Verglas finished reading H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars by Kunal Purohit
"Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book …
Finished the book. The final person out of three is Sandeep Deo who is a former journalist who started his own ethno-religious-nationalist publishing house and ecommerce platform. There is less in his section about him as a person than the other sections but that may be due to comparatively less exposure. What is discussed is how his story progresses from support of (the already very rightwing) leading BJP & Modi toward more and more Hindutva fringe people, first inside the BJP and then also outside of it. It was as interesting from a political perspective (as someone not from India) as the first two parts but the writing style definitely changed, perhaps because access to people around Sandeep was different than to the people around the other two.
You could criticize the book for it's style since it is quite different to most research books into extreme right political people. …
Finished the book. The final person out of three is Sandeep Deo who is a former journalist who started his own ethno-religious-nationalist publishing house and ecommerce platform. There is less in his section about him as a person than the other sections but that may be due to comparatively less exposure. What is discussed is how his story progresses from support of (the already very rightwing) leading BJP & Modi toward more and more Hindutva fringe people, first inside the BJP and then also outside of it. It was as interesting from a political perspective (as someone not from India) as the first two parts but the writing style definitely changed, perhaps because access to people around Sandeep was different than to the people around the other two.
You could criticize the book for it's style since it is quite different to most research books into extreme right political people. I also always wonder about the ethics of spending the amount of time required inside these extreme right spaces and telling such stories about people's private lives could act/be misused as a form of promotion.
Having said that, from the perspective of a non-local this really feels like a small window into what drives the extreme right in India, in which areas it is prevalent, and how it compares (the author investigates parallels with several places elsewhere where similar rhetoric had genocidal consequences) and I am happy I read it. The book is also fully referenced and has a long list of sources at the back.
