Hansen doesn't quite get it. He looks at the Indian political scence using Eurocentric categories, without caring to analyze the control the bureaucracy holds on the strings of power and the alienation of wide classes of people. His arguments explaining the rise of the Hindu parties are not convincing. He has not examined the effect that Pakistani policies and the contiuing Islamic terrorism have had on Hindu morale.

Hansen's "Saffron Wave" is among the best of the recent spate of publications on the rise of the BJP and transformation of the Indian political landscape that has accompanied it. Based on a comprehensive incorporation of previous scholarship as well as a great deal of field-work primarily in Maharashtra state, Hansen is in absolute control of his material. Indeed, though the introduction is a bit clogged with "theoretical" ruminations, even the Lacanianism is put to good use. Thus, what seems at first gratuitous and extraneous to the argument, is well integrated over the course of the text and enables some Hansen's richest insights into the sort of mentality that is responsible for, among many things besides, the sort of indecent ranting seen in the review above.

Not only does "A reader" go on and on at inordinate length for an online review, but he/she also cannot punctuate. Seriously, a review such as this is typical of the present situation whereby any attempt to analyze and criticize present-day Hindu nationalists is countered not by argument but by the assertion of the radically community specific truth. It should be stated from the first that the "we" of his review has no definite reference but is itself a coercive move to define who is and who is not a member of the nation and of Hinduism. Does the review tell one anything about the book? Does it question its facts and sources? Does it begin to engage its argument? No. Rather, the shrillness of the invocation of Darwin with its overtones of brute survivalism sets the tone for another tirade in what has of late become all too familiar a vein. This is why these online reviews are so often useless. Among other things, it precludes others, such as myself, from doing anything more than parrying the grossest puerility. The problem of the book is precisely its inability to grapple fully with the eviseration of considered public discourse in South Asia, as most everywhere else, in the present. Nevertheless, it is a very solid beginning in a literature still finding its bearings.