Majoritarian nationalism is complicating India’s China challenge

An inflated public view of the military prowess will make it challenging for the country’s political leadership to step back from conflict.

In the 2004 Hindi film Swades, Shah Rukh Khan plays NASA scientist Mohan Bhargava who returns home to a village in India. Tired of Mohan’s sharp questions about the way things are in society, a village elder quizzes him: “Kya tum nahi maante humara desh duniya ka sabse mahaan desh hai? [Do you not believe that ours is the greatest country in the world?]”

The same question was put to 7,000 Indian adults in April-May this year as part of a new survey for the Stimson Center, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington DC. The response …

Author

Sushant Singh

Sushant Singh is a lecturer at Yale University. Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and deputy editor of The Indian Express. A winner of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2017 and 2018, he had earlier served in the Indian Army for two decades. He is also the author of Mission Overseas and co-author of Note by Note: The India Story.

newletters+sushant.singh@themorningcontext.com