Tinderbox

The Unpredictable Rise and Uncertain Future of Modern India

By: Sadanand Dhume

A devastating critique of India’s failure to fulfil its founding promises.

Since claiming independence from the British Empire in 1947, India has dramatically changed its nature and its place on the world stage. Today, it is common knowledge that the country glitters with formidable potential.

India is the largest democracy in the world and it has the third-most billionaires after the US and China. It is predicted it will have the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, the largest middle class by 2033 and the third biggest navy by 2035. India boasts a raft of savvy English-speaking academics and business-leaders, an army of talented software engineers and a youthful population buzzing with ideas and ambition.

But can all that India has promised – to itself and the wider world – come to fruition?

In Tinderbox, acclaimed Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume takes a hard look at the country’s progress and potential, bringing together a view of politics, history, economic thinking and social attitudes. Dhume points to why the economic progress of India is stuttering, with a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the desires of its technocrats and its politicians; he shows how democracy is fraying, Hindu nationalism cutting away at the nation’s fabled pluralism; and he accounts for the country’s continuing paradox of astonishing contradictions, what with its record-numbers of billionaires and mass poverty, its technological advances but overall lack of access to electricity and clean water.

In short, it’s time to revisit the view that India’s growth and progress will continue at its prophesied pace. And it’s time to overturn the widespread assumption that a familiar India will remain familiar.

©2026 Sadanand Dhume

Critic reviews

PRAISE FOR SADANAND DHUME’S MY FRIEND THE FANATIC

‘Easily the best account by a journalist writing on Islam in contemporary Indonesia. Sadanand Dhume has really done the stuff, met the believers and extremists, and found out what drives them and what they plan for us all. With humor and style, he draws us into the world of radical preachers, hotheads, and youthful idealists, showing how militant Islamism has won the sympathy of a growing number of ordinary Indonesians. A wonderful book, entertaining and alarming in equal measure’
Andrew Beatty, author of A Shadow Falls: In the Heart of Java

‘Guides the reader deftly through the whirlpool these [radical Islamist] currents have created’
Wall Street Journal

‘At once funny, sad, and unpretentiously intellectual, this fine book tells us much about Indonesia and about Islamism’
Robert W. Hefner, Far Eastern Economic Review

‘My Friend the Fanatic should be required reading for anyone interested in the rise of radicalism in Indonesia, or in similar movements in other parts of the Muslim world’
Jamie F. Metzl, senior fellow at the Asia Society and author of Genesis Code