Arundhati Roy writes in her book 'Azadi',

"Fundamentally, India is in many ways still an empire, its territories held together by its armed forces and administered from Delhi, which, for most of her subjects, is as distant as any foreign metropole."
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On a fateful day in February 2020, policemen were seen forcing a few injured men lying on the streets of Delhi to sing the national anthem. One of them was beaten by the police with metal rods which had made his entire body black. His name was Faizan.

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His only fault was to look for his mother, who would attend the peaceful anti-Citizen Amendment Act protests. He died a few days later.

Another such story is that of Tabrez who was lynched in June 2019. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand.

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As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned twenty-two, he returned home to get married. Soon after his wedding to eighteen-year-old Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours,

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and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram! The police eventually took Tabrez into custody but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead they accused him of being a thief,

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and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died four days later.

There are thousands if not millions of Faizans and Tabrez whose stories do not find place even on the 10th page of Indian newspapers.

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The hate in India for its minorities has been brewing for quite some time. Its roots can be traced back to the formation of a fascist ideological group known as the RSS in the 1920s, who take pride in following the ideas of Hitler and Mussolini.

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The violence in India against the minorities always follow a similar pattern. We can find this pattern in how Modi's political career began in late 2001. BJP removed its elected CM in Gujrat and installed Modi who wasn't even an elected member at that time.

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His only qualification was being a lifelong RSS member. Five months into his first term there was a heinous but mysterious act of arson in which fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train coach. As “revenge,” Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned

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rampage across the state. An estimated twenty-five hundred people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad daylight. Women were gangraped on city streets, and tens of thousands were driven from their homes.

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Immediately after the pogrom(Gujarat), Modi called for elections. He won, not despite the massacre but because of it.

Similarly during Modi's PM campaign in 2014, massacre of Muslims in Muzaffargarh UP was another such example.

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Babu Bajrangi, one of the lynchpins of the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, was caught on camera in a sting operation by a journalist for Tehelka magazine, boasting of his deeds and of his proximity to Modi: “We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire, we set
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them on fire and killed them . . . hacked, burnt, set on fire . . . because these bastards say they don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it.”

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And to give you a clearer picture of the extent of this deep-rooted institutional fascism in Indian state, on January 28, 2020, the Supreme Court granted interim bail to fourteen people convicted of burning twenty-three Muslims to death during the Gujarat pogroms.

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The chief justice asked the government to find them useful “social and spiritual service.” The difficulty here is that, for many Hindu fascists, killing Muslims is considered social and spiritual service.

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The Ayodhya verdict of giving Babri Masjid's land for building a Temple. The fake encounter killing of 19 year old girl Ishrat Jahan on the pretext of having links with Lashkar e Taiba. These are some of the examples of how the Indian state has time and again proven

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to be only a Hindu state.

Arundhati Roy writes it beautifully, "In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an uppercaste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be,

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is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end."

Indian state's crimes against its citizens aren't only limited to Muslims alone. Dalits, Maoists, Naxals, Sikhs and the list goes on.

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In short, as the supreme leader of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat puts it, “India is a Hindu rashtra”—a Hindu nation. “This is non-negotiable.” In pursuit of a Hindu Rashtra, Indian state has made plans to revoke the citizenship of any non-Hindu person they do not like through

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bills like CAA, NRC and we do not know how many more are there to come. Author Hannah Arendt says, “Citizenship is the right to have rights.” and the Hindutva Indian state now plans to revoke the rights of a big number of its citizens.

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However, India's state policy of oppressing its minorities does not come without a price. Author Ryan D. Griffiths states in his book, Age of Secession, “India is one of the most secessionist-prone countries in the world”.

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I will discuss these secessionist movements in some other thread some day. Thank you for reading.

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