The author, who had just won the Booker Prize, found herself inadvertently cast as a cultural ambassador for the aggressive New India when a BJP-led Hindu nationalist government came to power in 1998 and conducted a series of nuclear tests. Feeling that keeping quiet was as political as speaking out, she wrote her first essay, The End of Imagination, which was published in two major mass-circulation magazines and labelled her a traitor and anti-national. This set her off on a long writing journey, entwining her fiction and nonfiction in ways that they can no longer be separated. Her essays were viewed with suspicion by some, but quickly translated into other Indian languages and distributed for free in places off the highway, where readers had an entirely different idea of what literature is or should be. The author believes that the place for literature is built by writers and readers, and that literature should provide shelter of all kinds.

The text discusses the current state of the media in India, stating that mainstream media houses are unlikely to publish essays critical of corporate advertisers. The author argues that the combination of the free market, fascism, and the so-called free press has led India away from democracy. The article highlights two recent events that illustrate this point: the BBC documentary "India: The Modi Question" and the Hindenburg Report, which exposed wrongdoing by India's biggest corporation, the Adani group. The Indian media portrayed these events as attacks on Prime Minister Modi and industrialist Gautam Adani, and the author suggests that Indian investigation agencies and media are unable to investigate or publish such stories. The article concludes by noting that in the current atmosphere of pseudo hyper-nationalism, foreign media coverage of such issues is often portrayed as an attack on Indian sovereignty.

The first episode of the BBC film The Modi Question focuses on the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, India, which saw at least 2,000 people murdered. The film also covers the 20-year legal journey of some victims seeking justice and political accountability. The documentary includes eyewitness testimonies, including Imtiyaz Pathan, who lost ten members of his family in the Gulbarg Society massacre. The film also reveals an internal report commissioned by the British Foreign Office in 2002, which estimated the number of deaths and called the massacre a pre-planned pogrom. The Modi government has banned the film, and social media platforms have taken down all links and references to it.

The Hindenburg Report accuses the Adani Group of engaging in a “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme”, which – through the use of offshore shell entities – artificially overvalued its key listed companies and inflated the net worth of its chairman. According to the report, seven of Adani’s listed companies are overvalued by more than 85%. Modi and Adani have known each other for decades. Their friendship was consolidated after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

Gautam Adani, an Indian industrialist, supported Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Gujarat riots in 2002 and helped establish the Gujarat Model of "development," which is characterised by violent Hindu nationalism and corporate money. Adani's wealth has grown from $8 billion to $137 billion during Modi's nine-year tenure, and his company, the Adani Group, controls a significant portion of India's shipping ports, airports, and power plants. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's ruling party, introduced electoral bonds in 2016, allowing corporations to fund political parties anonymously, and has become the party with the largest share of corporate funding. Meanwhile, Oxfam has reported that the top 10% of India's population holds 77% of the total national wealth, and 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth. Amnesty International and other NGOs in India have been harassed into shutting down.

Despite concerns about Indian Prime Minister Modi's human rights record, Western leaders such as President Biden and President Macron have continued to engage with him and even announced a major aircraft deal with India. Modi has also been feted during state visits to the US and France, despite his role in the Gujarat pogrom and ongoing violence against Muslims and Christians in India.

They would have known about the hounding of opposition politicians, students, human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, some of whom have received long prison sentences, about the attacks on universities by police and suspected Hindu nationalists, the rewriting of history textbooks, the banning of films, the shutdown of Amnesty International India, the raid on the India offices of the BBC, the activists, journalists and government critics placed on mysterious no-fly lists and the pressure on academics, both Indian and foreign.

They would have known that India now ranks at 161 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, that many of the best Indian journalists have been hounded out of the mainstream media and that journalists could soon be subjected to a censorial regulatory regime in which a government-appointed body will have the power to decide whether media reports and commentary about the government are fake or misleading. And the new IT law that is designed to shut down dissent on social media.

They would have known about the sword-wielding, violent Hindu vigilante mobs who regularly and openly call for the annihilation of Muslims and the rape of Muslim women".

They would have known about the situation in Kashmir, which beginning in 2019 was subjected to a monthslong communication blackout – the longest internet shutdown in a democracy – and whose journalists suffer harassment, arrest and interrogation. Nobody in the 21st century should have to live as they do, with a boot on their throats.

They would have known about the Citizenship Amendment Act passed in 2019 that barefacedly discriminates against Muslims, the massive protests that it touched off and how those protests only ended after dozens of Muslims were killed the following year by Hindu mobs in Delhi (which, incidentally, took place while President Donald Trump was in town on a state visit, and about which he uttered not a word). They would have known about how the Delhi police forced grievously injured young Muslim men who were lying on the street to sing the Indian National Anthem while they prodded and kicked them. One of them died subsequently.

The author highlights the hypocrisy of world powers who continue to support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi despite the rise of Hindu extremism and violence against Muslims in India. The author argues that this is a form of racism and that the dismantling of democracy in India will have global consequences. The author also notes recent events in India that demonstrate the erosion of democracy and warns that it is time to take action.

The text describes instances of violence and discrimination against Muslims in India. In Manipur, two women were handed over to a mob by a partisan police force and were gang-raped. In Maharashtra, a Railway Protection Force Officer shot Muslim passengers on a train and called for people to vote for Modi. A Hindu vigilante called for a religious march through a Muslim-majority settlement, which resulted in violence and the murder of six people. The state has responded by bulldozing Muslim settlements and causing families to flee. The prime minister has not commented on these incidents, which are seen as part of an election campaign to further polarize the population.

A video has surfaced of a teacher in a small school in India making a Muslim child stand while Hindu students slap him. The Muslim family has been pressured not to press charges and the boy has been taken out of school. The author argues that India has become a fascist state, with support from Hindus living abroad. The responsibility to stand up against this lies with everyone, as dissent will soon be shut down if Modi wins in 2024.