High-Voltage Treatment for a Comatose Elephant

Unshackling the Elephant by Anand Prasad: A Review

by Siddarth Raman.

Anand Prasad's Unshackling the Elephant provides an interesting clean-sheet critique of the Indian legal system. India's development story into the 21st century is shackled by a judicial system that is stuck in the past. The book succeeds incredibly well at applying economic logic and management principles to the judiciary. Many of the suggested reforms have the weight of common sense - the kind that becomes visible once someone has taken the trouble to articulate it well. It stumbles into uncertain territory when suggesting we succumb to indigenous instinct, especially given the fragility of India's current state capacity and my own preference for cautious reforms that avoid the treacherous currents of populism.

This book matters. It is precise in its diagnosis and bolder in its questions than most will venture. Systems rest on assumptions we stop interrogating; surfacing these debates is important because knowing why we got here tells us what needs to be fixed and what doesn't need relitigating.

The Low-Hanging Fruit of Process Modernisation

On several fronts, Prasad's prescriptions will invite broad agreement - particularly from those who have witnessed the impact of process modernisation in other fields and wondered why the legal system has resisted it for so long.

The law is both judicial reasoning and process management. Other fields have walked the journey of process improvement. IT services, consulting, accounting, even corporate law in some aspects. Templatised pleadings and standardised procedures need not be recreated from first principles for every matter; translation tools chip away at language barriers; and the knowledge management systems Prasad envisions - his "legal knowledge grid" - would make legal corpora accessible to law graduates and large language models alike. Ideas of virtual hearings and asynchronous proceedings push this further, reducing the friction of physical presence without necessarily compromising procedural integrity.

These are safe bets. They enhance capacity without demanding discretionary overreach. Early efforts have begun and should be embraced (see here, here, here); many of these ideas deserve serious piloting as part of the eCourts Phase III modernisation effort.

Prasad also questions the figure of the "all-purpose judge" -the expectation that foundational legal education alone equips one to adjudicate matters spanning technology, finance, and specialised commercial arrangements. The assumption may have held in a simpler era. Whether it holds today is less certain.

A note of caution on artificial intelligence. The justice system functions because society accepts the state's monopoly on coercive power and consents to have it applied through due process. This is a social contract grounded in human accountability. AI may assist judges. But the decision must remain with someone who can be questioned, overruled, and held responsible. As much as the engineer in me might wish law were code, it is not.

Fixing the Incentive Systems

Courts are not just forums for dispute resolution. They are markets where incentives shape behaviour.

Consider the interest rate regime applied to legal disputes. Courts award simple interest at rates that don't match any reasonable cost of capital. The effect is predictable: delay becomes a strategy. A defendant who owes money has every reason to stretch proceedings; time works in their favour. Prasad is correct to argue that judges need to understand the time value of money. Aligning judicial interest rates with economic reality would shift the calculus against strategic delay.

On damages, Prasad makes the case for stronger deterrence -particularly through punitive awards for corporate fraud. On costs, he argues that allowing successful litigants to recover expenses would reduce barriers to access, enabling those confident in their position could invest in quality representation without bearing the full risk.

He also correctly identifies information asymmetry and power imbalance as distortions in the current system. Those with deeper pockets hire better lawyers, and in an adversarial system, this matters considerably. His proposals - removing restrictions on contingency payments, allowing lawyers to advertise, and litigation funding - would make legal representation function more like a market, creating a more level playing field.

Like Chief Justice Suryakant, Prasad echoes the need for judicial performance reviews. This deserves serious consideration, though any implementation must balance accountability against judicial independence. For the bar, he calls for high penalties for malpractice and stricter consequences for perjury. Whether the profession will police itself remains an open question. Prasad's experience understanding lawyers and litigants shines through in this section - he dissects how courts, like any market, respond to incentives.

The Temptations of an Overhaul

Anand Prasad's frustration with the legal system is understandable. Stepping into a courtroom feels like walking back through time.

While some structural reforms like splitting the Supreme Court into a constitutional court and court of appeals or curbing judicial legislation merit serious debate, some of the more radical proposals warrant caution. Moving towards an inquisitorial system would transform judges from neutral adjudicators into active investigators. In a country where discretionary power is prone to abuse, such a shift is a dangerous gamble.

The most troubling temptation is the urge to decolonise the system. Weakening foundational principles like the presumption of innocence in favour of indigenous traditions risks legitimising majoritarian sentiment as law, especially when honour killings persist in the 21st century and extrajudicial encounters meet public approval. The philosophical questions in attempting an Indic reinterpretation are formidable - attempting to balance ideas of karma against retributive justice, uniform civil codes against community specific practices, or the contextual obligations of Raja Dharma against the common law tradition that all stand equal before the law.

The Contradictions

There is an internal tension in the book's vision. It praises codification for its clarity and bemoans lack of consistency in judgements while simultaneously advocating for inquisitorial discretion and culturally-responsive justice. Codification demands predictability. Instinctive justice invites its opposite. A similar tension runs through the hope that algorithms will fix what humans could not. AI may detect patterns across thousands of judgements, but it cannot bear responsibility for any one of them.

The deepest contradiction is one of trust. The book hopes to build a high-trust society where precedent holds and contracts are sacred. This is hard to reconcile with privileging cultural instincts that are fluid and contested. One cannot ask people to trust in precedent while empowering judges to override it.

Conclusion

The boldness of the project deserves recognition. Unshackling the Elephant is a precise diagnosis of a system that has resisted reform for too long. Many treatments align with modernity. But there is a rebel streak - perhaps born of frustration - that carries risk. Giant shocks may end up killing the elephant rather than reviving it.

References

Prasad, Anand. 2025. Unshackling the Elephant: Transforming Indian Law, Culture and Economy. Bloomsbury India.

Siddarth Raman is Senior Research Lead at XKDR Forum.

Resilience Decoded by Sujata Kelkar Shetty: A review

by Niharika Yadav.

Adolescence is liminal – set apart from childhood where one is shielded by a designated caretaker, or adulthood, where one is thrown headfirst into challenges but armed with experience and agency. Teenage is marked by heightened curiosity and creativity, yet shadowed by susceptibility to impulse, stress, and overstimulation. This period is especially fraught in the contemporary world where digital technologies, social pressures, and the lingering effects of the pandemic converge.

Sujata Kelkar’s new book 'Resilience Decoded' is a timely read and serves as a simple yet impactful guide for parents and caregivers looking to understand and raise resilient adolescents. Kelkar draws on her expertise as a neuroscientist and her experience as a mother to paint a fulsome picture of adolescence – weaving insights from frontier research in adolescent mental health with Indian personal narratives. She argues that the antidote to the rocky road to adolescence is resilience – openness to making mistakes, the ability to experience failure, the capacity to cope with setbacks, and the strength to ‘transform pain into wisdom without letting it steal your softness’.

A succinct read, the book comprises four chapters, each closing with summaries and practical exercises for guardians to engage with their children. These exercises — the 5-Minute Rule, the talk-back method of learning, and the emotional regulation toolkit, among others — provide both insight and a repertoire of functional strategies, reinforcing the book’s central argument for building resilience. The writing is straightforward and jargon-free despite being rooted in scientific research. The frequent variation in structure - from essay-like prose to check boxes and quick bulleted tips – makes the book an easy read for readers and non-readers alike.

The book opens with a basic biological analysis of the teenage brain, likening it to a high-potential, untested Ferrari approaching a rocky road. The metaphor is sharp and continues throughout the book, providing a revelatory parallel. Kelkar argues that a teenage brain is partially developed, relying more on the amygdala (the gas pedal of the brain that drives emotions, impulses, and reward seeking) as compared to the pre-frontal cortex (the brakes of the brain that support planning and impulse control). The teen brain is uniquely sensitive to dopamine, therefore reward seeking, leading teens into high-risk high return situations. This has diverging consequences - while it leads adolescents to explore, undertake new experiences, and learn new activities, it also increases vulnerability to thrill-seeking and addictive behaviours. Similarly, while teenage provides a susceptible window for skill-building, the adolescent brain also faces limitations in executive function, prospective memory, and multi-tasking. The modern world exacerbates these vulnerabilities, with research only recently beginning to provide a full picture of digital harms — social media, online pornography, and video gaming — combined with mounting academic pressure.

The book does not attempt a simplistic answer. Between the two extremes of ignoring the problem and medicalising it, the book argues for a thoughtful approach, rooted in an understanding of science and the human condition. Kelkar pushes caregivers to help adolescents build a culture of resilience. This includes unlearning perfectionism, building a disciplined lifestyle, developing comfort with failure, and moving beyond narratives of victimisation and fairness. Kelkar’s writing distinguishes itself from contemporary self-help discourse and avoids didactic solutioning, binding narratives or a disproportionate focus on correctness and therapy-speak. While she offers activities like co-regulation and affirmation as tools that can be deployed in select circumstances, the fundamental revision she demands is a cultural pivot towards strength and tenacity.

Kelkar talks of resilience not as an antidote to particular challenges adolescents face, but as a disposition they can build to better tackle the variety of challenges that life entails. Resilient parenting means meeting teens with calm and steadiness through life’s ups and downs, much like a driving instructor who stays patient and reassuring when the learner swerves or stalls, helping them find their way back on course with confidence. In making this demand of parents, the book expects resilience from adults too. Parents themselves require both the knowledge and acceptance of life’s randomness, as well as a disproportionate focus on overcoming setbacks, however imperfectly, over preoccupation with injustice and self-pity. It is this overarching outlook towards life that can help adults be better caregivers. In this sense, Kelkar’s book is worthwhile for readers of all ages and identities, who navigate life and look to make sense of it.

There are many small wins the author deserves credit for:

• The book offers a deep understanding of the theory of change among adolescents, building on Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Unlike surface-level linguistic fixes that dominate discourse in pop-psychology, Kelkar argues that teens do not learn by simply being told what to do. They absorb resilience, respect, and calm by watching how parents respond. While words open doors, sustained observation of actions truly helps teens internalize parental strength.

• The book supplements the theory of change with actionable lifestyle solutions that can help build resilience – exercise, nutrition, sleep, and creativity. The book rightly focuses on getting the basics in order. This, Kelkar argues, can go a long way in building cross-generational developmental successes.

• The book approaches risk wisely – neither shunning it nor embracing it without measure. It recommends that parents guide teens’ risk-taking behaviour through open communication, redirecting them towards positive challenges such as leadership opportunities and group tasks, embedded in a scientific understanding of teenage impulses.

• The book successfully avoids alarmist storytelling, tempering any tendency towards reactive prescriptions. Accounts of teen suicides are presented in a balanced manner, offering parents tangible insights. The book equips parents with tools for gauging warning signs of deteriorating mental health among teens, but also goes back to the root of the issue – lifestyle choices coded in resilient thinking that can improve propensity to handle failures.

• Finally, solutions in the book are practical and do not require any external resources. By emphasizing mental remodelling and small changes in day-to-day interactions, the book makes challenges feel both approachable and achievable.

The book also seeks to provide a balanced view of social media. It highlights its positives – like opportunities for community-building and engagement while also drawing on extensive research documenting its adverse effects on teenage mental health. That said, the book leaves room to further delve into several other threads of psychosocial impact of social media on adolescents. Contemporary readers, particularly young parents who actively use social media themselves, may find value in a more detailed exploration. Social media fundamentally rewires the brain to alter attention spans at the expense of memory consolidation, deep reading, and sustained reflection. It increases sensitivity to peer approval and reinforces biases. This has critical implications for cross-gender interactions, which are foundational for adolescent development. Algorithms reinforce existing beliefs, create niche echo chambers, and often contribute to polarisation on social and political issues among young adults. Recent research suggests that GenZ boys and girls hold starkly opposing political beliefs, leading to reduced engagement and growing social gaps. This is especially concerning in the Indian context, where the conversation on cross-gender adolescent interactions is marred with social norms and taboos.

Kelkar rightly advocates for a balanced approach to parenting in the digital age. Rather than imposing blanket bans on smartphones and tablets — devices that many children have already been introduced to, often by their own parents as tools of convenience — she argues for guidance over prohibition. Parents, she suggests, should take an active role in teaching their teenagers how to navigate technology with discernment, communicating openly about both its harms and its benefits. I would add that crucially, this also requires parents to deepen their own understanding of digital culture, so they can offer credible alternatives. For instance, parents should distinguish screen-time with and without narrative. As psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt argues, TV and movies are less harmful than reels and shorts as they engage the mind in a structured way. They are a relatively better alternative to what the book terms as brain rot – which involves mindless scrolling and disconnected dopamine hits. Similarly, parents should encourage teens to replace the reflex of waking up to notifications with the ritual of waking up to a story: keeping a book by the bedside as an invitation to begin the day in a quieter, more intentional way.

While the book urges parents to replace judgement with curiosity, there is more to be said on the issue from an Indian perspective. Indian culture is community-oriented and is yet to cultivate deep respect for individualism and uniqueness. Groupthink is common and we are quick to assume that what works for us should work for everyone else. Judgement, in many ways, is instinctive – used as a tool for social censure and acceptance. Precisely for this reason, it becomes vital for parents to set aside their own notions of what is good, bad, or improper, and create a space where children feel safe to voice even the strangest or most unconventional ideas. Divergent thinking, as the book rightly highlights, is a skill worth nurturing. Beyond that, parents must recognize that the greatest gift they can offer is the absence of rejection or shaming. A non-judgmental environment builds the internal confidence teenagers need to face the world’s ups and downs. This is not to suggest that criticism or opposition has no place; rather, it is about teaching children to engage with dissent without letting it erode their sense of self. The ability to withstand rejection or disagreement while remaining secure in one’s identity is a rare and powerful strength — one that will serve them throughout life.

Parenting guides are often prescriptive to the point of tyranny. Kelkar’s book, by contrast, feels more like a steady companion. It asks little in the way of grand gestures, and instead emphasizes what she calls the “daily work of presence.” For parents, caregivers, and adults seeking to better engage with adolescents, it offers a simple yet insightful weekend read. Fittingly, it closes with a letter from one parent to another, urging them to “hold the line” and continue providing a quiet, trusting sanctuary to their young ones.

Niharika Yadav is a policy consultant based in New Delhi.

Review of "The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World's Largest Political Party" by Bhupender Yadav and Ila Patnaik

by Josh Felman.

In 2014, the BJP secured a remarkable victory. They won an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha elections, the first time any political party had done so in three decades. Then, five years later, they repeated this feat, increasing their majority. Now, they dominate the national landscape in a way not seen since the heyday of the Congress party, half a century ago.

How did this happen? Most analysts give a one-word answer: Modi. Others give a two-word answer: Modi-Shah. Without doubt, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are exceptional politicians and strategists. But life is complicated, and great men cannot entirely determine the course of history.

One reason why the BJP won in a landslide in 2014 is that Congress completely mismanaged the economy. The party proved unable to deal with the fundamental problems that emerged after the Global Financial Crisis, such as the sizeable non-performing loans at the banks. Instead, they tried to resuscitate the economy through lax fiscal and monetary policy, a strategy which failed to revive growth, producing only double-digit inflation. Then came a spate of scandals, and the government became paralyzed, unable to do anything at all.

Even so, it is wrong think that the BJP was merely the accidental beneficiary of Congress' collapse. As this book stresses, the BJP has been rising for a long time.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. So consider the following chart. It shows that despite a notable dip in the 2000s, there has been a clear trend to the BJP's representation in the Lok Sabha. And that trend is upward. The BJP was formed in the 1980s, initially earning just a few seats. By the mid-1990s, it had become the largest party in Parliament.

How can we possibly explain this development? This book provides an answer. Not "the" answer, of course, but a particularly valuable answer, for the explanation comes from a BJP insider. Unlike most books written by politicians, this work avoids the intricacies of long-forgotten debates and refuses to engage in score-settling. Instead, this is a serious work, covering the entire sweep of independent India's history, documented with extensive footnotes -- exactly as one would expect from the co-author, who is a noted, non-political academic. (Full disclosure: I have also been a co-author with Ila Patnaik.)

The aim of the book is to explain how we have arrived at the current political pass. Of course, it does so from a BJP perspective. But that is exactly the need of the moment: we need to understand what the BJP believes, as these beliefs will translate into actions that affect all of us.

So, what explanation does the book provide? Essentially, it argues that the rise of the BJP stems from two factors: its organizational ability and its message. Of the first, the book makes a convincing case. Indeed, no reader – no matter what his or her political view – can finish this book without a sense of awe. It’s not just that the party has come up with one brilliant idea after another, such as "multiplying" their Prime Ministerial candidate by projecting 10-foot holograms of Modi in 200 cities across the country. Even more astounding is the BJP's ground game.

Consider the BJP's strategy for the 2014 election. The party developed a booth management strategy, under which leaders were assigned to every single one of the 1 million voting booths in the country. Each leader supervised around 50 individuals, whose job it was to meet with around 30 voters and convince 15 of them to vote for the BJP.

This arrangement required an incredible amount of effort, coordination – and manpower. Simple arithmetic shows that 50 leaders for 1 million booths required no less than 50 million party workers. For the 2019 election, the party mobilized 110 million members. How on earth did the BJP manage to convince so many people to work so hard for the party?

One strategy has been to convince members that they are part of a family. They even have a slogan for this: Mera Parivar, Bhajpa Parivar (My family is the BJP family.) In practice, this means that the life of a party worker is dominated by an endless calendar of events: campaigns, followed by political activities, interspersed with visits from seniors. Particularly strenuous efforts are made to nourish connexions amongst members from all strata of the party, with seniors being asked to share meals with workers on their visits to the regions.

Another strategy is to employ the highly motivated swayamsevaks (volunteers) of the RSS. The authors are unequivocal about the links between the RSS and the BJP. They emphasize that the predecessor of the BJP, the Jana Sangh, was founded with the explicit purpose of giving a political voice to the RSS' vision for India. And they note that the BJP was born when the leaders of the Jana Sangh were forced to choose between their commitment to the RSS philosophy and their political career in the Janata Party. They chose to stay true to their ideology.

The devotion to this ideology remains strong to this day. Prime Minister Modi has said, 'I am connected to the mission and not ambition. In my life, mission is everything, not ambition'.

So, what exactly is this mission? Put another way, if the second reason for the BJP’s success is that it has developed an attractive message, what exactly is that message?

In some areas, the book gives a clear answer. It says that right from the start the BJP has focused on the fight against corruption. Its first major success came in 1987 when it was able to pin the Bofors scandal on the Congress Party, accusing their senior officials of taking bribes in return for granting a large defence contract. In 2002, Venkaiah Naidu became BJP President partly on the strength of his credentials as convener of an anti-corruption movement in Andhra Pradesh. And of course corruption was a major theme of the 2014 election.

Another key element of the BJP mission, according to the book, is improving the standard of living of the poor, the people whom the Jana Sangh used to call the 'last man in line'. The Modi government came up with a particularly effective way of doing this, by providing the poor with tangible benefits such as LPG gas cylinders and toilets – and cash transfers, paid directly to newly created Jan Dhan bank accounts. These programs created a direct link between the party and the poor, earning in particular the loyalty of female voters.

In other areas, however, the book is much less precise. For example, we are told repeatedly that the BJP believes in "nationalism". But it is not clear what this means. After all, Congress is also a nationalist party; indeed, they led the independence movement against the British.

Some commentators claim that the BJP's nationalism is different because it is a communitarian vision, focusing on building a Hindu nation-state. The BJP strenuously denies this charge. Indeed, the word Hindutva is not to be found anywhere in this book. Instead, the BJP views itself as the party of true secularism, devoted to the principle that no group should be treated differently by the state. Accordingly, they oppose triple talak divorce and special status for Kashmir – because these policies treat different groups differently.

But this argument sits uneasily with the claim that the BJP believes in 'cultural nationalism'. The book takes great pains to stress that this phrase refers to an all-Indian culture, coming out of many traditions: Hindu, Muslim, even Western. But the only traditions the BJP has mobilized to defend – at least the only ones mentioned in the book are Hindu traditions.

Particularly striking is the framing of the dispute over whether to build a Ram temple on land where a mosque was standing. As the book puts it, for the BJP, Ayodhya was not a land dispute; "it was a mission to unite India with the thread of cultural nationalism". The argument seems to be that the country should have united behind this plan, since it honoured an important tradition, the place where Lord Ram was reputed to be born. But many people did not see things this way, and the dispute proved enormously divisive.

That said, the BJP's message of cultural nationalism does resonate with a significant section of the population, giving it a compelling message to go with its superb organization and millions of devoted members. That makes the BJP a formidable vote-getting machine. No wonder it has just risen and risen.

But history teaches that a relentless rise is often followed by a disastrous fall. Indeed, one doesn't have to look very far to see an example of this process at work. Right after independence the Congress Party bestrode the political landscape like a colossus, winning 364 out of the 489 contested seats in the first parliamentary election. But since the 1970s it has gradually decayed, to the point where it holds only 52 seats in the current Lok Sabha.

The BJP has thought long and hard about this example, concluding that Congress declined because it failed to nourish its roots during its long period in power. To make sure this doesn’t happen to them, the BJP not only pays considerable attention to sustaining morale amongst its party members (as already mentioned); it also takes great care to avoid the perils of dynastic leadership. The BJP offers a clear path for ambitious young supporters, who can start with party work, progress to a role in government, and then take up role of an elder statesman. To ensure that this career ladder is not blocked by elderly seniors, members are expected to step aside from active operational roles once they reach the age of 75. It will be interesting to see whether this practice continues, now that the party has a firm hold on power.

Beyond the constant need to replenish the party with new energy, the BJP faces another challenge, one that will be even more difficult to manage: it must meet the needs of the nation. Without doubt, the BJP has found a way to satisfy what we could call 'Cultural India'. But meeting the needs of Aspirational India, the hundreds of millions of young people looking to find good jobs and raise their living standards, will be a far more difficult task.

The current government is fully aware of this problem, having inherited an economy that was in shambles. Accordingly, it has implemented reform after reform, including Inflation Targeting, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, and the Goods and Services Tax. But the economy has still failed to take off, as investment has remained stubbornly low.

So far, there have been no political consequences, as the public has accepted that it will take time to restore an economy that was in such bad shape when the current government arrived. But the BJP knows that at some point, the public will demand results.

Accordingly in 2020, the government decided to change tack, abandoning the post-1991 policy of opening up the economy in favour of a new approach, Atmanirbhar Bharat ('Self-Reliant India'), whereby tariffs are being increased to encourage import substitution while production subsidies are being given to firms selected by the government. It is still early days, but there is little in India’s history or that of Asia more generally that suggests this strategy is likely to work. In that case, trouble for the BJP may lie ahead.

For far too long, the nature of the BJP has remained a mystery to the English-reading public. Finally, we have an authoritative presentation of their point of view, one that allows us to understand better how the BJP has risen and what it believes. For anyone who wants to understand how India arrived at the current juncture – and where it is likely to go in the future – this book is a must read. Buy it and read it carefully.

 

Josh Felman is the principal at JH Consulting.

Review of "The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World's Largest Political Party" by Bhupender Yadav and Ila Patnaik

by Ajay Shah.

The INC emerged as the dominant party after independence. A similar phenomenon was seen in other countries, e.g. the PRI in Mexico. With the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha election results, the BJP emerged as a dominant force in Indian politics. For everyone interested in India, we need to learn more about the sources of this success, and about the nature of the BJP as a political party and as an organisation. Many books about the BJP have been written. I found the new book insightful and thought provoking; it has many new ideas, it made me think in new ways, it changed the way I see the world.

Many simple stories are told about the rise of the BJP, e.g. around nationalism. I have been skeptical about the extent to which these can be at work. After all, `National' is the middle name of the INC, and after winning the war in Bangladesh in December 1971, Indira Gandhi's INC rapidly collapsed into a political crisis in 1973-1975. Perhaps we underestimate voters, perhaps we are too ready to impute base passions upon voters. We need to think more about the forces at work.

An insightful path for thinking about the world is to see the role of organisations, of teams of humans that come together to achieve complex tasks. To understand an organisation, we must understand the mechanisms of information, incentives and power that bind the group of people together, and generate actions by each person that are adequately consistent with the objectives of the organisation. This way of thinking yields insights about for-profit firms, into the large magnitudes of resources that are used by Indian state organisations which fail to deliver on their organisational objectives, and also into political parties. It encourages us to think about deeper forces rather than concepts like popularity of individuals or the passions of the street. In the book, I found new insights into the BJP as an organisation.

In this organisation-oriented approach to the evolution of Indian party politics, we would tell a story where in 1947, the INC was the only game in town. It had built a complex organisation under highly adverse conditions, of British rule, of a low probability of personnel achieving personal benefits from political activism, and of limited resourcing owing to the fear of rich people. The organisation design of the INC, that worked 1919-1962, broke down thereafter. The arrangement of information, incentives and power, that worked for the freedom movement and for the early decades after independence, were no longer optimal for the later period. In parallel with this decline of the INC as an organisation, the book tells the story of how the BJP built a more effective organisation design.

A major theme of the book is political mobilisation of the masses. A hundred years ago, Gandhiji got people to get involved, to march on streets, to turn the other cheek when faced with state violence. In a lost age, people walked many kilometres to catch a tiny glimpse of Nehru and hear a raspy voice crackling in loudspeakers. The precise recipes for mobilisation change over the years. When the people lost interest in listening to politicians, there was not enough fundamental thinking; many organisation people tried to cover up for the loss of interest through manufactured crowds. When I have been in political rallies in India, I have often seen listless people.

The BJP innovated with an array of process methods for political mobilisation. Whether it is a yatra or a divas, they have developed clear names and process methods for a continuous heartbeat of political mobilisation that is now taking place all across the country. Regardless of the extent to which there is a base that is ideologically motivated, a lot of people are attracted by the drum beat of activity and a sense of belonging to a club. The massive scale of mobilisation activity all around the country helps pull in enough voters who would otherwise be non-ideological, to get to the 37% vote share.

There is an ironic link between INC welfarism and BJP mobilisation. The Indian left and the INC focused the union government towards welfare, and built the UIDAI system. The BJP has built a remarkable system for reminding the recipient of welfare, all around the country, that the subsidy has come from Mr. Modi. We marvel at the complexity of information processing, in getting precise and personalised facts out to millions of party workers who talk with hundreds of millions of voters. These were unintended consequences of the emphasis in the Indian state upon subsidies and not public goods.

In understanding India, we need to think more about the BJP. We have to look beyond the `crests of foam that the waves of history carry on their strong backs'. Bhupender Yadav and Ila Patnaik have written a valuable book which helps us understand the phenomenon and direct our curiosity into a new set of questions.