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Political scientist Srirupa Roy’s incisive book The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism shows how India’s experience from the Emergency up to the emergence of leaders like Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal can explain why the world has become enamoured with self-proclaimed outsiders who wish to “cure” democracy. Her work helps explain the success of rising political figures like Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam.

If populism is a “thin-centered ideology” or worldview of political and social life as a Manichean moral combat between a unitary and pure people and a dissolute and corrupt elite/system, then we need to understand how it both converges and conflicts with other, existing and older, ideas of the people: the central subject of modern political thought and practice.

If we take such an approach, two things quickly become evident. First, an investigation of populism’s backstory that goes beyond the immediate moment of electoral victories by distinctive new campaigns of angry politics in the name of a newly assertive political subject, “the people,” leads us to plenty of banal, bureaucratic-institutional processes and influences as well that have also fueled populism’s rise. In other words, it is not just an overtly emotional and exceptional politics of anger that produces...

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