Festival season or election season, an all-you-can-eat buffet of hate is our new normal

Every Hindu festival these days arrives like a first punch that starts a nationwide bar fight. This past week’s pan-India brawl is a “celebration” of Ram Navami in which many pious and proud Hindu men get to unwind by bullying and beating up Muslims. There were reports of such violence in Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal, Gujarat, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh. Two people died, and the situation remains tense across several states.

For the second consecutive year, Ram Navami, which overlaps with Ramzan, became an excuse for Hindu mobs—high on potent mood-altering substances like rhetoric, hate and unemployment—to vandalise mosques, cut the beard of an imam for refusing to chant “Jai Shri Ram,” and to accost Muslim citizens. This is India under the Modi administration, at her ugly and malevolent best, with a terribly banal tendency to fixate on myths.

Not a single official from the top brass of Modi administration has come out to condemn the unadulterated hate speech and hate crimes that are committed in the name of gods. The irony that this is done in the name of the “maryada purushottam” Lord Ram—the ideal king, husband, brother, son—seems lost on them.

As the pious organised into mobs to spiritedly take part in the brawl, this government had a busy few weeks. Modi’s government opposed recognising same-sex marriages in a filing to the Supreme Court, arguing that the legal recognition of marriage was for heterosexual relationships alone. The government that conceived an entire registry to count citizens also submitted in the Parliament that it had no data on offshore accounts held by Indians. The law minister, Kiren Rijiju, called retired judges critical of the government “anti-India” even as his government went shopping for a low-profile version of Pegasus spyware.