Indian democracy has many a fault-line, says Patwant Singh in The Second Partition, from Hay House India (www.hayhouse.co.in). Sixty years ago, India was partitioned. "Somewhere along the way India got partitioned a second time without the world � or even Indians themselves � knowing it. So what we have now is two Indias," he says. The first is `the prosperous power with global aspirations’, comprising `the country’s top stratum and the middle classes’. And the second has the rest of the population � `starving, malnourished, subject to untreated disease, often unemployed and homeless, with infant and maternal mortality as daily realities’.

Singh finds that poverty’s grip has not loosened despite all persuasive arguments advanced to prove it has. "The face India presents to the world is startlingly different from the faces of its people mirrored in the slums and shanties of urban and rural areas, or seen on the streets of its teeming cities � faces that India’s politicians and wealthy prefer not to see."

Woeful numbers that the author cites in a chapter on health include these: "The country has only half the number of community health-care facilities it should have, and of these, 38 per cent lack the medical personnel required. Nagaland has just 500 doctors for two million people… One woman dies five minutes from pregnancy-related problems." The public health system suffers the most from `unprincipled politicians’, frets Singh. They have "no compunction in shifting the location of primary health centres from where people need them most to where they might better serve their own electoral prospects."

Given India’s continuing neglect of the poor, and its widespread corruption, bad governance, obsessive militarisation, and religious polarisation, will we ever come out of the darkness that threatens our future? Posing this question in the epilogue, the author wraps with his fond hope "that India’s future lies in the hands of those many men and women who have moral clarity, deep convictions, and an abiding respect for decencies in public life."