The Indians fighting back against religious hate

Last year, Ayesha Shikalgar was excitedly looking to the future. She and her husband, in their early 30s, were trying for a baby and harbouring dreams of building a business. Their quiet life in the village of Pusesavali, in Maharashtra, seemed to them as idyllic as the Sahyadri mountain ranges nearby. Shikalgar had known Nurul Hasan, a civil engineer, for only a year or so, but the romance felt like it was meant to be. “We had been married for just nine months, but people felt we had known each other for years,” she told me. It felt like a dream. It ended as swiftly, too.

In September, Hasan was lynched by a mob of right-wing Hindu extremists who attacked a mosque in the village. The spark that led to the attack was a string of social media posts including derogatory references to Hindu Gods. Screenshots of the posts were shared around the village, causing outrage among some villagers. The posts looked like they had been sent by three young Muslim men from the village but all three denied ever making such offensive comments, and maintained that the screenshots had been doctored by far-right Hindu groups.

Not everyone believed them. Over the next few days, little-known Hindu right-wing groups – consisting of young men from the village and adjoining villages – held protests in Pusesavali. In a petition filed in January in the Bombay High Court, locals alleged that these groups had links with Vikram Pawaskar, a senior leader from Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who they claim incited the groups against Muslims in at least two public speeches in the days before the attack.

Shikalgar said her husband was disturbed by the animosity building up between Hindu and Muslim villagers. “He used to have more Hindu friends than Muslims and he was always a part of Hindu festival celebrations in the village,” she recalled. Yet, on the evening of 10 September, when Hasan decided to go and pray at the local mosque, a rampaging mob of 60-100 men armed with stones, sticks and wooden rods attacked him, along with the other worshippers. Hasan was killed on the spot.

Violence between religious communities is on the rise in India, particularly against religious minorities like Muslims and Christians. Many say that Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP are at least partly to blame. Between 2014, when Modi was first elected, and 2022, there was a 500 per cent increase in reports of speech defined as “promoting enmity” between groups, including religious groups (India has no exclusive legislation defining hate speech). When the BJP lost its parliamentary majority in June, the results were hailed as a rejection of the politics of hate. But will Modi’s diminished power be enough to stem the tide of anger that has engulfed sections of the Indian population?

“Hindutva is no longer in the BJP’s control”

In early June, more than 600 million Indians cast their votes, delivering a blow to Modi. The BJP’s seats in parliament fell from 302 to 240, forcing Modi to form a coalition. This followed an electoral campaign that openly targeted the country’s 200 million Muslims, accusing them of trying to dominate the Hindu population by having too many babies, and calling them “infiltrators” – a reference to the idea of India as an essentially Hindu country, with Muslims cast as outsiders. The rhetoric was aimed at galvanising the country’s 960 million Hindus to back the BJP as “their” party – even as an opposition alliance, named INDIA, accused Modi of failing on key economic targets, such as job creation and taming inflation. The INDIA alliance won 234 seats in the parliament, only a few dozen short of a majority. But not everyone is hopeful about the result.

“It is very wrong to read this verdict as a defeat of communal forces,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author and journalist who has been tracking far-right Hindu nationalism. He points to the data behind the headlines. The June vote saw the lowest share of Muslim MPs being elected to parliament in six decades, while the total number of Muslim candidates dropped to a meagre 78 out of 8,360. The BJP put up only one token Muslim candidate, who lost. Muslims were being “invisibilised” in the country’s politics, Mukhopadhyay said. “There is a certain amount of caution, even in non-BJP parties, that they should not be seen taking up the Muslim cause.”

Pratik Sinha is co-founder and editor of Alt News, a fact-checking website known for debunking disinformation around Hindutva – a political ideology aligned with the aim of establishing Hindu hegemony in India. “These elections showed that [divisive] rhetoric might no longer give electoral dividends,” he said, but the Hindutva project remains in the BJP’s DNA. He added that the strength of right-wing Hindu nationalism was not wholly dependent on votes. “The Hindutva project is not an electoral project, it’s a much wider project no longer in the BJP’s control.”

Thousands of kilometres away, Shikalgar speaks to me on the phone while feeding her baby daughter Ashnoor, born months after Hasan was lynched. She agrees with Sinha’s analysis. The electoral results haven’t changed her life at all. Following her husband’s death, her family disintegrated. She now lives with her parents in the city of Satara. Hasan’s parents also left the village for ever.

Meanwhile, communal violence keeps occurring. Since the elections on 4 June there have already been four major instances. Three days after the election, two Muslim men were beaten to death by a mob of Hindu right-wing vigilantes in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, while another Muslim man at the scene died soon after. The vigilantes suspected the men of smuggling cows for slaughter, although police did not investigate the claim. Many Hindus believe the cow to be sacred and slaughtering cattle is banned in many Indian states. Days later, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, another Muslim man – 35-year-old Mohamed Fareed – was beaten to death with wooden sticks by a Hindu mob who suspected him of theft. Instead of pursuing the accused, local BJP officials came out in their defence, prompting the police to file a case of theft against the dead man, who was charged posthumously. The week after, a Muslim man named Salman Vohra was killed by a group of Hindu men at a cricket tournament in Gujarat after a dispute over parking. Eye-witnesses said Hindu spectators had heckled and chanted religious slogans aimed at Muslim players during the match that preceded the killing.

And the hatred isn’t only directed at the Muslim population. While Muslims are the biggest religious minority in the country, Christians come second at 28 million, according to the latest census. Hindu far-right groups have routinely attacked Christian communities, launching attacks on churches as well as pastors. According to a report from the US State Department, attacks on Christians in India rose from 599 incidents of violence in 2022 to 731 in 2023. On 24 June, a Christian woman in Chhattisgarh named Bindu Sodhi was killed by her relatives, ostensibly angered by her conversion to Christianity. Fewer than 33,000 people in India define themselves as atheist, but they are also threatened by the Hindutva agenda.

The Hindutva Watch website, which tracks religious violence in India, logged at least 36 public speeches inciting hate being delivered by far-right Hindu nationalists in the month after election results day. They also logged at least nine instances where “cow vigilantes” intercepted vehicles carrying cattle or animal meat and assaulted the Muslim drivers, as well as a pattern of violence and intimidation against those celebrating Eid ul-Adha in June. The website’s founder, Raqib Naik, is based in the US, partly for his own safety. “Online and offline hate is as rampant as before [the elections],” he said. “In fact, it might be even more than before because the BJP lost its majority and far-right voters are blaming Muslims.” WhatsApp groups run by Hindu nationalists and BJP sympathisers went into overdrive following the results, he said. Some posts contained covert or overt threats of retribution, including calling for violence and for people to boycott Muslim businesses.

A spike in hate speech

Is this trend likely to continue, or even escalate? Modi’s divisive campaign may have emboldened actors on the Hindu right, regardless of the electoral result. Some of this rhetoric was aimed at opposition parties. Home Minister Amit Shah, for example, criticised the immigration policy of West Bengal’s ruling party, Trinamool Congress, saying they had allowed the “infiltration” of migrants from Bangladesh to appease Muslims and that their slogan should be changed to “Mullahs, Madrasas and Mafias”. Another senior leader, Himanta Biswa Sarma, falsely accused the main opposition party Congress of planning to build a mosque over the newly-inaugurated temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram. Sarma also accused Muslim men of seducing Hindu women by posing as Hindus online, in order to further their agenda of dominating the Indian population. “The leaders spouting such rhetoric knew it could incite mass violence against the Muslims,” said Naik.

The prime minister’s own rhetoric seems to be followed particularly closely. On 21 April, Modi, addressing a rally in Rajasthan, singled out Muslims more directly than usual. “When the Congress was in power, they said Muslims had the first right to the property of the state,” he said. “This means they want to collect these properties and give them to the ones who have more kids. They will give it to the infiltrators.” Modi’s remarks were factually inaccurate. He was referring to a 2006 speech by then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had emphasised the need to prioritise the development of traditionally disadvantaged social castes and communities, not just Muslims. After this, Hindutva Watch noticed a spike in people posting hate-filled speeches delivered by BJP and far-right activists. “Before, we would get 1-2 hate speeches a day” from political leaders, Naik said. “But after, we started seeing anywhere between 8–15 speeches each day.”

This seems to indicate that the rhetoric and policies of the BJP, and particularly of Modi himself, are a major contributing factor to communal violence. The BJP’s current dependence on its political allies may therefore bode well for the country. After winning his second term in a landslide victory in May 2019, Modi presided over a government that undermined the rights of Muslims. In August of that year, they stripped the constitutional autonomy from India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, placing thousands under house arrest and imposing a curfew in the region. In December, they passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminated against Muslims by fast-tracking citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from India’s Muslim-majority neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

Such bold partisan moves might be unlikely in the near future, as the BJP’s crucial allies – the southern Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the northern Janata Dal – both count Muslims as their voters. For example, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh before they lost their majority, the BJP had talked about scrapping affirmative action for Muslims. Currently, 4 per cent of public sector jobs are reserved for 15 communities within the Muslim population that are considered to be the most socially and economically disadvantaged, a policy introduced by Congress. But having secured a position as “king maker”, TDP leader Nara Lokesh has said his party will continue the policy. “It’s a fact that the minorities continue to suffer and that they have the lowest per capita income. As a government, it is my responsibility to bring them out of poverty,” Lokesh said in a TV interview after the vote.

A far-right ecosystem

With allies pushing for compromise, the BJP may not be able to push its ideologically driven legislation and executive actions through to the same extent. However, some analysts believe this could spur the far-right Hindu nationalist ecosystem – from little-known cow vigilante groups to local outfits and right-wing influencers on social media – to double down on the Hindutva agenda, in a quest to regain the core Hindu vote bank that seems to have lost some of its allegiance to the BJP.

Mukhopadhyay believes that on-the-ground Hindutva activities might now gather steam. “It is very unlikely that four and a half decades of communalisation are going to be rolled back suddenly,” he said. “Instead, in its attempts to consolidate losses, we might even see the orchestration of [more] communal skirmishes.”

The journalists and fact-checkers I talked to are preparing for grimmer times. Naik said his team at Hindutva Watch was trying to figure out ways to raise more resources and expand their team. “We will also do more to demand accountability from social platforms, because they allowed hate speech to flow,” he said. Alt News is shifting its focus from fighting all kinds of misinformation to specifically tracking hate speech and crimes, Sinha, the co-founder, said. “Social media has ensured that Muslims are looked at with disgust,” he added, “and this process of normalisation has been through constant misinformation.”

Sinha’s words echo in the village of Pusesavali, several months after the lynching. Tensions appeared to die down for a while. But in June, as Muslims prepared for Eid ul-Adha, WhatsApp groups in the village were buzzing non-stop. Videos were shared showing the slaughter of cows by Muslims – later, several fact-checkers found that the videos had been taken in Bangladesh where, unlike in India, cows and buffaloes are commonly sacrificed as part of the Eid festivities. Irshad Bagwan, a local lawyer and a friend of Hasan’s, saw these messages streaming into his phone. “Some Hindus don’t talk to us at all now, others talk, but just briefly,” Bagwan said. “Outwardly, everything is inching back to normal, but the suspicion remains. Muslims don’t know what local Hindus are saying and thinking.”

For many like Bagwan, growing up in Hindu-majority Pusesavali, religion was seldom a marker of identity. Now, he confesses many are struggling to cope, as local Hindu right-wing outfits go about the village trying to keep the embers burning. “Our Hindu friends tell us how local right-wing groups often try and use wedding and birthday celebrations to incite Hindus against us, telling them how they need to seek retribution from Muslims for insulting Hindu Gods,” Bagwan said. The Muslim community in the village is grappling for answers. Some have left. Others continue to live there under a cloud of anxiety.

Communities fight back

Elsewhere, communities are finding new ways to tackle hate. Mumbai’s Malvani area had previously been a site of communal tension, breaking out into violence. In 2022, the Hindu festival of Ram Navami saw a procession led by local BJP leaders who shouted provocative slogans and insisted on playing loud music outside a mosque. Last year, when the day of the festival came round again, there was another massive turnout with revellers marching across Malvani. But as the procession reached a mosque the event descended into chaos, with slippers and stones hurled by Hindu revellers and Muslim bystanders.

What led to the violence is disputed. Anwar Shaikh, head of the Islamist organisation Jamaat-e-Islami’s local chapter, was standing not too far away. Shaikh and others said the Hindu revellers chanted aggressive slogans and played music with insulting lyrics while passing before the madrasas. The police chargesheet said that some local Muslims had made an “illegal assembly” near the mosque and hurled objects at the processionists while chanting “Allah-u-Akbar”. The police registered a case against 12 Muslim men and 400 unidentified persons. No Hindus involved in the incident were charged.

The processions, and the reaction by police, have added to rising tensions between the two communities. “Slowly, the way people here [were] speaking about other communities started changing,” Shaikh said. “I saw many [of my] Hindu friends start speaking the same language as the far-right activists,” he added, referring to jokes and digs now regularly thrown into daily conversation. “Among Muslims, there was a sense that we had been abandoned, that nobody would come and stand up for us”.

But Shaikh and other like-minded activists got together and decided to fight back. They soon got a chance to put their resolve to the test. In March this year, as residents were slowly beginning to put the memories of last year’s clashes behind them, a BJP leader, Nitesh Rane, known for delivering provocative speeches against Muslims, decided to lead a march organised by local right-wing outfits. Local NGOs asked the police to stop the event, but they refused. In online videos, Rane is seen delivering a speech in which he insists that Hindus in Malvani are “living in fear”, though he avoids mentioning Muslims explicitly. “Will you show them your strength or not?” he asks the crowd of Hindus gathered before him. “Look at them – if anyone looks at them with an evil eye, 100 of them will gather in half a minute. And look at us – we need to coax our people to mobilise them.”

Rane’s speech seemed to vindicate the fears of Shaikh and his friends. They approached the police again, asking them to prosecute Rane, but heard nothing. Refusing to give up, they adopted a new strategy: summoning the courts. “We approached the Bombay High Court, presented the evidence of the hate speech, and asked the Court to direct the police to prosecute Rane,” he said.

It took a few weeks, but by the end of the April, the residents of Malvani had claimed their victory. On 23 April, the court ordered the Mumbai police to charge Rane for “promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion”, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years or a fine, or both.

The ideology has spread

For the residents of Malvani, this wasn’t just a sweet victory but a timely reminder that the law can protect them, said Shaikh. “Rane would say in his speeches that Hindus should do whatever they think is right to protect themselves, meaning violence against Muslims, and that the BJP government will protect them,” he said. This was not what the Constitution says, Shaikh and his friends told themselves.

However, there has still been no action by the police against Rane, and he doesn’t seem to be cowed by the court order. Less than a month later, in the run up to the elections, he commented publicly that Hindus must vote for the BJP for their own safety, adding that a vote for the opposition parties would be a “vote for love jihad and land jihad” – a reference to the Islamophobic trope that Muslims are seeking to dominate India through buying up land and tempting Hindu women into marriage and reproduction. Shaikh said he wasn’t surprised that there hadn’t been action yet. “After all, Rane’s party is in power in the state.” But he believed that the court’s intervention created pressure on the police, and has opened up a new path for activists.

Meanwhile, Vikram Pawaskar has also been charged for “promoting enmity” through his public speeches and is being investigated for his role in Hasan’s murder and the injury of 12 others in Pusesavali. Yet the police have already been accused of dragging their feet on the case, perhaps reluctant to act against such a senior BJP leader.

Naik, from Hindutva Watch, said there has been more evidence since the election that the police cannot be relied on to uphold the law in a neutral manner. Last month, police in the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh searched fridges in the homes of Muslim families in Mandla district and claimed to have found beef inside them, accusing the families of partaking in the illegal cattle trade. They then ordered the demolition of 11 homes overnight before any trial could take place, alleging that the homes had been built illegally on government land.

The Modi government in coalition may have to rein back its Hindutva agenda. But, as Naik said, “This ideology has made its way into the entire socio-political fabric of the country.” The BJP may not need to pursue top-down policies to see this agenda furthered on the ground. Hatred between religious communities has already taken hold across many areas of India, while the police cannot always be relied on to enforce the law equally. Hindu right-wing and vigilante groups have set up networks with local people, capturing imaginations, and online hate is rampant, with no sign of regulation. While those sitting in parliament might now tread more carefully on communal issues, the mobs on the streets are unfettered. And the mobs do not fear the new coalition.

This article is from New Humanist’s autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.