The use of hate and arbitrary power and calculated killings by Hindu nationalists reveal an ominous disregard for democracy, a forewarning of what is to come.
The Narendra Modi-led government’s drive to remake India as a Hindu nationalist state has instigated states of emergency since the 2019 national elections. Long-standing techniques in militarised governance habitual to the administration of India-administered Kashmir are being regularised across India as this new authoritarianism unfolds, unchecked by international attention or consequences.
The targetingof independent media, massive corporate and economic corruption, increasing collapse of law and order, impunity laws, vengeful circulation of nationalist propaganda and hate speech, and political, gendered and sexualised violence are aggressively persistent. Human rights defenders, journalists, scholars, students, allies and their principled articulations are being criminalised as anti-national. The repression of caste-oppressed groups, foremost of Adivasis and Dalits, and the minoritisation of non-Hindu communities, is rampant. Calls to genocidal violence via the extermination of Muslims and dog whistles to foment vigilantism among Hindu nationalists, reverberate.