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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.

So far I am really enjoying this book and I am learning a lot. It is different than I expected, focusing not just on the spread of extreme right wing Hindutva through popular music (via youtube and live performance), but also on popular poetry (via kavi sammelans, public poetry events). The book will also discuss journalism/youtube influencing but have not reached that part yet.

The style (which was the surprising thing) is that each of the three topics are told through a prominent individual within that movement, respectively Kavi Singh (and her adoptive father), Kamal Agney, and Sandeep Deo. The author has clearly spent a lot of time with them and spoken to the people around them but does so while fully contextualising their ideas in terms of disinformation.

The book is well researched, the author has very obviously put a lot of time into it and I am enjoying the style in which is was written. The author uses a lot of Hindi terms, lyrics and poetry samples (in Latin script), each of which is carefully translated, to give the reader an idea of the sounds of the words chosen which I think really adds to the reading experience and somehow makes a lot of it feel much more proximal or intimate than it would have had the text been more 'sterile'.