It is amply clear from the title of the book that it deals with Islamism in contemporary India. But how should one define contemporary India? Can it be defined in terms of time period from a particular date onwards or within a larger structural problematic, which signifies a radical break, a kind of watershed that clearly marks a distinct departure from the ‘past’ and indeed identifies with our contemporary present. I identify the ‘neoliberal dispensation’ in India as a marker of ‘contemporary India’, which can be clearly distinguished from the pre-neoliberal phase of Indian history and politics. The major politico-ideological currents that precede the making of contemporary neoliberal India are the Nehruvian model of state-capitalism, secularism and the Congress system in the 1950s and 1960s, the fragmentation of the Congress system with a gradual transition to regionalization from late 1960s till mid-1980s and subsequently the rise of Mandir, Mandal and Market from late 1980s onwards, symbolically expressing the politics of majoritarian communalism, the politics of backward and lower castes and the policies of neoliberal economic reforms.

The neoliberal policy regime in India is generally agreed upon as a marked departure from the earlier Nehruvian vision of nation-building. The Nehruvian model of economic development was mimicry of some socialist and liberal welfarist agenda in economic policies, emphasizing the public sector, and the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in the realm of foreign policy. The advent of neoliberalism in India has been marked by the processes of liberalization, privatization and globalization with market-led economic policies, deregulation of the economy for foreign direct investment, retreat of the state from major economic activities and greater alignment with the United States in foreign policy. The neoliberal policy regime in India roughly from the 1990s onwards was characterized by disinvestment of the public sector, inadequate public expenditure in social sectors and commercialization of health and higher education, withdrawal of subsidies from agriculture, collapse of the public distribution system and increasing private corporate control over natural resources including large-scale land acquisition by the entente of state and big private capital, often followed by either forced displacement of existing inhabitants or resistance by them.