The book “Age of Anger” was written not long after May 2014, when a Hindu supremacist accused of presiding over the mass murder of Muslims became India’s most powerful prime minister in decades. Hindu supremacism under Narendra Modi had surged on the back of failed promises. The country’s first postcolonial elite had scantily delivered on the country’s founding promise of democracy and development, and a more recent guarantee, underwritten by the country’s neoliberal ruling class, of general prosperity through stout fidelity to the principles of the market, had flopped more spectacularly. In fact, recent years in India had witnessed the proliferation of a social jungle, marked by exploitation and inequality, in which a state stigmatized by corruption scandals and weakened by global crises increasingly appeared to lack authority and legitimacy. Not for the first time had a failed experiment in economic liberalism, which benefitted the few at great expense to the many, created a reservoir of frustration and resentment, and an opening for fascistic and semi-fascistic movements and demagogues.
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