The story hunter: Rahul Bhatia on narrative and nation building

Hindustan Times

22-06-2025

Dear Reader, Rahul Bhatia and M. Rajshekhar ( head of the table L to R).
On a Sunday morning at the Taj Mahal Tea House—a cozy Mumbai café known for its pakoras, chaat, and fine teas—we are just settling into a discussion of our book of the month when our attention is caught by two men at the next table. Deep in conversation, they pass a hardcover book between them—sometimes poring over its pages, sometimes examining the cover with care.
Curiosity gets the better of us. After a few failed attempts to identify the title, one of our group finally leans over and asks, 'Forgive us for butting in—we're a book club and just had to ask, what book is that?'
One of the men smiles. 'It's a new book—you're the first people to ask us about it in public. This is the author, Rahul Bhatia.'
And so we meet Rahul Bhatia and fellow journalist M. Rajshekhar, and get an unexpected first look at The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy, a book that would go on to become a New York Times Notable Book of 2024 and the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Kerala Literature Festival. Soon we're all seated at the same table, and conversation flows easily, as it often does among book lovers.
That serendipitous encounter leads to an unforgettable conversation with Rahul Bhatia—and later, a masterclass at NMIMS Mumbai with my MBA students—on journalism, power, and the narratives that shape modern India. In an era of contested facts and fragmented attention, Bhatia reminds us that stories, rigorously reported and responsibly told, are how we make sense of power. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation: Rahul Bhatia with MBA students at NMIMS, Mumbai.
You grew up in Dubai. Tell us about your childhood reading.
My parents worked at banks in Dubai—my mother worked in the treasury department, and my father was in information technology. My mother loved jokes and puns, and so our home was filled with books of limericks, joke books, books full of insults, and comics—mostly Mad magazine and Asterix. My father preferred National Geographic and PC Magazine.
My mother tried hard to get me to read the classics, but my attention wandered. I tried Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, but they did nothing for me. I kept returning to teenage detective stories, Clarke, Asimov, and all the science fiction I could find.
You studied design at the Pratt Institute, New York, worked as Art Director at Ogilvy and Mather, but ended up finding your calling in journalism. You've written for Reuters, Cricinfo, Tehelka, Mint, The Caravan, The Guardian, The New York Times. What draws you to this profession?
It's the relationships, the personal growth, the getting to know sources over months of interviews. It's that feeling that everything in the world is available for me to write about. I am obsessed with writing things down as they happen. The narrative really, really matters. Today you find powerful people exerting a great amount of narrative control, because it allows them to shape reality in a certain way.
The truth is much more complicated, but it's not something that you see often, and I wanted to put all of that together.
You've written on politics, tech, godmen, industry and cricket. How do you choose your stories?
Back in 2011, one of my editors at The Caravan said, 'Why don't you write a story on Arnab Goswami?'
I spent five months interviewing dozens of current and former employees. Some genuinely admired him—but over 98% described horror upon horror inside the newsroom. You don't get that kind of consistency from people with just an axe to grind. There was something else going on.
When the story came out, I was a little nervous. I'd never written about someone with such a public persona. I didn't know how he'd react.
Apparently—for a brief while—Times Now considered suing The Caravan and me. But their legal advice was: don't. Everything was fact-checked.
Once you've done that kind of story and survived, the natural question becomes: what next? One assignment was investigating why bridges kept collapsing across India. Another was about N. Srinivasan, who headed India Cements and became the boss of Indian cricket.
Writing about cricket became a way to study power—how men gain it, use it, misuse it. It was almost sociological, revealing the workings of our society.
Because you can't control outcomes, but it's really important to write down what happened. The more complex and layered, the better. The story should have strong characters, something should happen to them, there should be an antagonist of some kind, and there should be a journey. I wonder if I can play around with time, with transitions, with mood. Each story has to be harder than the last. There's no point in doing it otherwise.
In your book, The Identity Project, you weave together the story of Aadhaar cards, citizenship laws, and the interminable wait of riot victims for justice along with a history of the far right. How did this book happen?
I had just written a piece about Facebook Free Basics, which was really Facebook's way of creating a version of the internet that had Facebook at the centre.
Reporting it was interesting because I saw how policy is created in India. I spoke to people who had conversations with the government, who were in the room where persuasion actually happened, and it was like nothing I had ever heard of in my life.(Read the story for more.) I felt like somebody had just said, 'there's a secret door, and we'll let you peep in for a little while'. And it blew my mind to see how the government interacts with industry. You hear about it sometimes with India's large companies. But this was Facebook behaving a little clumsily, so they were not able to cover their tracks in the way that more subtle operators would. I wrote about it.
A friend who read this story advised me to look at Aadhaar. He was right. Critics were being threatened, reporters were complaining of dropped stories, and serious data leaks were being downplayed.
Eventually, I realised this needed my full focus—so I quit my job at Reuters to write the book.
Aadhaar was pitched as India's digital utopia. Your reporting reveals it became something darker?
As I explored Aadhaar's origins, I discovered an intriguing parallel with an identical ID project commissioned by LK Advani in 2000, almost ten years before Aadhaar. Now that Advani had emerged as a potentially major character in the book, I tried to understand his motivations. That took me into the world of the Hindu Right, its beliefs, and the methods of its supporters. The book expanded from an Aadhaar story to a story about callousness, about the implementation of powerful surveillance technology in a country that occasionally unleashes horrific violence on its own citizens.
Your book shows how Aadhaar's critics were erased. How does that happen?
I spoke with reporters, economists, and lawyers who were disheartened by the role the press played. They told me of news stories that were carried in the opinion section, of the press's unwillingness to dig deeper into the numbers used to justify Aadhaar. Reporters explained what simply never made it into the papers. That's the subtext here: if it doesn't exist in the news section, it doesn't exist at all. At the same time, critics were disinvited from conferences, they received legal notices.
You've written about Goswami, Nilekani, the Government and godmen—have you ever been threatened?
I think there is this fear that if you annoy power, something bad will happen. But the truth is, if you take the longer term view, which is that if I don't write about power, it just becomes more powerful, and my environment becomes more and more unequal.
I have a family that worries every single time I have a big story coming out. But what is the alternative? It is to just be quiet, to do nothing. But if you think in terms of society at large, you feel like, okay, I need to write this. I need to write about a person who doesn't have a voice. You tell yourself: I'll do it—and trust that the environment will protect me.
There is another kind of censorship as well, isn't there—the kind of being systematically ignored. Your book has made it to NYT's top list of 2024 books. But the coverage of your book in India seems to have been quite subdued?
Yes, I have been told about things like this. About people calling, saying, Just don't invite this person to your literary festival. Just don't review this book. It's a very modern kind of censorship. You don't really know whether you're being censored or not, and that messes with your mind. Like, sometimes I was telling somebody, Have I written the book I think I have, or am I just overestimating myself? After putting in the years of work, you're like, there's an external force that is making you doubt yourself.
I am grateful for what I've got so far. The book has been reviewed by the NYT, the Guardian, the Times, the Economist, and other places; serious academics are writing about it; a scholar is using it as a basis for a serious essay about violence; school kids and college students are reading it. This is more than I could ask for.
Does having been published internationally and having written for publications like the Guardian, The New Yorker and the NYT give you more credibility ?
It works two ways. Yes, each of these names is a gatekeeper of some sort, and if you have gone through that gate, you acquire a certain something.
But again, having written for some of these places can also be seen in countries like ours as a marker of elitism. And not just elitism, but also like, Oh, you're anti-national. So it's double edged.
Despite all you've uncovered about manipulation and censorship, you keep going. What gives you faith that truth still wins—and how can our readers become part of that fight?
If you want to do something, you can't always do it on your own. You need allies, and the press is an ally.
When I was working on my Facebook story, I reached out to people who were in a position to see a lot and maybe unhappy. Sometimes they don't know who to talk to, and you reach out to them, and you're like, these are the publications I worked for. So that marks you out as a serious sort of writer.
It turns out that there are a ton of people who really don't agree with what's happening in their companies. And they will slip you little bits of information, and they'll tell you, This is all I can do. Now, go talk to other people. Sometimes, that's all you need—you don't need a full-blown whistleblower. You just need somebody to point you in the right direction.
..............
Ninety minutes later, it's time to wrap up. But the students cluster around Rahul Bhatia, reluctant to let go. One asks: 'I'd love to be a writer, but my family says it's not financially viable—what would you advise?'
'You can't do a traditional cost-benefit analysis on this,' he replies. 'You have to ask: what do you want to be remembered for? What's your legacy?'
And so it goes on, until at last he must go away, leaving behind a sense of courage and inspiration in the air. And also a set of book recommendations.
Rahul Bhatia's Book Recommendations
1. Despite the State by M. Rajshekhar
Why? A brilliant exploration of why Indian states fail, written in an engaging travelogue style.
2. Stasiland by Anna Funder
Why? A gripping account of life under East Germany's surveillance regime, relevant for understanding state control.
3. Works by Supriya Sharma
Why? Her election travelogues offer deep insights into Indian politics through grassroots conversations.
Begin this list with reading The Identity Project, with the story of Nisar who looks for justice in a nation where democracy is under threat. And write to us with your picks, your favourite books on politics and current events.
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at [e-mail]. The views expressed are personal.)