When Religious Mafia & Rightwing Extremists Take Over (w/ Rollo Romig) | The Chris Hedges Report

The 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, is indicative of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide that is now infecting the United States.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

One of the most stark examples of the expanding tide of authoritarianism worldwide was the 2017 murder of Gauri Lankesh, an Indian journalist and activist, allegedly assassinated by a far-right religious group in India for her fearless journalism.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Rollo Romig, a journalist whose Pulitzer Prize-finalist book, I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Ruse of Autocracy in India, examines the historic and political context of Lankesh’s murder.

Romig chronicles the rise of Hindu nationalist extremism in India, linking it to India’s current authoritarian policies under Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The group accused of Lankesh’s assassination, Sanatan Sanstha, operates on the vision “of making India an officially Hindu country and, equally importantly, relegating all non-Hindus to second-class citizenship and ostracizing, particularly, Muslims from Hindu society,” according to Romig.

Much like in the United States, Romig and Hedges argue that such fringe groups serve a strategic purpose of mainstreaming extremist ideologies that ultimately benefit the ruling class. Gauri’s work represented a threat to far-right political movements in India and she was often subjected to fierce intimidation campaigns, including, as the title of Romig’s book suggests, being placed on murder hit lists.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

The rise of authoritarian regimes has made the work of journalists, or at least those journalists who still believe it is our job to hold the powerful to account, deadlier and deadlier. One of the journalistic legends we lost is Gauri Lankesh, the editor and publisher of a Bangalore weekly, The Gauri Lankesh Patrike. She was a fierce and uncompromising critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP party (Bharatiya Janata Party). Her defiance, although her publication did not have a wide audience and was written in the local dialect, saw her assassinated in September 2017 outside her home.

These regimes seek to stamp out the truth, even when it smolders on the far edges of the media landscape. Those who will not be cowed and intimidated are silenced, either by prison or assassination.

India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter. Two to three journalists a year are killed. Journalists are smeared in well-orchestrated campaigns of character assassination by state-controlled media as traitors and enemies of Hinduism. The government regularly shuts down social media, television stations, and newspapers, especially in places like Kashmir. Reporters' phones are tapped. They are harassed in big and small ways, including being denied hotel rooms, hit with lawsuits and receiving constant death threats.

The ruling BJP is allied with some 30 far-right Hindu groups who subscribe to the virulent brand of Hindu nationalism. These groups carry out lynchings, bombings, mob attacks, rape, dismemberment, incarceration, and hanging to silence opponents and terrorize Muslims.

According to the 2024 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranked 151st out of 180 countries. The United States is ranked 57th.

Gauri’s assassination ignited protests and vigils throughout India. Posters and giant, colorful puppets proclaimed “I am Gauri.” None of these tactics are confined, however, to India. They are the familiar methods employed by all authoritarian regimes, including the emergent authoritarianism in the United States.

Joining me to discuss the life and work of Gauri Lankesh and its ramification for India, and for us, is Rollo Romig. He manages the Solutions Insights Lab at Solutions Journalism Network. His book on Gauri, I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Ruse of Autocracy in India, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, in 2025.

So this story is, which I think the power of the book is that you just peel back every layer of the onion to get to all of the internal mechanisms that go into the reconfiguring of Indian democracy into an authoritarian or an ethno-nationalist Hindu state. And boy, it just resonates with everything that's happening in the United States.

Let's just lay out who Gauri was, what made her so unique aside from her deep integrity and courage and what she was up against. There was one point in the book where you were talking about or you were quoting her and she talked about her love of multiculturalism and pluralism, all of the things that go to create a functioning society, open society, all of which of course we are now seeing taken from us.

But just, for those who haven't read the book, talk about her and talk about what she did and why she was so unique.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, thanks Chris. I really felt she was an extraordinary person. It was a privilege to be able to spend so much time immersed in her life. And it's interesting because as you noted, her platform was actually pretty small. Her newspaper had a small circulation. She was really struggling by the end of her life. Journalists everywhere are struggling to keep their publications afloat. And even in the weeks right before she was killed, she thought she was probably going to have to close her paper permanently.

So that was immediately a really interesting question to me, that there was such an incredible outpouring, especially in Bangalore, her home city, in response to her murder, even though the thing that she was most noted for, doing journalism, had become increasingly a struggle for her to even continue doing.

And one thing I really realized as I looked into it wasn't just that tens of thousands of people came out in the streets of Bangalore after she was murdered. It was the incredible variety of people who came out. People from every religious group, people from every walk of life, from street sweepers to students to trans people. And she seemed to have touched all these different groups. It was, to a degree, a surprise to even her closest friends and family. And that was really interesting to me.

And what I eventually learned about her was I think such an important lesson for extraordinary people in general that often we misidentify their talents or what's most significant about them. And of course since her job title was journalist, there's this assumption especially in the international coverage of her murder that what was most notable about her was that she was a journalist and that she was maybe one of India's biggest journalists.

Of course her role as a journalist was incredibly important, but that was just one thing. First of all, she increasingly saw herself as a journalist activist. Or even at the end of her life, she kind of flipped the equation. She described herself as an activist journalist. And she increasingly saw her journalism as in service to her activism, primarily on a number of issues, but especially as you note this idea of defending a pluralist India. It's an incredibly diverse country, not least religiously, and the erosion of this pluralism, the attacks on this pluralism really unnerved her and worried her.

And so she really focused on that by the end of her life as an activist and a journalist. It was a real shift for her because she started her career as a much more conventional journalist, working for big national English language papers. Doing solid work but in a pretty like you know traditional approach striving for neutrality keeping her political opinions to herself.

She really came to a band in that position completely by the end of her life and we're really radicalized her was, maybe more than anything, was that she shifted to writing in her local language, Kannada, which really put her… You know, I've heard Indian journalists say before when you're writing in English, you don't know who your audience is. It could be anyone around the world. It's this amorphous audience.

When you're writing in a specific local language in India, you know exactly who your audience is, and you're directly in conversation with them, and they're directly in conversation with you in return. That makes you especially dangerous, though. And it's no accident that nearly all of the journalists, the many journalists who've been killed in India over the decades, have been journalists writing in languages other than English.

Chris Hedges

I just want to interrupt you there because I found that a fascinating point because we have to remember that the BJP controls all of the major media platforms, including, of course, the electronic media. So they saturate the media landscape. And I mean, I didn't know this until I read your book. And yet the people they obviously fear the most are these figures like Gauri. Why?

Rollo Romig

Well, you're right that they have enormous control over the national media and they exert pressure in every way that you can imagine. And you give a long list of the ways that they mention that's not even, it goes on, you know, tax raids on newsrooms who go against the ruling party line, terrorism charges against specific journalists, especially if they're Muslim.

I mean, even Arundhati Roy, one of India's most internationally famous novelists, has a terrorism case against her for something she said in a speech over ten years ago. No one seriously believes that Arundhati Roy is guilty of terrorism. The illogic of it is part of the point, you know? But yeah, so they have enormous control, enormous sway over the big national publications, particularly in Hindi, which is the biggest language in India, but not even a majority language in India. There's so many big languages in India.

But they can't control everyone. It's too big, it's too diverse, there's too much dissent, you know? So it's impossible for them to keep everyone down. And then these local journalists are in much more direct contact with not just their readers, but with the local problems that are happening on the ground and actually have a chance… I mean, this is just a lesson for all of us everywhere. It's the local journalists that have a lot more of an ability to affect change actually in an immediate way. We all, in these big countries, India and the U.S,. we all tend to be so much more focused on national politics, national media, national news stories. But where do things actually make a difference?

So often this engagement of things on, this obsession with things on a national level leaves us feeling completely impotent. When actually the areas in which we can actually affect change and where we can see change happen is in our local level. And that's where, I mean, you know, I'll tell you for myself personally, just getting more engaged in local politics is just giving me life right now.

It's saving me from despair of just my complete impotence in the face of all these horrors that we're seeing on the national level. And that's where you keep the flame alive is in these local struggles. So they recognize this.

Chris Hedges

But it's interesting that these monolithic forces will target people within the media landscape, and as you said, her paper was, I mean, she didn't have much reach. She was writing in a fairly obscure dialect. And yet they were terrified of her.

Rollo Romig

Yeah. And it's interesting because there's this whole... So the people who seem to have killed her, the trial's ongoing because the trial actually started three years ago, but the Indian justice system is incredibly slow. And the lawyers for the defense have been using every tactic possible to slow things down. If you're determined to slow a trial down, it's actually very easy to do so in India. There are many ways of doing it.

Chris Hedges

I think in the book you quote somebody who says a good lawyer can keep this going for 10, 15 years, the trial.

Rollo Romig

Exactly. So we'll see how long it takes. I mean the murder happened in 2017. The police arrested so far a total of 17 men for conspiring to kill Gauri, mostly in 2018. That's seven years ago. This trial is trying to get through hundreds of witnesses. In this, over seven years, many have forgotten what they knew. Many have turned hostile under pressure.

But all these men who have been accused of conspiring to kill Gauri were associated in one way or another with this fringe religious group called Sanatan Sanstha. They're based in Goa, this ashram out of Goa. They're led by this guru who's very reclusive, hasn't been seen publicly in decades.

And they're not officially a part of the government but they are very politically aligned with the government. They've got the same political program as the BJP government, which is this program, as you mentioned, Hindutva, and specifically this question of a Hindu Rashtra, which just means Hindu nation. This idea, basically, of making India an officially Hindu country and, equally importantly, relegating all non-Hindus to second-class citizenship and ostracizing, particularly, Muslims from Hindu society.

And they're very much in line with the BJP in this program. The BJP has actually made a lot of progress with that agenda. And it's one of these things, we see this same dynamic here in the U.S. with so-called fringe groups in relation to the kind of Republican establishment and its whole constellation of organizations, think tanks, et cetera. These fringe groups say outrageous things, they do outrageous things but they're pushing the window of what's acceptable to say.

And then the kind of conventional parties are able to embrace them or distance themselves from these fringe groups depending on how the wind is blowing politically. Narendra Modi, this group, Sanatan Sanstha, that's been associated with not just this murder, but a series of murders, a series of four murders of writers, as well as a long series of terrorist bombings particularly of movies and plays that they disagreed with that they found offensive for one way or another.

Narendra Modi actually sent a letter of congratulation to their yearly convention about 10 years ago and his regrets that he couldn't make it in his support for their cause. So we see that here with all these groups. You see [Donald] Trump's whole dance with these white supremacists, embracing them, distancing himself from them. It's all part of the program.

Chris Hedges

You raise a really important point. You talk at one point in the book about the traditional mafia in India and how they were much easier to break until the mafia became religious, which is of course what you're describing and what we are experiencing here, because it's not just the rhetoric they push, but it's acts of violence.

And you know, I don't want to draw too many parallels to the early years of Nazism, but that's the role of the Brownshirts. So if you look closely, Hitler, when he was chancellor, kept distancing himself and even at a certain point condemning actions of the Brownshirts, but the Brownshirts, the Nazi militia which had three million members, was doing precisely what you just said.

They kept pushing the boundaries, pushing the boundaries in the service of this radical agenda that was embraced by the fascists or is embraced by Modi. So let's just talk a little bit about that transformation of the underworld because these people come out of the underworld. That's the interesting thing. And I covered Al-Qaeda for the New York Times. And the traditional profile of an Al-Qaeda member was that they were a criminal.

They came out of the criminal class. They didn't come out of religious households. They weren't raised in strict Muslim households.

Rollo Romig

They're largely ignorant of religion.

Chris Hedges

They're largely ignorant of religion. And having written a book on the Christian right, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, and being a divinity school graduate, the same is true here and the same is true in India, which is the point that you make in the book. So talk about that.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's a strong religious motivation among these men who conspired to assassinate Gauri. But these are men who are hungry for instruction in religion and hungry for instruction in life. These guys weren't scholars. They were waiting to be told by people who supposedly knew better what the scriptures say and importantly how to interpret the scriptures.

So, this guru who I referred to, Jayant Balaji, who's this reclusive guru of this group, he… and by the way, he's completely been untouched by this. You know, he's been investigated pretty lackadaisically a few times over the years. Never been charged with anything.

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt you because wasn't there, I think I have this right, there was like a flood or a rainstorm. And in the neighboring field, they found like thousands of used condoms that had washed down out of his compound.

Rollo Romig

That's right. Exactly. And then there was another time that, I'm glad they're enjoying themselves, but it kind of, it indicates...

Chris Hedges

Well, probably at the expense of a lot of women.

Rollo Romig

Well right and it indicates this kind of cult-like environment in this place, they've often been described as a cult. I'm no expert on cults but the Sanatan Sanstha actually fits a lot of the hallmarks. And one of the few times that the ashram was actually raided after one of these bombings that they were associated with, they found enormous quantities of psychotropic drugs on the premises.

Many people have noted that before he became a guru, he was a trained hypnotherapist. So you could use your imagination there on how that works. And they're often, when people join the group, and especially when they join the ashram, they're strongly encouraged to distance themselves from their families.

Chris Hedges

That's true with all cults. And the Christian right does the same thing, by the way.

Rollo Romig

That’s true, all those hallmarks. Sorry, I forget where I was going with that, with the initial question.

Chris Hedges

Well, we were talking about the religious, you know, these people who essentially present themselves as religious jihadists. Actually, they tend not to come out of a strong religious tradition. They tend to come out of the criminal class. And then you were talking about how they are essentially indoctrinated.

And just to make the correlation with the Christian right having spent a lot of time with them as soon as they knew I was a divinity school graduate, they never wanted to speak about the Bible, and I think this is the point you make in your book, because they don't know the Bible. They know those particular passages or lines that they have been fed to bolster their ideological orientation but it's a very selective kind of literacy and I think that's the point you're making too.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, absolutely. And so that was part of the program too, in this ashram. One of the members who got out of the ashram, and one of few people who's actually spoken publicly about getting out of that situation, said that they were actually strongly discouraged from reading Hindu scriptures at all. And you can see why. That they were only supposed to read the guru's interpretations of the scriptures.

And he actually wrote a book that several of the conspirators were found in possession of, that is… It's an outrageous book. It's actually written in English, so there's no loss in translation. I've read the book. And it is a manual for murder in the name of murder. It's as direct as you possibly could imagine. It's a program for identifying suspects to kill and how to go about shooting them. And he repeatedly says things like, you may think I'm speaking metaphorically here. I'm not. I'm talking about literally killing people. And yet he still remains untouched.

So this is how he's interpreting the scriptures. So yeah, and this is interpreting things like the Mahabharata, which is one of the great Hindu epics, one of the great works of literature from human history. And it's, of course, about a war. And most Hindu teachers are going to tell you that this is metaphorical, you know. It's not about literally killing people. It's about internal struggles and so on.

But of course his interpretation is always about literal violence in defense of the religion. And it's interesting, like what you say about the kind of ignorance of the religion among a lot of these people who are even willing to go so far as to kill in the name of their religion, that one of the things that seems to agitate this group the most is when they perceived blasphemy on the part of various speakers, including Gauri.

Like, it seemed like really motivated them to kill Gauri was the sense that she had blasphemed Hinduism. There's actually no concept of blasphemy in Hinduism until incredibly recently. Have any Hindus talked about blasphemy? It's a concept from the Abrahamic tradition. And so you see this thing also where, like, Hindutva's greatest enemy is Islam.

But in their, I don't know what it is, in their obsession with Islam, they're increasingly mimicking what they see in Islam and borrowing concepts from Islam and codifying their religion into a more Abrahamic and in many ways more Islamic form.

Chris Hedges

Yeah and she held up these multicultural events where nuns were doing, it's in your book, Hindu dances. And at one point she said she wants to go visit friends and get a good plate of beef, which, of course, Hindus are not supposed to eat beef.

Rollo Romig

Right. Although there's a lot of disagreement even among Hindus on that point, you know?

Chris Hedges

Yes, there you go. But I want to talk about social media. So you have these assassins who come out of this kind of fringe group that, of course, is tolerated and sanctioned by the BJP for the reasons we talked about. But social media plays a big role in demonizing her and demonizing those who are seen as opponents of Hindu nationalism.

Rollo Romig

Absolutely. So there are very targeted, very ugly social media campaigns against any critics of the government. And you mentioned how Indian journalists are often targeted very directly in kind of like state-controlled media. Another thing that happens is they actually have a troll army employed by the government, they euphemistically refer to it as the IT cell.

Chris Hedges

That's what the Israelis do, by the way.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, so they have a whole bureau that's devoted to trolling critics on the internet and on social media in the ugliest terms imaginable. And of course they're particularly ugly in the way that they go after women journalists with rape threats. Some of these things we don't know the origin of them, but you know Muslim women journalists come in for just unbelievably ugly... Trolling isn't even the word for it. I mean they're having their faces pasted by AI [artificial intelligence] onto pornography clips and circulated. They're holding mock auctions for their right to rape Muslim women journalists.

It's just as ugly as you can possibly imagine, and many of this is actually orchestrated directly by the government. And Gauri was, of course, a constant subject of these kinds of attacks on social media. Nonetheless, she was a devoted social media user. She was such a true believer, even as she despaired of the fascist direction that her country had gone in, and knew better than anyone how ugly and violent things had gotten, she was still a true believer in that just dialogue could get through to people.

So she would actually respond to her trolls and invite them out for coffee, you know, to have a conversation. They never took her up on it, but this kind of spoke to just her belief that she wouldn't hold a grudge even against someone who'd kind of verbally assaulted her.

Chris Hedges

She was Hindu. I mean, and one of the things I learned covering war is that the first people who are assassinated, this is certainly true in the war in Bosnia, by for instance the Serbs, or in this case the Croats, were not the Muslims on the other side of town because they wanted to essentially create a kind of parallel radicalism or fanaticism. It was those within their own community, like Gauri, who insisted on building bridges with demonized communities. Those were the first people to be killed.

Rollo Romig

That's 100% correct. And so when these guys were putting together a hit list, and by the way the title of the book is I Am On The Hit List, this is actually a quote from Gauri. This was a joke that she would make. She and her friends figured there was an assassination list because there were writers being assassinated by similar patterns. And they would kind of calculate with gallows humor who might be next and she would jokingly say I am on the hit list.

Unfortunately she was correct both that she was on the list and that there was, there were these literal lists. But when they were putting together these lists, the police found that different members of the conspiracy would propose possible targets. And the leaders said, no, don't include Muslims, don't include communists. What we're after is Hindus. We're after Hindu traitors is our first target for exactly the reasons that you're saying.

It's interesting though, the question of whether Gauri was a Hindu is kind of an open question. She would have said no. She was an atheist, first of all. But she came out of this tradition, just because of how complex India is, she was a Lingayat. Her family came from this Lingayat background, and the Lingayat community is very divided over whether they are Hindus or not.

This was a really hot political topic at the moment that she was killed, too. And she was agitating for the idea that Lingayats are not Hindus. Lingayats have a fascinating history of being one of the first prominent, adamantly anti-caste groups. I'm talking the 11th century, and many of them died for their overt opposition to caste in all its forms. They would orchestrate weddings between Brahmins and so-called untouchables, much to the outrage of many of their contemporaries.

And even today, their whole approach is very highly debated but they have an incredible millennium-long history of progressivism and also incredible poetry. They were all known as poets too. It's really worth looking up Lingayat poetry. A.K. Ramanujan has a gorgeous book of Lingayat poetry in translation from the 11th century that was actually a huge influence on many American poets when it came out.

Chris Hedges

Well Gauri’s father was a poet, among other things.

Rollo Romig

Absolutely. Yeah, very prominent poet.

Chris Hedges

You should have written a book about him, you can do that next.

Rollo Romig

Yes, exactly. Fascinating guy.

Chris Hedges

He was great I mean you have a wonderful profile of him in there. I just want to read this passage I told you before that so many of the undercurrents, you know, the changing demographics, the alienation, the rise of IT with a money class that's not rooted in the traditions of the city.

Pankaj Mishra does a wonderful job explaining all of this in his book, The Age of Anger. You write,

“The murder of Gauri Lankesh offers a key to India's current crisis and its many facets. The dysfunction and capture of India's entire judicial system, from policing to trial, the collapse of the press under the pressure of the ruling party, the increasing criminalization of all dissent, the dominance of an enormously popular demagogue, who leads an ultra-nationalist movement that seeks, among other things, to obliterate regional and religious variety in favor of homogenized Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu nation, in which hundreds of millions of non-Hindus are to be second-class citizens, and the real danger of genocide, as the forces of hate are further empowered and emboldened. The situation is, I fear, much worse than even many engaged observers realize. And Gauri's story illustrates how it got there and where it's going.”

Well, I mean, I read that and I wonder if you're not writing about the United States. But let's talk a little bit about what the BJP has done to Indian democracy, especially with Modi. And I mean, you do go into it in the book, but the roots of this, the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], the militia that fed the political party, overtly copied, in particular Benito Mussolini's fascism, this wasn't, this was the model.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, absolutely. So they've had this century-long program that they've been very methodically working towards. We can see the parallel there with the Republican Party here, how they've played a really long game. And that many of these ideas that, again, I always want to put the word fringe in quotes, these “fringe” ideas, they're not fringe anymore.

Both there and here, you know, they're mainstream ideas now. They're outrageous ideas. They're offensive ideas. But they're not fringe anymore. But yeah, like you said, the BJP, whose parent organization is the RSS, this paramilitary group, that's actually, I've heard that it's the largest organization of any kind in the world.

It's got untold members of Indians, and they're paramilitary in that they conduct these military drills. That's kind of what they're most known for. It's also like a show of force. They often do it in public squares, these quasi-military drills. There are many different groups who are associated with the RSS. The BJP is their political arm and they took direct inspiration from the fascist movement as it was happening when the organization was being built in the 1920s and 1930s.

And you made the allusion earlier to like Nazi comparisons in the U.S. and we all try to be a little careful by going too far with that. I'm feeling like a lot of us were scolded for making Nazi comparisons during the first Trump term. I think we should have listened to those a little more, because now we can see the truth of them a lot more clearly. There's an extremely direct lineage with this stuff, and there's a playbook with this stuff.

And Modi and Trump are taking cues from each other. They're close allies. So the BJP had this program. They were not a popular political group. When they first came along, they looked like they were going nowhere, but slowly built support, often through violence.

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt you there. They also built support because the ruling Congress party, like the Democratic party, became disconnected from the rest of the Indian population and phenomenally corrupt. Again, those parallels struck me when I read your book.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, absolutely. I think the Congress Party and the Democratic Party have a lot in common. The Congress Party started off as being the party of the freedom movement. It was the party of [Mahatma] Gandhi and [Jawaharlal] Nehru. But like any party that actually won revolutionary freedom for a country, it's only downhill from there. And so over the years, they've really embarrassed themselves. And now it's really difficult to identify what they stand for.

The BJP vilifies them as the party that only cares about Muslims. Unfortunately, the Congress Party actually does very little for Muslims. They're scared to actually stand up for Muslims by and large because they're scared of that criticism. By the way, India has one of the very largest Muslim populations in the entire world.

It's 200 million Muslims in India. It's the largest minority of any kind in the world. And second only to Pakistan, and I'm sorry, second only to Indonesia, probably equal to Pakistan, maybe even a little more Muslims in India than Pakistan. And so the threat to Muslims there, it's a threat to this incredibly large population, equal to two thirds of the United States that's being vilified, ostracized, segregated in their own country with a playbook that very often resembles Jim Crow in the United States and all of its particulars, including the criminalization of intermarriage in many cases across religious lines.

So yeah, it's been this long program. And you're right, the Congress Party's failings left an enormous opening for the BJP. A lot of people voted for the BJP at first and even now because they want to see reform. They just want to see something different from the Congress Party which dominated.

Chris Hedges

Well, that's why people voted for Trump, a lot of them.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of these people aren't dyed in the wool white supremacists, but they're very unhappy with how things are going. I don't want to downplay, though, the appeal that authoritarianism has to a lot of people. I mean, I think that liberals often underestimate that authoritarianism actually has a very enthusiastic constituency.

People who want the strong man who claims that he can fix everything. That there is actually a large constituent of people who don't like democracy and who want an autocratic ruler.

Chris Hedges

Well, this goes back to the whole cult, because if you read Margaret Singer's Cults in Our Midst, and if you think of Trump or Modi as a cult figure, then what they do makes sense, because in a cult, you want your cult leader to be omnipotent, completely all-powerful, because the cult leader, in your own sense of powerlessness, the cult leader becomes your ability to be empowered. It’s completely different from a political party.

That's why I thought that your highlighting of the cult that spawned these assassins was so important. But the dynamics of a cult are such that, you're right, that the attraction is less and less freedom, more and more control by the demagogue or the cult leader to compensate for your own sense of frustration, stagnation, powerless, and that's what Singer, in her book on cults, writes.

Rollo Romig

Yeah, that's right. And the fact that Trump so frequently says things that are nonsensical, outrageous, offensive, that's actually part of the program. I mean I think he's operating by instinct, by and large, but it's kind of a test of how committed you are to the cult, if you're able to integrate things that are absolutely indefensible. And yeah, a lot of people are passing that test, right now.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about what this did to India. I mean, one of the things that I didn't know until I read your book was that newspapers are thriving in India. They're not thriving anywhere else. How many are there? Like, what did you, there was some incredible number of…

Rollo Romig

Oh god, I don't remember the number. It's always, since it's now the largest country in the world too by population, it's always a little bit difficult to have perspective in those numbers. But even by any metric, even just by per capita, the number of newspapers, their variety in languages is just incredible. There's no parallel anywhere in the world.

And yeah, there's definitely been erosion of physical newspaper readership with the rise of smartphones. A lot slower than virtually anywhere else, though. And it's an interesting paradox because we've been talking about how incredibly threatened Indian journalism is, and it's absolutely true, and yet it's still thriving in many ways as a profession. And so what accounts for that?

It's an interesting question. Partly the press appears to be a lot more free than it is. There's a lot more restriction on... it doesn't look censored often, because a lot of the censorship happens very quietly and behind the scenes. There's also still a lot of really remarkably brave journalists who are just persisting in this environment. I find it just astonishing, and it's really what my whole book is built on, you know?

Like, I couldn't have written a sentence of my book without the work of these hundreds of Indian journalists who my bibliography is devoted to. It's all just built on their work, you know? Like, obviously, I did the shoe leather thing in India a lot. I covered a lot of ground talking to people, but it would have been nothing without building on these journalists who are doing what they do under incredible personal threat.

I have no, there's no equivalent for me in terms of the personal threat. It's easy for me to parachute in there and do my work. And so I really tried to see it as an opportunity to kind of leverage my privilege there to elevate what these really brave journalists who are doing what they're doing under enormous price, to elevate and platform what they're saying and the work they're doing.

Chris Hedges

When you talked about the cult figure, I ran into this little passage in your book about,

“For the national stage, Modi expanded his use of holograms, broadcasting his image to a hundred locations at a time. His speaking style had become famous-macho, authoritative, sarcastic, sometimes almost scolding, always delivered as a direct address to common people. He likes to refer to himself in the third person. ‘Modi does not lose, does not die,’ and often boasts, especially about his tireless work ethic, but also about his mythic childhood and feats of daring. He has claimed that as a boy, he liked to swim in a lake full of crocodiles and that he's able to survive the ingestion of any kind of poison like Trump and like Gauri, he had a penchant for assigning insulting nicknames to his opponents.”

I just wanted to pick up that passage. Probably the difference between Trump and Modi is I don't sense that Modi is as stupid as Trump.

Rollo Romig

No, he’s much smarter.

Chris Hedges

It actually strikes me as pretty unfrighteningly intelligent like JD Vance. But again, I mean just to pick up on that sense of we have to stop looking at these figures as political leaders, but as cult leaders. And that passage sort of, I think, illustrates that. I mean, these assassinations, and it's not just Gauri and others, they're designed to send a message. I mean, they're not just designed to silence a voice. And that message, I sense from your book, works.

Rollo Romig

Oh yeah, I mean it's definitely had a chilling effect. How could it not? You know, I can't blame people for being chilled by this. There's so many people I spoke to who found out that they were on these lists, like after the police. And this is the thing, you know, so this is a large conspiracy where they charged 18 people, arrested 17. The 18th is still on the run.

But it came out in the interrogations that they'd actually trained dozens of young men in violent techniques in shooting, in bombing, to line them up for future attacks. And it was really unclear even after they'd kind of broken the conspiracy, like did this still have enough legs to keep going? Would the murders continue? These assassinations in this particular pattern have not continued. There were four in a row spread out over several years.

Chris Hedges

And can I just interrupt you, I got this from your book. The methods were all the same. It was a motorbike, it was a 7.62, what do you call them, ghost guns. Each one was a replica of the next.

Rollo Romig

Exactly, exact same MO [modus operandi], exactly right. And so it was pretty clear there was a pattern there. Weird thing was, no one took credit for these murders. Which is actually, India unfortunately has a long history of political assassination, much like the U.S. But what it used to be in the old days when there were major political assassinations, it would be usually very famous figures and the person who committed the assassination would usually surrender and then say why they did it, you know? I mean, that's what happened with Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse.

Chris Hedges

Who, and I don't want to keep interrupting you, who the BJP and the RSS hold up as a hero.

Rollo Romig

Absolutely. So that's a big shift now. This is a big narrative change where now they malign Gandhi as much as possible. Are there reasons to criticize Gandhi? Sure, but those aren't the points that they're criticizing him on. They're criticizing him as being, you know, they have this whole narrative that he's submissive to Muslims and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, Godse is now, like they erect statues to Godse, they praise him as a patriot. This has become mainstream.

Chris Hedges

This is the assassin. This is Gandhi's assassin.

Rollo Romig

This is Gandhi's assassin. It's become a mainstream position within the last decade to praise him as a hero. So when he, in court, he delivered actually quite eloquently, even though his reasons were horrific, he defended his position very straightforwardly. It was published as a book, you know, Godse’s defense.

Gauri’s killers, it was baffling until the police actually tracked it down. Why did they do this? And so it didn't, there were all these theories on what the specific message that was being sent was. No one knew what the specific message was. But I think the point is, like you're saying, the point wasn't a specific message.

The point was to instill a more generalized fear and a more generalized chilling effect. And it became a thing where, to this day, journalists get, part of the trolling is to send messages to journalists and say what happened to Gauri Lankesh is going to happen to you.

Chris Hedges

Right. And is this coming to us?

Rollo Romig

Yeah, when I wrote that passage that you read earlier and pointed out that it sounds like I could have been describing what's happening here now. Certainly didn't imagine that at the time that I wrote it. I wrote it before Trump came back. The book was published before Trump came back. Now it feels like it's frightening to me how much what I described in that book seems to be describing what happened here. In many ways it feels like we're speed running this program.

Yeah, I can't say what's gonna happen next. What I can say is we have to watch out for this playbook and be ready for what's next. Because they move fast and they do 20 different things at once. And it's so easy for these things to happen and for them to barely register because they know how to not just dominate a news cycle, but completely overwhelm it.

So that some of the most outrageous things don't even really make it to the news or penetrate the general consciousness of citizens. And so we have to think ahead, actually. We have to study these playbooks and how they've been pulled out, because they're going through these things point by point.

Obviously, there was a program, Project 2025. It was often dismissed how much this would be a program, including by Trump. And now we can see that they're working through it very systematically, just the way that the BJP has worked through this century-long program very systematically and very effectively.

And so it's not enough for us to respond. It's actually impossible at the speed in which they're doing it because it's so easy to break things if you have decided that you're willing to do that. It's not enough for us just to respond to things being broken. We have to think ahead, what is the next thing they're going to target and shore up defenses around that thing.

Chris Hedges

Right. Thanks, Rollo. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Sofia [Menemenlis], Max [Jones], and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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