This preview from Martha Nussbaum's The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India's Future has generated at least one passionate response in the burgeoning Indian blogosphere. Her essay is a paranoid summary of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and its relationship with 1930s European fascism. She tries to scale up the microcosm of Gujarat, as if it represents the whole mosaic of modern India, and fails miserably. While devoid of any new insights on our predicaments, the preview essay contains strangely amusing notions such as:

Well, for a start, the people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims.

Even the most liberal Hindu would be offended. This image brings to my mind that great genetic journey we have all made, all the peoples of the world - branching out from the dark heart of Africa, the cradle of Man, the source and origin of all nomadic drift. By Nussbaum's logic the Hindus are no more indigenous than Muslims because the Hindu identity as a coherent unit was only established after the arrival of Islam in as a force in the subcontinent, in the same way as the idea of India as a national entity was only conceivable after its assembly within the British Empire. It would be far too laborious to point out the historical errors and faulty assumptions in Nussbaum's story, which would have benefited from a little research.

For anyone looking for the most authoritative guide to post-1947 democratic India, please refer to historian Ramchandra Guha's awesome tome - India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy . The hyperlink will take you to a review of the book by Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian, who describes it thus:

"What if?" animates Guha's reconstruction of the past 60 years of Indian history. Since 1947, the possibility of disaster has taken the form of certain questions and crises: "What if India were to disintegrate; or to become a totalitarian society; or a military dictatorship; or a Hindu state?" All these are scenarios that appeared plausible, at one time or another, to both the Indian and foreign observer.

The most striking example of the tribal resurgence was the 2007 election in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state with 166 million people. The election was won by a dalit (lower caste) woman named Mayawati, who has personal assets in crores and very little interest in any religious agenda. The fear to India's democracy is no more from religious fundamentalism, but the arrival of a new monster of economic tribalism, the roots of which were sowed post-1947 by the Congress party government led by Pandit Nehru.

The division of India into the twenty odd states/provinces was achieved by demarcating linguistic assemblages. It must have been difficult to draw those boundaries across a flowing culture, considering the 800 different languages and 2000 dialects that have now been identified. To assuage the potential conflicts resulting from this, selective treatment was doctrined based on your caste, religion or the backwardness of your tribe. I don't understand any logic behind this, other than a way to remain king, no matter what the future holds for your progeny. After a whole generation has passed, the echoes of this 60-year old stupidity reverb across the land.

As I write this post to you from Jaipur - the Pink City and capital of Rajasthan, the eastern belt of the state is in grip of violence . The Gujjar community has taken to the streets and highways on the issue of reservations . Another caste of Meenas, who already have reservation, are up against the Gujjars. There has been heavy fighting between the armed forces and the Gujjars, more than twenty people died in the last two days, hundreds of police stations and vans burned. They are standing on railway tracks, blocking highways. Yesterday, Jaipur was closed for business.

More importantly, the Gujjars are talking to each other on their cheap Reliance cellphones and coordinating their next moves.