The hindu who is a vigilante

Her husband appealed the decision in the Supreme Court which ordered the National Investigation Agency to investigate a possible Islamist conspiracy.

But when they saw the investigation results, they ruled in March that her marriage was valid. The party considered overtly exploiting it ahead of by-elections in UP But the party made it a campaign issue during the elections. Today, the BJP is going one step further in the states it rules by announcing new laws. Such a law would illustrate the transition from a de facto to a de jure Hindu Rashtra, something already evident from the Citizenship Amendment Act This process is bound to transform India officially into an ethnic democracy, like Israel — where mixed marriages are practically impossible.

But this new, law-based version of the Hindu nationalist fight against inter-religious marriages reflects another major change. The first ideologues of Hindutva were not against these marriages. According to the most recent census figures, Muslims constitute 27 percent of the population of West Bengal; Hindus, about 71 percent. It is now the lowest it has ever been. As the sun set, Premi had his assistant bring us balushahi , a local sweet.

After I had my fill, I offered some of my portion to the assistant, who hesitated. He is not the kind of Muslim who will kill you. Throughout my reporting, my own status as a Muslim was the elephant in whatever Bajrang Dal office I happened to be in. I often felt provoked, needled, and scrutinized in my reactions, and occasionally vaguely threatened.

On the evening when we sat on the roof together, Premi tried to explain the concept as if it were entirely reasonable. There is no one to force them now. They should come back to the fold of Hinduism. Eventually, Premi shifted to talk about a ghar vapasi he had personally carried out. Cowed, Kumar said no. So they called in a barber to shave his beard, and someone in the crowd applied a red tilak to his forehead.

A couple of Bajrang Dal activists recorded what happened next, raising their smartphones high overhead for the best view, and the video went viral. It shows Premi performing an elaborate purification ceremony on the man. How dare he become a Muslim! There is a very small triangular gap between his two front teeth, which I noticed every time he smiled. Then Premi turned serious. Once again I tried to pretend that I did not hear anything.

Things only got worse from there. In May , Narendra Modi was elected to a second term as prime minister, in one of the most overwhelming landslides in Indian history.

By then, two private databases that tracked hate crimes against Muslims had also disappeared from the internet. But in Uttar Pradesh, Premi was brooding and cooling his heels. In August his superiors in the Bajrang Dal had assigned him to the small town of Bulandshahr, about three hours southeast of Shamli—not to raise hell but to do damage control.

The previous winter, a mob led by the local Bajrang Dal district chief—a young Premi-in-training named Yogesh Raj—seemed to have finally crossed a line that caused public uproar: They allegedly attacked and killed a police inspector.

The victim, Subodh Kumar Singh, had led the investigation into the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq back in Singh had arrested several of the people allegedly involved, including the son of a local BJP politician. Police in Bulandshahr locked up two of the young leaders of the mob, including the district Bajrang Dal chief, and bad press about the militia flooded in. I had come back to India for a few weeks and decided to pay a visit to Premi in Bulandshahr.

He seemed bored and talked about how he missed beating up cow slaughterers. While we were talking, sitting on plastic chairs in a small and dingy room in the local Bajrang Dal office, a man in his early sixties came in asking for Premi. He was a retired clerk, and he wanted to report that a few Christian missionaries had been visiting his settlement once a month. He asked Premi to take care of the missionaries. The moment he left the room, Premi took out his phone to get the word out.

In recent months, the BJP had become more brazen in talking about its own vast apparatus for generating memes. I had been watching Premi busy himself with his device for months, and for years I had been hearing about how central WhatsApp has become to the rise of the Hindu right. But WhatsApp is a black box: an end-to-end encrypted, private service. The closest I could come to experiencing how Premi and his allies saw the world, I realized, would be to see what was coursing through his account, if just for a few minutes.

Premi seemed deeply uncomfortable with the idea, but he eventually handed his phone to me, on condition that I only forward to myself messages that he approved. I looked at only a couple of the several hundred groups he belongs to: One was the local Bulandshahr Bajrang Dal list, where I could see Premi coordinating with all of his cadres and informants, trading tips and alerts.

Another was a national list full of memes and propaganda, and I scrolled through dozens of items. One long message in Hindi went like this:. Hindus formed half of the population in the Kashmir Valley just 20 years ago.

Today not even a single Hindu is left in Kashmir. In northeastern states of India like Sikkim, Nagaland, Assam, etc. What are the reasons for this???? Data of childbirth at a government hospital at Kasaragod in Kerala. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims Muslims make babies and Hindus create wealth.

But the same wealth comes in handy for the use of these Mullas. This is the black history of Hindus in this country … Jai Hindutva. Yet another post presented a kind of infographic: a family tree of all the many supposed varieties of jihad. It broke them down into two main branches: hard jihad and soft jihad.

I marveled at how systematic it was. Of course, the posts were a fever dream. The figures about births in Kasaragod had no source that I could trace. And the idea that the Kashmir Valley was recently majority Hindu, or that it is now completely empty of Hindus, is preposterous. In , according to a census conducted by the British Empire, Hindus constituted 5.

In they made up 1. India has million WhatsApp users and million users of Facebook, and it is the largest global market for both platforms. Facebook has come under heavy fire in India for uneven enforcement of its community standards against hate speech and misinformation.

In a particularly chilling example, Equality Labs found a huge number of Indian Facebook posts targeting Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, who had already been the victims of one social-media-fueled ethnic cleansing in their home country.

Facebook, which owns both platforms, tells WIRED that it has expanded its content review team in India, and has made progress in pulling down content that violates its standards on its eponymous blue app. But WhatsApp, the far more popular platform, essentially has no community standards.

Because all of its communication is encrypted, the content that flows through it is entirely in the hands of its users. His mood seemed worse. I asked what he and the Bajrang Dal were focusing on these days. Millions of Bangladeshis, he told me, had infiltrated India and spread out across the country, and the Bajrang Dal was on high alert about it.

This is new. They need to be thrown out like termites. To identify all of these Bangladeshi infiltrators across the country, Premi told me, the government should roll out a nationwide register of citizens: a program to suss out who really belonged in India. A version of what Premi was suggesting was already underway in Assam, a far northeastern Indian state that borders Bangladesh.

Over the previous few years, all 33 million people in the state had been required to supply evidence that they or their ancestors were Indian citizens before , the year Bangladesh was established. But it proved hard for many Indians to dig up the right moldering documents.

Ultimately, in August , some 1. But Premi, who told me he was contemplating a future in politics, still wanted to see a national version of the program—because he understood that a fix for its biggest flaw was already in the works. Just a few weeks later, in late November, Amit Shah announced that a National Citizens Register would indeed be rolled out across all of India in In other words: Only Muslims needed to worry. The bill passed in a mere two days. Protests erupted across the country.

Roving Hindu mobs attacked Muslim homes, firebombed their shops, and assaulted Muslims on the street. Fifty-three people were killed, most of them Muslims; hundreds were injured. As I watched events unfold from New York, something shifted inside me. I had spent much of my career reporting on sectarian violence in India, yet I had always thought of communal bloodshed as something that happened outside of Delhi—at least an hour or two away, in a dusty place like Muzaffarnagar or Shamli or Bishahra.

Now the feeling of safety I had always identified with the capital was gone. Since then, I have become terrified for my family, and haunted by the image of my parents in a detention camp. A few days after the violence in Delhi, the anchor of a national, prime-time Hindi-language news show devoted an hour to discussing the dangers of all the various kinds of jihad. The anchor invited readers to post their own photos of buildings taken over by Muslims under the hashtag LandJihad.

On April 1 this year, India was scheduled to begin carrying out a national population registry—a first step toward completing its National Citizens Register. But as it happened, one nightmare has postponed another. On March 25, the entire country went into lockdown to hold back the spread of Covid Later that month, dozens of people reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus after attending an international event organized by a Muslim missionary group in Delhi.

In no time, the Hindi-language airwaves were dominated by coverage that compared the group's followers to terrorists bent on spreading the virus throughout India. And a new hashtag was trending wildly on Twitter: coronajihad. This article appears in the May issue. Subscribe now. Let us know what you think about this article. However, he still could not get assurances from the police that they would protect the festival from Bajrang Dal violence, he said, with the police superintendent suggesting the organisers and Bajrang Dal negotiate.

The police have denied they ever received the request for permission for the festival. How long should Hindus have to tolerate this, why are they putting on plays that target Hindus? Why not put on a play about Muslim autocracy or about the Christians?