State of Southasia #06: Harsh Mander on fighting the Hindu right’s project of hate in India

On 28 September 2015, a mob of Hindu men in a village in Dadri district in Uttar Pradesh dragged 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq from his house and beat him to death. Earlier that day a local Hindu temple had announced that a cow had been slaughtered in the village and a rumour had spread that it was Akhlaq’s family that had killed the cow. The case sparked outrage across the country. Al Jazeera called it “The lynching that changed India”. Particularly shocking was the fact that instead of looking for the killers, the police were focussed on the contents of Akhlaq’s fridge and testing whether the meat found inside was from a cow.

Since Akhlaq’s death, hate-driven violence against Muslims has risen with incidents of vigilantism, mob lynchings as well as attacks by individuals being reported by different parts of the country. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, its right-wing politics has gained widespread traction and acceptance. The Hindutva agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP has also gained greater legitimacy through the BJP’s repeated electoral success. In these ten years, so many incidents of hate-driven violence, particularly against Muslims, have been reported that they no longer make headlines or primetime news.

The recent general election results, in which the BJP won far fewer seats than expected and had to form the government with the support of other parties, sparked hope that the party would rein in its right-wing agenda, communal policies and anti-Muslim hate speech by its leaders including Modi. Commentators said that the results showed Modi and the BJP that the electorate did not subscribe to divisive politics. That hope faltered with a series of communal incidents taking place in the short month since the results. One such incident occurred on 22 June 2024 when a Muslim man was lynched at a cricket match in Gujarat’s Anand district.

In this episode of State of Southasia, assistant editor Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Harsh Mander, the peace activist and founder of Karwan-e-Mohabbat, a campaign in solidarity with victims of communal or religious violence. Mander says that over the past decade the Modi regime has normalised, legitimised, valourised and incentivised hate to such an extent that it is difficult to undo despite any kind of electoral setback to his party, and that much more is needed to defeat the social project of hate that is underway.