In calling India’s intellectual class "anti-India", driven by their antipathy towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, Salvatore Babones, an American sociologist, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, and a respected writer, has caused quite a flutter.

While his observations about Modi and India under him have been effusively welcomed by the Hindu right because they align with their views, there are also those who reject them out of hand. Professor Babones has called India’s democracy “extraordinarily successful” and offered specific markers why he thinks so.

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