By Amol Rajan/London

A similar but infinitely more alarming process is under way in the world’s greatest democracy. Last week, Penguin India, an arm of Penguin Random House, agreed to destroy all unsold copies in India of The Hindus: An Alternative History by the University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger.

This came as part of a court-supervised settlement in a legal case against Penguin by a bunch of cowards called Shiksha Andolan Bachao, or the Save Education Movement.

An excellent analysis for the Financial Times by Amy Kazmin showed how this censorship has spread like a plague across India. In 2004, the authorities banned a history of Shivaji, a 17th-century king, after Hindu bigots attacked the library in which its author consulted manuscripts. Two years later, Maqbool Fida Husain, perhaps India’s greatest living artist, was forced into exile because his works, which sometimes depicted Hindu deities naked, were vandalised.

Just this January, a book about Air India was withdrawn, and Bloomsbury apologised after a former aviation minister got twitchy about its contents; and the High Court in Calcutta suppressed a book about a real-estate conglomerate, while fearing reprisal.

There are countless more examples. What unites them is a pattern of Hindu extremist aggression meeting with success. This is urgent and desperately sad. Urgent, because in May Narendra Modi, the highly competent chief minister of Gujarat who specialises in insulting Muslims, will probably be elected the country’s leader, much to the pleasure of those extremists. And desperately sad because of what India is.

When Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the “tryst with destiny” that marked the birth of this nation, he emphasised pluralism and tolerance. The Constitution declared India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic. With regular failings, India has strived to meet Karl Popper’s vision of an open society, with nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan and Christians as Australia, and a crazy experiment in democracy that gave 788mn people the right to vote.

But the spirit of Nehru and his fellow founding fathers has faded. India is now engaged in its own culture wars, and the good guys aren’t winning. The great divide among nations today isn’t so much ideological as between those that are open or closed in the face of globalisation.

And for those of us who savour its intellectual heritage, the closing of the Indian mind is a catastrophe. In fact, it’s beginning to feel like we’ve got three months to save the spirit of a great nation.- London Evening Standard

♦ Amol Rajan is the editor of The Independent newspaper in London. Twitter.com/amolrajan