At the apex of Hindutva's pre-eminence in Indian polity and society, the Left was collectively scratching its head. It was racked by hermeneutic anxiety: was it witnessing homespun fascism, or was this merely the new face of national conservatism?

Outside of lecture halls, away from radical newspapers and removed from diasporic pressure groups, this might appear to be an overwrought tussle over semantics. But it preoccupied India's Left and its satellites around global academia for several good reasons.

As intellectuals, major and minor, arranged themselves on either side of the debate, the battle lines were carefully drawn. What was at stake went far beyond academic allegiances; the ensuing arguments would not only consecrate new hierarchies of intellectual prestige but also, far more importantly, set the compass for organised resistance to the dominant ideology in the world's largest democracy.

Advocates of fascism – so to speak – were not restricted to those who aligned themselves to Marxism, whether dyed-in-the-wool Hegelians or avowed materialists.

In the years following the BJP's ascension to power at the centre, a flurry of critiques claiming to expose the intellectual rationale for Hindu nationalism has appeared. From the philosophy of Chetan Bhatt's Liberation and Purity (1997) and the rationalism of Meera Nanda's Breaking the Spell of Dharma (2003) to the varied Marxisms of Achin Vanaik's The Furies of Indian Communalism (1997) and Radhika Desai's Slouching Toward Ayodhya (2002), they have commonly indicted the follies of Indian anti-secularism for ‘sharing discursive space’ with Hindutva.

It is no doubt true that the ascendancy of the postcolonial critique of modernity assigns it a powerful voice in debates around the legitimacy of state secularism in India. Since it has long since concerned itself with posing a political as well as an epistemological challenge to Western power, postcolonial reason has led in the front lines of a battle of ideological wills which has split India's contemporary Left.

Nanda, for example, writes that postcolonial studies aided and abetted the meteoric coming to hegemony of cultural nationalism and the cultivation of the religious vote bank.

This book has explored the current struggles over the progressive dilemma. As we've seen, the terms of this dilemma are themselves contested, with competing assertions of where the real fault lines in today's global politics lie. There are those on the Left for whom class remains the great dividing line and, less archaically, those who persist in the belief that the real dilemma is whether progressive politics aligns itself with redistribution or whether it allows recognition to obscure its mission.

This book has been unequivocal in its assessment of the challenges facing oppositional politics amid the various tussles for preeminence and priority. These challenges are the result of extensive and cumulative sociological shifts in democratic society that have global implications. The de-territorialisation of religion, mass demographic upheaval through immigration, redrawn political sovereignties and relentless urbanisation have made these shifts ubiquitous and analogous even if they are not directly comparable.

They have presaged the globalisation of the progressive dilemma. The challenge comes from the anxieties, fears and dislocations bred by these various sociological shifts. What's important to note is that these popular responses are not novel; they have and will continue to recur in the career of democratic society. What is novel is how these responses are framed. Through the democratic world (except perhaps homogenous societies like Norway) we are living in times that are not only characterised by cultural diversity but supposedly threatened by it too.

The honour of being the British symbol of dignity and poise has been monopolised by half-German nobility for the best part of sixty years, but it seems she now has a rival for her crown. And what an unlikely rival she is. First seen (for most of its viewers) on a reality TV show that had been posting historically low ratings, her bullying at the hands of three D-list celebrities catapulted her to the bosom of the great British public.

Since capturing Celebrity Big Brother's very own crown, Shilpa Shetty has been as lionised outside the house as she was victimised inside it. She was booked to speak at a Commonwealth Day speech in the presence of a host of dignitaries. She has been courted by Tony Blair, lauded by Keith Vaz. The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries gushed that Shetty is no less than the ‘embodiment of civility, articulacy and reserve’.

Western Europe will implode by 2018. A terrifying whirlwind of insecurity, political disloyalty and new-wave piracy will dismember our societies within eleven years. Waves of mass immigration from Third World disaster zones will surge over Britain's borders, reducing it to a hollow shell sacked by ‘reverse colonisation’. ‘Indigenous’ Britons will soon become minorities in a land overrun by a multitude of diaspora groups.

Future immigration will be characterised by little allegiance to host countries; the idea of assimilation will become ‘redundant’. People will reside in Britain out of convenience, expediency and necessity as regional economic crashes, natural disaster and failed city-states propel a mass exodus from the Third World to Europe. As Europe's leading destination for immigrants, Britain will be in the most perilous position.

Such is the belief of Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) at the Ministry of Defence. He already believes that is almost impossible to ‘integrate’ new immigrant groups. In a briefing speech he warned that ‘globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant 34 The Future of Multicultural Britain and old-fashioned … [the process] acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet’. In a speech designed to outline the challenges that will shape Britain's security policies in the coming decades, Parry was unequivocal that the diaspora issue is ‘one of my biggest current concerns’.

Scene 1: Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, summer 2001

At the dawn of New Labour's second term, when they were returned to power with a daunting parliamentary majority, a cascade of civil unrest in England's northern towns stunned Britain. Even before the cataclysmic events of 11 September that year, multiculturalism had been battered and British tolerance towards minorities had stiffened. Though the ‘race riots’ have been eclipsed by the sensationalising implications of the so-called war on terror and receded from historical centre stage, they provided political capital for an assimilationist revival that has been unambiguously attributed to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

Britain was alerted to the latent violence in Oldham on 23 April 2001. Walter Chamberlain, a 76-year-old World War Two veteran, was hospitalised after a savage beating at the hands of three Asian youths. He had been walking home after watching a local amateur rugby league match and was alleged to have breached the rules of Oldham's racialised cartography by entering a ‘no-go’ area forwhites. He was set upon by the youths for an unauthorised incursion onto Asian territory.

The attack viscerally confirmed the emergence of a new social problem: minority racism. The rise to power of Asian racists, in particular, preoccupied the local media. Oldham's racial problems were stated to have been ‘inspired’ and ‘perpetrated’ by Asians who were said to ‘be behind most racial violence’. Statistics were wheeled out to prove this disturbing fact: Oldham police logged 600 racist incidents in 2000, and in 60 per cent of them, the victims were white.

The years hunched around 1990 were a tumultuous epoch for British political and cultural life. A decade dominated by Thatcherism and the monetarisation of social values was brought into disgraceful decline by Hillsborough, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a fatwa, the iron lady's ignominious shuffle off centre stage and a Bradford headmaster's unexpected emergence as the champion of Middle England.

It is the last event that I want to seize on as the defining moment in the convergent crisis of mainstream anti-racism and British socialism. This crisis had been given voice in Paul Gilroy's landmark obituary ‘The End of Anti-Racism’ (1990) which argues that sequestering anti-racist energies in the stifling confines of local government has divested it of the dynamism, genuine radicalism and grass-roots involvement that had made it a political imperative in the first place. It was important both as a riposte and a preemptive strike against a resurgent centre-Right critique of multiculturalism and anti-racism.

Municipal anti-racism's dictatorial edicts on best practice were easily seized on as ‘moralistic excesses’ on what constituted best behaviour. The backlash from the conservative heartlands, though ostensibly an assault on the ‘absurdities of antiracist orthodoxy’, jeopardised the legitimacy of anti-racism as a worthwhile political project – especially in the absence of other models of how its objectives could be met.

Gilroy identified anti-racism's crisis in the confluence of a simplistic rendering of its objectives, its isolation from the larger scope of anti-racist movements, and its organisational reliance on the Labour party and local authorities. Anti-racism had become abstracted from other political antagonisms and, using Gilroy's words, had become largely perceived to be ‘epiphenomenal’.