By Team
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/e3aDL
2025 marked the further entrenchment of patterns of religious discrimination that have steadily consolidated since the ascension of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Now in the twelfth year of uninterrupted Hindu nationalist rule, India’s minorities—particularly Muslims—continued to be systematically targeted through law, policy, and other everyday exercises of state power that stripped them of security and dignity, and rendered the promise of equal belonging increasingly fragile.
State actors continued to deploy a long-documented—and expanding—repertoire of coercive practices against Muslims, including by killing and maiming them in staged police ‘operations’, torturing and detaining them en masse, bulldozing their homes, livelihoods, and places of worship, and forcing families out of long-held settlements without rehabilitation. New practices also emerged, with the government launching a large-scale, nationwide crackdown on Bengali-speaking Muslims, including Indian citizens, who were detained, denationalised, separated from their families, and ‘pushed’ across the border at gunpoint after being accused of being ‘illegal migrants’. India’s once-celebrated electoral machinery was also repurposed as a tool of exclusion, through an unprecedented nationwide voter re-verification drive that has already resulted in the mass disenfranchisement of Muslims in Bihar and is now being rolled out across the country.
This story was originally published in southasiajusticecampaign.org. Read the full story here.