As the world is celebrating the arrival of 2026, India seems to have arrived in 1930s Germany. One one hand, Prime Minister Modi visited a church on Christmas celebrations, while on the other hand, vigilante mobs affiliated to the Sangh Parivar vandalised churches from Kerala to Assam, harassed foreign tourists in Uttar Pradesh, and abused visually impaired women during a Christmas community meal in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. In Ghaziabad, an outfit called the Hindu Raksha Dal was distributing swords, machetes and axes to each house in a neighbourhood to kill Muslims, while a ‘priest’ from Uttar Pradesh called for establishing armed suicide squads to protect against Muslims. At roughly the same time, a mob vandalised a private birthday party in Bareilly protesting the presence of Muslims.
Separately, right-wing groups aggressively supported the perpetrator (a convicted legislator from the ruling dispensation), while a separate rape survivor in Madhya Pradesh attempted suicide because she was being harassed for daring to file a case against a local Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) leader. And finally, in Kerala and Odisha, people were lynched to death on the suspicion of being Bangladeshis.
It has been argued that this spate of right-wing vigilantism, which methodically circumscribes and reshapes constitutional morality, is a perverse consequence of mushrooming unemployment. There are also some ‘liberals’ who privately claim that the hate and violence only affects Muslims and Christians, seemingly suggesting that this isn’t their (read a Hindu) problem. Then there are others who claim these incidents are sporadic, driven by fringe elements. Each of these explanations are lazy and stunted. While unemployment has certainly caused discontent, this vigilantism is structured violence sparked by the systematic injection of regressive norms into society by the Sangh Parivar. It would be easy to consciously force yourself to ignore what’s happening (either in privileged escapism, or abject resignation). It would be easier still to keep deluding yourself into thinking these fires won’t reach you. Or that the Sangh sanctioned mobs are acting in the interests of Hindus. Or that you can escape these fires by immigrating. Each of these delusions need to be dissected.
The systemic vilification campaign
For the past decade, BJP leaders have systematically caricatured journalists as presstitutes and turned a blind eye as they were targeted (eventually making speaking truth to power a rarity). The BJP also vilified Sikhs as Khalistanis, caricatured Adivasis as Naxalites, Kashmiris as Pakistanis, Muslims as Bangladeshis, liberals as anti-national, North-Easterners as Chinese and Christians as rice bags. Adapting from Martin Niemöller, the BJP has come after everyone.
Yes, the BJP originally fanned these flames to engineer an electoral consolidation of Hindu communities against a perceived common enemy. Whether it is social media pages like Gems of Bollywood, or hate speeches by BJP leaders (which rocketed by 1130% after 2014) or mob-violence, the design was to foment an environment of hatred, and culture of violence against minorities. But while the BJP reaped electoral benefits from its performative violence and hate, the fires it lit have run amuck. Case in point is what happened with Anjel and Michael Chakma in Dehradun. A frenzied mob felt it was kosher to harass someone on the basis of how he looks, and felt emboldened enough to take the law in their own hands.
The mob almost got away with it because the BJP government in Uttarakhand tried to brush the incident under the carpet, acting after two weeks, only after sustained pressure from the All India Chakma students association and mass public outrage. But the notion that ordinary citizens can take the law in their own hands (undermining the State’s monopoly on violence) to enforce primordial rules of conduct has become mainstream, and is not limited to the fringes. It has emboldened anti-social elements to affiliate with the BJP, since BJP affiliates act with brazen impunity, almost as if the law doesn’t apply to them.
Case in point is Vikas Barala, the Haryana BJP chief’s son, who stalked and tried to kidnap a woman in broad daylight. And Ashok Singh, the husband of a BJP councillor in Madhya Pradesh, who raped a woman at knifepoint in December 2025, screaming “Sarkar hamari hai, mera kuch nahi bigadega” (It is our government, nothing will happen to me). And of course, Minister Kailash Vijayvargiya can dismiss a query from a reporter asking questions on water contamination that left at least seven people dead and more than a hundred hospitalised as ‘fokat’ (worthless) and ‘ghanta’ (rubbish). Clearly power (and proximity to it) accords special privileges and immunity from justice.
Similarly, those who feel that the Sangh’s attacks are directed against minorities or are in the furtherance of ‘Hindu causes’ need to smell the bitter coffee. The attack on the birthday party in Bareilly targeted a Hindu woman, and the Hindu cafe owner. Likewise, the Unnao and Madhya Pradesh rape survivors (both harassed by BJP leaders) are both Hindu. Ram Narayan Baghel (who was lynched to death by a mob that included BJP workers, on suspicion of being a Bangladeshi) was also a Hindu. As was Ankita Bhandari, who was murdered by those affiliated to the BJP. Equally damningly, the four dozen attacks in the guise of cow-protection since 2015, all spearheaded by vigilante groups affiliated to the Sangh, were never about cow-protection. If they were, these vigilante-mobs would also have targeted the BJP, which not only received donations from companies involved in the beef and abattoir business but whose legislators own abattoirs. And finally, the Mahant of the Kashi Vishwanath temple publicly alleged that several ancient temples were destroyed for the construction of the Vishwanath Corridor at the behest of the BJP. The unvarnished truth is that in the pursuit of its ideological agenda, the Sangh will target Hindus just as easily as it criminalises minorities.
There are also those who meekly claim that such problems are because of ineffectual state governments, while prime minister Narendra Modi himself is beyond reproach. Let us for a moment ignore that BJP chief ministers and ministers are hand-picked by the BJP High-Command (prime minister Modi and home minister Shah), with whom the buck stops. Let us instead focus on Prime Minister Modi, who has not only effected a gleichschaltung (the Nazi system of total control over all aspects of a nation) but is projected by the BJP as the face of their “One Nation, One Leader and One Ideology” project. PM Modi on one hand urges Indians to “strengthen Constitutional values through our actions”, but himself made hate speeches in 110 out of the 173 speeches he delivered in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
