| Book Name | The End of India |
| Author | Khushwant Singh |
| Publish Year | 2003 |
| Publisher | Nigarishat |
| Language | Urdu |
| Genre | Politics |
| ISBN | NA |
| Download | Link |
Review: The End of India
This is the Urdu translation of Khushwant singh's latest controversial book The End of India, The End of India provides a fearless, sometimes vulgar, admission and realistic portrayal of the cumulative growth of Hindu extremism in India, especially through the past two decades. I call it an "admission" - before anything else - insofar as Singh does not write like some highbrow, accusatory outsider to the Indian cauldron; he views himself as much a victim as a default social accessory to the declining communal situation in India."India is going to the dogs," he screams, adding, "and unless a miracle saves us, the country will break up. It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri" (pp 3-4).
The immediate cause for Singh's despondence is the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the politics that followed them. In the riots, Hindus mutilated and sexually tortured a great many Muslims in addition to massacring more than 3,000 of them, often with the support of the state. The riots themselves were in retaliation against the torching of a train allegedly performed by some Muslim miscreants at the railway station in Godhra. The fire killed scores of politically mobilized Hindus that were going by the train to the controversial religious site of Ayodhya.
"The carnage in Gujarat ... and the subsequent landslide victory of Narendra Modi in the elections will spell doom for our country," Singh warns (p 3). Throughout the rest of the book, however, he goes well beyond auditing the forces of Hindutva to give us a sketch of the evolution of the religious question through the regional history of the state of Punjab, the subcontinental Independence Movement, and the history of post-colonial India.
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