India’s liberal intellectuals might be unknowing participants in a grand hoax, according to Perry Anderson’s The Indian Ideology. That hoax is India’s secular democracy, which is eagerly marketed as the world’s largest and most diverse, but in reality is soiled and riven by chauvinistic politics, religious parties, a calcified caste system, and the ongoing catastrophe of Kashmir. Anderson traces India’s near-irreconcilable contradictions to its independence and Partition, offering a stunning indictment of the Indian National Congress (INC), Hindu anti-colonial leaders including Mohandas Gandhi and his political partner Jawaharlal Nehru, and British administrators.

Anderson describes Gandhi as “a first-class organizer and fundraiser,” though also “temperamentally in many ways an autocrat,” and for whom his peculiar brand of “religion mattered more than politics.” A talented and charismatic communicator, he helped transform INC into a Hindu-dominated popular political party, rendering India’s secularity a farce. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was an upper-caste dandy who “had few political ideas of his own,” and could be trusted “not to challenge [Gandhi’s] authority if he chose to exercise it.” He is the one who Anderson holds chiefly responsible for using the favor of the British and its crooked electoral architecture to alienate the Muslim minority and undercut socialists, while enshrining a tradition of hereditary politics that India continues to suffer from to this day.

To Anderson, India is a hopelessly impoverished and divided country, rife with corruption and nepotism and bloody from communal violence and pogroms against Muslims. It is this judgment that has left Anderson contemptuous of liberal Indian intellectuals who produce glowing tributes to their country.