India’s democracy, once celebrated as an unprecedented experiment in pluralism and participatory nation building, now faces a grave crisis. In this urgent and penetrating work, veteran journalist Prem Shankar Jha traces how the country’s hard-won democracy—rooted in diversity and tolerance—has been steadily hollowed out since Independence—slowly at first, and since 2014, with determined ferocity. Structural flaws in our Constitution, like the lack of state-funded elections, Jha argues, were made substantially worse by Indira Gandhi’s ban on company donations to political parties. As parties increasingly turned to clandestine donors for election financing, politics became a near-criminal enterprise, facilitating the rise of a predatory state long before 2014. And now, under the Modi regime, the weaponization of state agencies, the serious undermining of electoral processes and the transformation of governance into a tool of political vendetta threaten to tear down the last remnants of India’s democracy.