Hate in India today does not erupt suddenly, it circulates. It does not shock; it settles. It is no longer an interruption in public life but its background rhythm embedded in political language, amplified by television studios, and quietly legitimised by institutions meant to protect citizens. What we are witnessing is not a temporary spike in intolerance but a structural transformation: cruelty has been normalised, and discrimination has been routinised as governance.
This transformation did not happen overnight. It was built carefully, brick by brick, headline by headline, speech by speech.
The Politics of Permanent Suspicion
Across the country, entire communities now live under a regime of permanent suspicion. Muslim sanitation workers in Lucknow are branded “ghuspaithiyas” despite possessing Aadhaar cards, NRC papers, and decades-long residence. Christians celebrating Christmas are accused of conspiracy and conversion. Northeastern students are racialised as outsiders even while asserting their Indian citizenship. In each case, the accusation precedes the evidence; guilt is assumed, innocence must be proven endlessly.
This is not about law enforcement or national security. It is about redefining citizenship itself. Belonging is no longer a constitutional right but a privilege granted by the majority. Documents do not guarantee safety; loyalty performances do. The state’s gaze does not fall evenly, it lingers on certain bodies, languages, names, and prayers.
For people like Salma, a sanitation worker who has cleaned Lucknow’s apartments for seventeen years, this means waking up every day unsure whether her labour counts as belonging or merely toleration. Her story is not an exception; it is the template. When the poorest workers are framed as threats, society is being trained to see humanity as conditional.
What is unfolding is not rogue bigotry. It is policy atmosphere. Political speeches routinely describe Muslims as infiltrators, demographic dangers, or internal enemies. These words are not symbolic; they prepare the ground. When leaders speak the language of purification and cleansing, the audience understands the implication. Violence does not need to be ordered explicitly, it is invited.
The idea of a Hindu Rashtra thrives on this atmosphere. It does not require total exclusion; it requires constant insecurity. A minority kept anxious is a minority easier to discipline. Hate thus becomes a tool of governance, efficient, mobilising, and electorally profitable.
Economic failure, unemployment, agrarian distress, and shrinking welfare are no longer confronted honestly. Instead, they are displaced onto imagined enemies. Scapegoating replaces accountability. Fear replaces policy.
Media: From Watchdog to Ringmaster
Nowhere is normalisation more visible than in the media.
Television studios have abandoned journalism for theatre. Prime-time debates function like courtrooms where Muslims are perpetually on trial, for their faith, food, fertility, love, language, and loyalty. The question is never why poverty persists or why institutions fail; the question is always who belongs.
When Muslims are lynched, coverage is fleeting or euphemistic. When Muslim shops are boycotted, it is called “local tension”. When a Muslim child is murdered, it disappears from national memory within hours. Meanwhile, open calls for violence are debated as free speech, and hate speeches are framed as bold opinions.
This is not negligence; it is deliberate design. When hate is repeated daily, outrage loses its edge. When only certain suffering is shown, audiences are trained to care selectively. Violence is no longer a moral rupture; it becomes routine programming. Hate turns into entertainment, and cruelty into consumable content. Viewers are not encouraged to understand or empathise, they are invited to judge, ridicule, and applaud.
In such a media ecosystem, suffering is not erased. It is diminished, normalised, and rendered insignificant.
Law as a Selective Instrument
The most devastating consequence of this normalisation is the steady corrosion of the rule of law. On paper, India’s Constitution guarantees equality before law, dignity of life, and freedom of religion. In reality, the application of law has become deeply selective. Enforcement now follows identity rather than principle. Protesters, especially from marginalised communities, are arrested swiftly and in large numbers, while mobs aligned with dominant political interests roam freely, often under police watch.
FIRs are filed with alarming speed against victims, not perpetrators. Those who suffer violence are forced to prove their innocence, their intentions, and even their citizenship, while those who incite or commit violence receive political protection, public justification, or quiet administrative indifference. Detention centres are spoken of casually in public discourse, as though depriving people of liberty without proven crime were a routine administrative exercise rather than a grave constitutional violation.
Justice, in this climate, is no longer a right. It is conditional. Rights are not guaranteed equally to all citizens; they are rationed according to religion, region, caste, and political convenience.
For families who have lost children to lynchings, custodial violence, or racially motivated attacks, the legal system becomes yet another site of trauma. Court hearings stretch endlessly. Investigations stall. Witnesses are intimidated. Each visit to a police station or courtroom reopens wounds. What should have been a path to accountability becomes a slow, exhausting process that punishes the victim far more than the crime itself. The state does not simply fail to protect these families; it wears them down until hope itself becomes unbearable.
This pattern of selective justice sends a chilling message to society. It teaches people which lives are worthy of outrage, mourning, and protection, and which can be violated, erased, or forgotten without consequence. Some lives are publicly grieved. Others are quietly deemed expendable.
The Psychology of Normalisation
Perhaps the most dangerous feature of this moment is not the visibility of cruelty, but how easily it goes unnoticed. Violence has not disappeared; our capacity to recognise it has. When injustice becomes routine, it stops interrupting everyday life and begins to blend into it.
For those untouched by suspicion or surveillance, life appears largely unchanged. Work continues, routines hold, festivals are celebrated, and screens can always be switched off. This distance creates disbelief: Is it really that bad? Normalisation thrives on privilege. When injustice does not arrive at your doorstep, it is tempting to dismiss it as exaggeration, media sensationalism, or political propaganda.
But for those who are targeted, life is lived under constant pressure. Every day becomes a negotiation with fear, fear of the police knock at dawn, fear of the mob gathering by night, fear of being recorded, reported, or misinterpreted. Ordinary acts acquire risk: speaking freely, praying publicly, loving openly, or asserting dignity. What is imposed is not only physical control, but psychological domination. This is not merely political oppression; it is a form of sustained psychological warfare.
Such a society cannot remain stable. A nation that trains itself to dehumanise one group gradually loses the moral language to defend anyone. The mechanisms built to target minorities do not remain confined. Today they are used against Muslims and Christians. Tomorrow it is dissenters, workers. Authoritarianism never stops where it begins.
Authoritarianism is never content with its first victims. It expands, adapts, and advances. It does not stop where it begins, it stops only when it is confronted.
Hate as Electoral Strategy
Why does this continue? Because it works.
Hate is politically efficient. It consolidates votes by transforming fear into loyalty. It produces emotional unity without delivering material improvement. It allows those in power to survive without performance, accountability, or results. Polarisation is far cheaper than governance, and fear is far more dependable than development.
What makes this moment particularly bleak is not only the ruling ideology, but the opposition’s failure to challenge the framework itself. Instead of confronting majoritarianism, large sections of the opposition compete within it, offering diluted, cautious versions of the same narrative. In doing so, they reinforce a dangerous lie: that equality is negotiable, that constitutional rights can be suspended for political convenience, and that minority protections are optional.
As a result, Muslims are not treated as citizens with legitimate claims on the state, but as liabilities to be managed, contained, or silenced. Justice is not denied openly; it is postponed, diluted, and reframed until it disappears.
This unspoken consensus, shared across political lines, has hollowed out democracy. Politics becomes performance, outrage becomes theatre, and citizenship is reduced to spectacle.
History offers no comfort here. Societies that normalise cruelty do not stabilise; they decay.
From Nazi Germany to Jim Crow America to apartheid South Africa, the pattern is unmistakable. Once the suffering of a minority becomes routine or entertaining, institutions begin to rot from within. Laws lose meaning. Violence escalates. And the very machinery built to target the “other” eventually turns inward, consuming dissenters, critics, and finally the society that applauded it.
India is not an exception. No civilisation is immune to this logic.
The Question That Remains
This moment demands more than sympathy. It demands recognition.
Can we still see hate as hate when it is repeated daily? Can we still feel outrage when cruelty is wrapped in legality and broadcast as debate? Can we still recognise our neighbour as human when power tells us to see a threat instead?
Because when hate becomes the grammar of power, silence is not neutrality, it is participation.
Republics do not collapse in one dramatic moment. They erode quietly. They erode through normalisation, through laughter at humiliation, through indifference disguised as realism and “practical politics”. By the time injustice feels personal, by the time the knock comes to our own doors, the foundations have already been weakened.
This is where students, thinkers, and ordinary citizens matter. Universities were meant to be spaces of questioning, not compliance; of dissent, not fear. Students must ask what kind of country they are being trained to inherit. Teachers must refuse the comfort of silence. Journalists must choose truth over access. And society must decide whether it will continue to trade humanity for a false sense of security.
The choice before India is stark and unavoidable: interrupt this machinery of hate, or accept a future where fear defines citizenship, loyalty is reduced to performance, and humanity becomes optional.
History will not ask who remained quiet. It will ask who spoke when silence was easier, and who chose to remain human when cruelty was being normalised.
Roshan Mohiddin, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Animal Sciences, is serving as the National Secretary of the Students Islamic Organisation of India.
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.