By Harsh Mander
Ten years of Narendra Modi’s leadership since 2014 witnessed the steady metamorphosis of India into a republic of hate and fear. Lynching, genocidal hate speech and bulldozers became the chilling leitmotifs of the regime. Hate became a normalised staple of social intercourse and of state engagement with its Muslim citizens. Fear for them became an essential element of daily living.
The humbling of Modi and his party in the midsummer general elections of 2024 therefore brought with it an almost dizzying sense of relief and hope. For a brief interlude, we believed that the country had left firmly behind the nightmare of the last ten years.
After all, the people of India had delivered an unambiguous message that the politics of hate did not compensate for failures of the state to improve the daily lives of working people, with jobs and affordable food, fuel and healthcare, schools and fair examinations. Besides, Modi alone could not form a government: he depended on the support of parties that opposed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s ideology of denying equal citizenship to India’s Muslims.
But within days of the election results, these new shoots of reprieve and hope were smashed. It is as though the ideologues of the Sangh, both within and outside the government, wanted to compress in just the first four weeks of the new government a rapid-fire repetition of all the stoked fear and hate in the first Modi decade.
In not even a month after the announcement of the outcome of the elections, the country has been wrenched with a series of brutal hate attacks, mainly targeting Muslims but also on occasion Christians. The bulldozers have also made a rattling reappearance as they lawlessly target the properties mainly of Muslims.
The nightmare has commenced again. A nightmare in a loop.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.