www.techpolicy.press/technology-a...

Technology and Democracy in the New India | TechPolicy.Press A conversation with journalist Rahul Bhatia about his book, The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy.

For the @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast, I spoke to @rahulabhatia.bsky.social, author of The New India: The Unmaking of the World's Largest Democracy. Bhatia takes a close look at Aadhaar to consider the role it plays in the modern state and what the motivations behind it reveal.

Colson Whitehead’s fond appraisal of George Saunders’ 2017 novel LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, which includes this passage: “It is a perilous moment, the sort that comes along every so often, where it seems the country is listing and about to tip and only steady hands can right the ship. Survival depends not only on the captain, but on all aboard. Here we insert the common observation that the inanity of modern life has left the satirist unable to compete; pour one out for the absurdists among us. But events sometimes conspire to make a work of art, like a novel set in the past, supremely timely. In describing Lincoln’s call to action, Saunders provides an appeal for his limbo denizens — for citizens everywhere — to step up and join the cause.”

Tonight I finished George Saunders’ magisterial LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, which didn’t quite take for me in 2017, whatever the reason. One person who hailed it at the time was Colson Whitehead; here’s how he concluded his trenchant appraisal in the Times.