‘Kill Two Million of Them’: Institutionalised Hate Speech, Impunity and 21st Century Atrocities in India (Brill)

1 Introduction

This article examines the issue of hate speech and incitement leading to targeted violence and atrocities in India to understand the dynamics leading to escalation, and to identify pathways for violence mitigation. Violence against minorities on the basis of religion and ethnicity has been a regular feature throughout India’s modern history. The rise of the Hindu nationalist movement, and particularly the mainstreaming of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), has fostered a political climate that is conducive to hate speech. This hate speech has regularly transformed into calls for violent action, rioting, and pogroms through which thousands of people have experienced horrendous atrocities. India was acutely affected by the covid-19 pandemic, with significant costs in terms of lives lost, damage to the national economy, and an overrun health system. As this article illustrates, the pandemic also exacerbated underlying social tensions, hate speech is on the rise across the country, as are the numbers of hate crimes targeting vulnerable minority groups. A recent call to ‘kill two million of them [Muslims]’ is an example of an overt and unchecked call from a high-profile Hindu leader to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing that is entering mainstream discourse.¹

This article starts with a historical background to contextualise the current situation of hate speech and violence against religious and ethnic minorities in India, followed by an analysis of the legal and policy framework in place concerning the regulation of hate speech and other forms of discrimination against minorities. To illustrate the dynamics and character of hate speech, incitement, and violence, the article provides case studies of the 2020 Delhi riots, the targeting of the Tablighi Jamaat during the covid-19 lockdown in 2020, and a discussion of hate speech and violence towards Christian and ethnic minority groups in the North Eastern states.

In doing so, the article contributes to the overarching objective of this special issue by showing the wider historical, institutional, and legal context in which hate speech is enacted. The case studies demonstrate that the specific actors and trigger events through which hate speech develops into incitement and atrocities are highly contingent. However, a powerful enabling environment for hate speech leading to incitement and atrocities has been cultivated by Hindu nationalists for decades. Systematic patterns of behaviour can be mapped and identified over the long durée, and indeed intensified over the past few years with the compounding effects of new social media technologies, the global pandemic, and a pervasive communalist ideology propagated by leading politicians in positions of authority. Mitigating institutions, such as legal bodies and a robust judiciary, have eroded in the past decade due to increased politicisation of the courts and the introduction of discriminatory laws. A comprehensive overview of the trends in India explains why hate speech has become so dangerous, and why greater attention needs to be paid to communal violence within India from an atrocity prevention perspective.

2 Historical Background: Communal Violence in India

To understand the nature of hate speech and, in numerous cases, ensuing patterns of incitement, riots and pogroms in India, it is important to contextualise communal politics that have made religion one of the most volatile issues shaping the current political landscape. Constitutionally, India is a secular state; however, Hindus are by far the largest religious group at 80 per cent of the population. Muslims are the largest minority group at 14 per cent of the population, followed by Christians (2.3%), Sikh (1.72%), Jain (0.37%), and others/none (less than 1%).² Communal violence between Hindus and Muslims is the most prevalent, although there have been significant instances of communal violence targeted at other minorities, such as the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom and the 2008 anti-Christian riots in Orissa state. Although with strong ideological overtones defined by Hindu nationalism, communal violence is often exacerbated by electoral politics, often the need by Hindu nationalist groups to galvanise support across its wide caste-base along religious lines.³

Historian Gayendra Pandey has argued that the politicisation of communal difference in India is a product of colonial knowledge generated through the classification practices of the British during their colonisation of Greater India.⁴ The classification of population groups along the lines of religion shaped group consciousness of communal difference that spurred nationalist movements headed by the Muslim League and the secular Indian National Congress party that were central to the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims (including East Bengal – now Bangladesh) and India in 1947. Unprecedented communal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs occurred during the 1947 Partition and became constitutive of the nationalist ideology that shaped the nation-building programs of both states following Partition.⁵ In the decades that followed, politicians across the political spectrum have periodically leveraged communal identities both at central and state levels to advance their political goals.⁶ The high levels of impunity within the security sector and justice system that have become hallmarks of India’s communal violence today are a result of the deep politicisation of communalism during these early years.⁷

The Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) movement has its origins in the early twentieth-century independence movement against British colonialism. Independence activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar developed the political philosophy of Hindutva in the 1920s, defining the essence of Indian national identity in the Hindu religion – it is a far-right organisation that has been backed by the voluntary paramilitary organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss) since 1925. In the 1960s, Sangh Parivar was created as the umbrella organisation for a family of right-wing Hindu nationalist organisations in the country. Among its key institutions are the bjp (the political wing), the rss (the paramilitary wing), the Bajrang Dal (the youth wing), and the Durga Vahini (the women’s wing). They have been responsible for orchestrating and actively participating in much of the communal violence that has taken place in India over the past decades.⁸

The Hindutva movement rose as a significant political force in India during the 1980s and 1990s, and was accompanied by a rise in communal violence orchestrated by member organisations of the Sangh Parivar that continues to shape the contours of modern politics and political violence today.⁹ As a sign of the formal mainstreaming of Hindu nationalist ideology in the domestic political landscape, the bjp was in government from 1998 to 2004 under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and has again been in government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014.

Hate speech propagated by Hindu nationalist leaders that exemplifies their exclusionary agenda includes statements such as those by bjp and rss leader Rajeshwar Singh that ‘Muslims and Christians will be wiped out of India by December 31, 2021’.¹⁰ The use of terms such as ‘wiping out’ has been interpreted as a statement of intent for ethnic cleansing by observers.¹¹

This story was originally published in brill.com. Read the full story here .