A note on Rahul Bhatia's The Identity Project

The photos here are of author Rahul Bhatia, human-rights activist Usha Ramanathan, and Nisar Ahmad (tireless striver for justice after losing his home in the 2020 Delhi riots) during a very thoughtful conversation last evening, around Rahul’s new book The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy. This is a wide-ranging work – journalism and narrative non-fiction – about the development of India’s enormous biometric identification project, and how it has intersected with the growth of Hindutva/militant and exclusionary Hinduism over the past three-and-a-half decades.

It took me just two days to read The Identity Project, which was very unusual because my (non-work-related) reading has been almost non-existent in recent times. But this is a testament to the directness and gentleness of Rahul’s writing, qualities I have been familiar with ever since we became acquainted 20 years ago (even back then, when so many of us were trying to be “writerly” to impress – first on blogs, later when opportunities for long-form feature writing opened up – there was an immediacy about his work that was enviable). I began reading the book mainly to revisit and more fully understand those chaotic months in 2019-2020 when the anti-CAA/NRC protests were followed by the anti-Muslim riots in north-east Delhi (and all of it was soon overshadowed in many of our minds by the pandemic and the lockdowns); but I just went on reading, as the narrative moved back and forth in time – from Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj 150 years ago to LK Advani’s rath yatra to contemporary times where men like Nisar (a protagonist and guiding light in the book) found their family’s lives threatened by long-time neighbours, including men he had seen since they were children. The historical back-story in the second section was particularly important for me since I knew very little about figures like Balakrishna Shivram Moonje (whose life, I realise with some interest, ran almost exactly parallel to Mahatma Gandhi’s – 1872 to 1948. His idea of Hinduism, and ultimately of India, was very different from Gandhi’s, though).

In between all this, there are terrific pen portraits of Nandan Nilekani, Advani’s personal aide Deepak Chopra, and others. And a sinisterly entertaining passage where Rahul visits a shakha and briefly becomes a sort-of honorary RSS member himself – the bits here about a game called “Mantriji” reminded me of the whistle-blower accounts of Ku Klux Klan meetings, about grown men playing childlike games, having fun with code-words and phrases, while also posturing and nursing their grievances.

All this means the book is structurally complex – having many balls in the air – but it stays lucid all the way through because the writing flows so easily. Do look out for it, and for other conversations around it.