Preface

This book is the scholarly edition of the India Power Atlas, a research programme that measures the distribution of political, social, economic and institutional power in contemporary India. Its question is narrow and, we hope, precise: across the arenas in which power over India is exercised, what share is held by actors aligned with Hindutva, the Hindu-nationalist political tradition, and what share is held by everyone else?

The Atlas does not ask whether that distribution is good or bad. It asks what the distribution is, how it was measured, and how far the measurement can be trusted. Each of its 40 arenas is presented in a chapter of its own, with the indicators used, their weights, the resulting reading and the exhibits of evidence on which it rests: shares by side, the largest actors, money-flow diagrams and time series. Part X reproduces the figures of the 15 underlying studies, from the master map of money flows to the calibration of the classification. A reader who rejects a weight or a coding decision can see exactly where it enters and what it changes.

Disclosure. The Atlas is published by The Hindutva Project, an organisation that is itself a participant in the politics it describes. We state this at the outset so that readers can weigh the work accordingly. The interactive edition, which allows every weight and assumption to be changed and the results recomputed, is available at thehindutvarebellion.org. The data behind every chapter can be downloaded from the same site; Appendix D explains how.

The readings in this edition are the Atlas's baseline readings as of 2 Nov 2026 (Atlas rev 9.40). They will change as the evidence changes. Corrections and challenges to any figure are welcome and will be acknowledged in later editions.