Editorial Note, Jan-Feb, 2023

6 December 2022 marked the completion of thirty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which heralded a major transformation of India’s polity with a former right-wing fringe rising to dominance riding on a majoritarian and communal agenda. That transformation occurred alongside a rapid shift towards a neoliberal economic policy regime, that cemented a loosely structured compact between the State and big business, both collaborating with international finance capital. Put together these two transitions defined, in the thought and practice of a right-wing elite, a ‘new India’, which fundamentally differed from the idea of a nation that the Indian Constitution-framers thought they had fashioned. This issue of Social Scientist focuses on understanding the forces that drove the tendencies that led up to the demolition of Babri Masjid, the ways through which they gathered strength and established dominance, and the means, often authoritarian and brutal, through which they seek to reinforce and sustain their positions of power using a divisive, majoritarian agenda.