x-social-media-round-icon

Rahul Shivshankar

Author. Essayist. Journalist.

About

Author and journalist Rahul Shivshankar’s nearly 3-decade long career spans print, broadcast and digital media. He has is the author of Modi & INDIA: 2024 and the Battle for Bharat. The book is published by Penguin Random House.

Rahul is presently a consulting editor with Network18 where he anchors a nightly primetime opinion show, The Hard Facts, on CNN-News18Rahul began his career as a print reporter, pounding the streets and then Delhi’s courtrooms for stories. As a beat reporter for the Times of India over 20 years ago, he broke a record number of stories and after 13 months he was promoted to the edit page as one of the youngest-ever leader writers at the paper.

But TV beckoned. As a broadcast journalist Rahul has served as the Editor-In-Chief of Times Now between December 2016 and June 2023. Under his editorship Times Now won several “Channel of the Year” awards. Apart from playing a pivotal role in steering the channel, Rahul also conceived and anchored India Upfront, a 60-minute nightly debate show that topped the ratings. The show echoed Rahul’s commitment to bringing back the focus on hard facts that separate news from rhetoric. India Upfront won several TV excellence awards.

In the recent past, Rahul has interviewed many heads of government and newsmakers,  including Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, Benjamin Netanyahu, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Mike Pompeo, Anthony Fauci among others. In 2005, when Rahul was part of the original core team that launched Times Now, he was widely acclaimed for his coverage of the 2011 Mumbai terror attacks. His coverage secured him an invite to contribute to an anthology of hard-hitting investigative narratives about the event, 26/11 Mumbai Attacked, published by Roli Books.

New Book Release

Modi & India

The year 2014 was a consequential one for the Bharatiya Janata Party and for India. Will 2024 also be so?

Is this election about stopping the rise of Narendra Modi and his alleged distortion of the ‘idea of India’ as conceived by its founders or the beginning of a dharma-inspired ‘second republic?’

In 2014 the BJP, under the leadership of Modi, won a clear majority in the Lok Sabha elections. The National Democratic Alliance’s triumph ended a nearly two-and-a-half-decade run of mostly messy coalition governments. In 2019 the BJP further improved its tally, cementing its parliamentary majority and its ability to ring-in transformational laws and policies. Most of the initiatives taken by the Modi-led NDA have been aimed at positioning Bharat as a ‘Vishwa Guru’ – an exemplar of moral righteousness, a pluralistic democracy led by dharma and drawing sustenance from the wellspring of an eternal Hindu universalism.

But this shift towards India’s Hindu ethos has prompted the opposition and many allied commentators to fear the rise of a second republic – a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ – moored to an implacable ultra-nationalist and majoritarian dogma. The INDIA alliance has declared the 2024 election as the last opportunity to stop the rise of Modi and his idea of India.

Evocative, anecdotal, argumentative and deeply researched, Modi and India: 2024 and the Battle for Bharat chronicles the emergence of, and the battle for, a new republic in the making.

Get in Touch