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This is more than a work of non-fiction. It is a tour de force of Democracy as it gradually transforms from an empowering tool to a millstone around the neck of India’s poorest millions. Nowhere is the phenomenon more distinct than the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. A political formation led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has managed to stay in power there since 1977 without losing an election, whether to the national Parliament or the local panchayati raj body. What is most amazing is that the secret of their invincibility-an admixture of terror and deception-has gone virtually uninvestigated owing to a conspiracy of silence imposed on the collective conscious by India’s institutions of free inquiry. To mark his twentieth year as a journalist, the author returns to his home state, Bengal, to find a province of 80 million rendered the last outpost of Stalinism anywhere in the world. He discovers people brutalized and their culture laid waste by a pernicious system that relies on violence, intimidation and election manipulation for self preservation.