“I belong to the Muslim community and believe in Allah. Those belonging to my community hate Hindus.”
These were among the sentences Article 14 reporter Akansha Kumar found in 22 identical confessional statements by alleged Muslim rioters during her investigation this month of a 2023 riot in the Muslim-majority Haryana district of Nuh, the poorest in the state and eight-poorest nationally.
The common threads of the police cases she examined: copy-paste confessions; copy-paste but conflicting accounts by Hindu witnesses (most from the Hindu extremist Bajrang Dal); a post-mortem report that contradicted police claims; and vague, unsubstantiated claims of links with international terror group Al Qaeda.
Kumar’s findings corroborated a report by the People’s Union for Democratic Right released in July that found a “lack of any independent or corroborating evidence for arrest” in 81 of 89 bail orders studied by members of the advocacy group. “The bail was given because there was no evidence,” said former Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur at the release of the report. “Now, if there was no evidence, why were these persons arrested?”
“The police know if there is any evidence or if there is not any evidence,” said Justice Lokur, who was recently appointed chairperson of the United Nations’ Internal Justice Council. “They also know if there is evidence, if it will stand scrutiny in a court. But the idea is let’s punish this person… the court is probably going to acquit him, but until then let him spend a week, let him spend a month, in this case several months… the idea is to keep a person in jail as long as you can.”
Kumar’s reportage and the PUDR report revealed how these arrests traumatised the Muslim youth involved, deprived already poor families of their main earning members, forced them to use scarce finances to find lawyers and sureties for bail and ended many livelihoods.
The courts have often called out fudged police cases in India, but the weaponisation of the law against minorities, especially Muslims (here, here and here), by agencies meant to safeguard the rule of law has become especially glaring in the Narendra Modi era.
Attacking Muslims
As the biases in the police investigation in Nuh were made clear in this, the 75th year of the republic, one of two leaders spoken of as a successor to Narendra Modi mocked penurious Muslim descendants of a medieval emperor – attributing their fate to divine justice – and the other vowed that as long as his party could help it, no Muslim would ever receive the benefits of affirmative action.
The descendants of Aurangzeb, said Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adiyanath, were now rickshaw pullers. They might not have been if the Mughal emperor – who died 317 years ago – had not destroyed Hindu temples, he reasoned. In an era of Hindu-first politics defined by its competitive Muslim bashing, Home Minister Amit Shah said before recent Maharashtra elections that if the Bharatiya Janata Party had even one MP in Parliament or one MLA in the state assembly, no Muslim would ever get job reservations.
None of these statements was particularly newsworthy in the New India, consigned as they were to the inside pages of newspapers and ignored by television anchors as dog-bites-man normalcy. Such normalisation is an important threshold in societies that reshape national identity around a dominant community and its narratives.
The year 2024 appeared to deliver what the Modi era has long sought: a new normal.
Hindu society and political opposition to the BJP barely reacted to lynching, abuse, and discrimination against Muslims. Anti-Muslim – and to a far lesser extent, anti-Christian – rhetoric settled into a steady, unexceptional drumbeat in the New India, syncing with and energising the soundtrack of real-life bigotry and atrocity. Indeed, Opposition leaders seldom spoke out about anti-Muslim speech and violence, and, often, the situation in states that they rule reflects the radicalisation of Hindu society.
Last week, a day before Christmas, we also reported how Congress-run Himachal Pradesh had become a hotbed of disinformation and Islamophobia, similar to BJP-run Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Kaushik Raj and Shristi Jaswal tracked 30 anti-Muslim rallies in 34 days, reporting how Hindu protesters demanded mosque demolitions, eviction of “outsider” Muslims, economic boycotts, and vandalised Muslim properties.
They interviewed six men leading the campaigns. One was a Congress councillor, who proudly told them of his role in evicting poor, Muslim vendors. “Congress-BJP comes second,” he told Raj and Jaswal. “We are Hindus first. We can do politics only when we are alive.”
In Delhi, the government of the Aam Aadmi Party, propelled to power in part by Muslim voters, has studiously avoided uttering the M word, as its bruising battle with the BJP to stay afloat has intensified.
It has not reacted to the prosecution of alleged Muslim rioters and conspirators since the Delhi riots of 2020, despite case after police case collapsing in court. It has ignored the demolitions of Muslim homes, and, now, it has joined the BJP’s dog-whistling tactics, denying basic services to illegal Muslim migrants and refugees.
An AAP government circular issued this week schools to “ensure strict admission procedures, verification of students’ documentation to prevent illegal Bangladeshi migrants’ enrolment, implementation of greater scrutiny to detect and prevent unauthorised admissions of illegal Bangladeshi migrants in particular”.
That circular violated the constitutional right to education for any child and the government’s own April notification, which requires that admission not be denied to any child – destitute, refugee or asylum seeker, migrant or homeless.
And, so, the new normal around the feet of the republic accretes and grows, weighing it down with hatred and insecurity, hastening its descent into the murky waters of majoritarian tyranny, from which – as history has shown us – it takes many lifetimes to emerge. This new normal cemented in 2024 allows a people who comprise 79% of India’s population to claim victimhood and demand retribution on a community that occupies the lowest rungs of India’s socio-economic ladder.
The new normal allows a high court judge to use the abusive term “kathmullah” and proclaim that the wishes of the majority will prevail. The new normal allows Muslims – even children and the elderly – to be randomly stopped and slapped around if they refuse to chant “Jai Shri Ram” and stops them from renting or buying flats in a Hindu-dominated area.
The new normal allows the State to demolish Muslim homes and businesses by either ignoring the law or deliberately misinterpreting it. It is quite normal for random Hindu men and women to threaten Muslim vendors into disclosing their religious identity or simply stop them from earning a livelihood. It is certainly normal for India’s leaders to speak the language of radio Rwanda and Kristallnacht and call Muslims infiltrators and termites.
On the day I write this, reports of the new normal stream in: Hindu extremists sing and dance to disrupt Christians praying on Christmas in Lucknow, violently stop a Christmas school carnival in Jodhpur, Rajasthan; another in Bapunagar, Gujarat; stop a folk singer in Patna, Bihar, from singing Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn uniting Muslims and Hindus; prevent Kashmiri Muslim shawl salesmen in Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh, from doing business and threaten landlords from renting homes to them; and despite a Supreme Court order, the state government finds new ways to harass Muslims in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh.
Hindus now lay claim to Sambhal’s 16th-century mosque and at least nine more in other towns, claiming that temples lie beneath. The Supreme Court in December stopped surveys of such shrines, easily ordered by local judges in violation of the law. Two such surveys in five days sparked a riot in Sambhal that claimed five Muslim lives, followed by accusations of police bias, forced burials and coerced statements, as Sabah Gurmat reported for Article 14.
Demolition drive
Rising Hindu belligerence made even appeals for calm and common sense from Mohan Bhagawat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, appear to be what he himself would once have called “appeasement” of Muslims. “Every day a new matter is raked up. How can this be allowed?” said Bhagwat this month, referring to demands to excavate more mosques. “This cannot continue.”
Yet, it does, as India’s old right rapidly moves to the centre. Bhagwat’s observations, made after the violence in Sambhal, were contradicted by Hindu gurus and the Organiser, his own organisation’s mouthpiece, which described the demands to search for temples beneath mosques as a quest for "civilisational justice”.
It is in Sambhal that glimpses of what the Indian state might do to enforce the new normal are clearly evident. Days after the Supreme Court ordered the state government to ensure peace, officials launched drives against encroachment and power theft, specifically in Muslim areas, Scroll reported. They demolished part of a Muslim MP’s house and fined him Rs 1.9 crore for allegedly stealing electricity, and opened the locks to what they said was a Hindu temple in a Muslim neighbourhood locked for 56 years.
On 15 December, Chief Minister Adityanath said the temple represented “our enduring heritage and the truth of our history”. The same day, the superintendent of police and the district magistrate prayed there, Scroll reported.
It is no coincidence that Sambhal for the BJP is a new political battleground in a region where it has rarely won elections, The Indian Express reported last week. The party hopes to energise Hindu voters by claiming holy ground, where a grand temple must be built for Kalki, the last avatar of Vishnu, a god who will arrive to save society after the end of days.
It is a template for the party’s ascendant politics in the New India.
The quick and easy conflation of myth with modern Hindu demands and politics and the willingness of the state to deploy its powers to accordingly bend or abandon the law is a standout feature of India’s new normal. As the radicalisation continues apace, more police, judges, politicians, and others sworn to uphold the rule of law are likely to either justify it or succumb to its demands.
I am often asked what difference does your work and that of others like yourselves do? Can it reverse the tide? I cannot say that it will, but when a reckoning comes – and it will, maybe even sooner than later – we must serve as a record of these times. We must continue holding a mirror to society, reminding ourselves of where we were, where we have reached, and where we are headed.
A version of this column was published in Article 14, of which Samar Halarnkar is the founding editor.
