Rebuilding Trust in a Divided Society: Challenges for India Today

Two young men are killed in Ghaziabad within weeks of each other, both around Bakra Eid. In one case, a Hindu man is killed, allegedly by Muslim acquaintances — and the accused is shot dead in a police encounter within days, while a demolition notice appears on his family home. In the other, a Muslim man is killed by a Hindu friend — and nothing comparable follows: no encounter, no bulldozer, barely a ripple of organized outrage. For Irfan Engineer, Director of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS) and author of two recent books tracking the machinery of communal hatred in India, that asymmetry isn't incidental. It's the whole story.

This article is drawn from an in-depth Nous Network conversation with Irfan Engineer — please go through the full video for more context and detail than a single article can capture.

Speaking with Nous Network, Engineer — whose organization has documented and monitored communal violence in India continuously since 1993, and who is also convener of the Inter-Religious Solidarity Council — laid out a case that reframes the entire conversation around India's rising communal tension: that what has genuinely changed since 2014 is not simply the frequency or intensity of Hindu-Muslim conflict, but the identity of who is actually carrying it out.

A Passive State, Then an Active One

Engineer was careful to draw a precise historical line. Communal riots, he noted, are not a new phenomenon in India — but their character, in his analysis, has shifted fundamentally.

"Before 2014, the big problem was that the state was largely passive. It watched riots happen. Occasionally, a rogue police officer would participate directly — like in Malliana in 1987, where a mob, allegedly backed by the PAC, entered the village, blocked exit points, and opened fire, killing 72 people. Victims were shot or burned alive in their homes. The SP at the time, a decent officer, filed the FIR and had it investigated properly — and to this day, not a single one of those officers has been punished. That was the injustice then: the state failed to deliver accountability. But it was still, largely, a passive failure."

What he describes happening since 2014 is different in kind, not just degree.

"I use this word deliberately: the state now participates. What rioters used to do — burning homes, damaging property with whatever limited means they had — the state now does with a bulldozer. And where riots happen, 80 to 90 percent of the victims are Muslim. Yet when police make arrests after those same riots, 90 percent of the people arrested are also Muslim."

He extended the argument to the treatment of protest itself, contrasting the fate of BJP leader Kapil Mishra — who, Engineer noted, was filmed openly warning of violence unless a protest site was cleared, standing beside police at the time — with that of Umar Khalid, arrested in connection with the 2020 Delhi riots and, at the time of this conversation, still in custody six years later without bail.

"Kapil Mishra said it openly, on camera, standing with the police. And who is sitting in jail today over the conspiracy behind those riots? Umar Khalid — for six years, with bail rejected court after court. A Supreme Court bench itself recently observed that his bail had been looked at through a double standard, and that he should have been released. We are turning legal process itself into the punishment."

The Bombay Precedent

Engineer pointed to the 1992-93 Bombay riots as an earlier, instructive marker of institutional bias — one he sees as continuous with, rather than separate from, the current moment.

"In the Bombay riots, 80 percent of the victims of police firing were Muslim — even though the rioting mobs were overwhelmingly Hindu. If police firing had actually targeted the mobs doing the rioting, far more Hindus would have died. That's a partisan role for the police, even then. The difference now is that after 2014, the state doesn't just quietly favour one side during a riot — it openly stands with Hindu rioters, and it fulfils demands rioters themselves are making."

He described a broader pattern of dispersed, smaller-scale communal incidents replacing the large, cyclical riots of decades past — Gujarat, the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, the 1989 Bhagalpur riots — a shift he attributes partly to a ruling party's own interest in projecting an image of law and order to attract investment, even while permitting continuous, lower-intensity violence to persist beneath that surface.

Hate Speech as the Foundation of Physical Violence

A central plank of Engineer's analysis concerns what he calls "attitudinal violence" — the normalization of hate speech as the precondition for physical violence, and its dramatic escalation in both frequency and source over the past decade.

"Every kind of 'jihad' has now been discovered — love jihad, corporate jihad, spit jihad, civil-services jihad. This language starts at the very top: the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the party president. When it starts there, it filters down, and the person at the grassroots level with hatred in their heart feels licensed — that they're doing a patriotic act by targeting Muslims, as though this were a new freedom struggle they finally get to participate in."

He connected this directly to specific, oft-repeated rhetorical tropes — including remarks evoking mangalsutras, land, and daughters being "taken away" — as a mechanism for making abstract hostility feel personally believable.

"When language like that comes from the top, it makes the hatred believable to your own supporters — so that when they look at a Muslim neighbour, colleague, or stranger on a train, they see exactly what they've been told to see. That normalization of violence is precisely why someone can be beaten to death on a train and it barely registers anymore."

The Roots: An Undefined, Expansionist Idea

Pressed on whether framing this purely as a BJP electoral strategy — a distraction from bread-and-butter issues — risks understating a much older and more explicit ideological project, Engineer agreed without hesitation, tracing the lineage directly to RSS ideologue M.S. Golwalkar's writings.

"Golwalkar wrote very clearly, in We, or Our Nationhood Defined, that Muslims and Christians are second-class inhabitants of this country — foreigners who shouldn't even be here. The RSS's objective is a nation purified of Muslims and Christians. Not the inclusive nationalism we fought the British for, the one that promised democracy, equality, and dignity for every citizen — enshrined in our Constitution's preamble. That's not the nationalism this ideology means. It means Hindu nationalism, and in Hindu nationalism, Muslims and Christians have no place except as second-class citizens."

He was pointed about the absence of any clear, agreed definition of what a "Hindu Rashtra" would actually mean territorially or constitutionally — arguing that under a maximalist reading, it implies claims over the entire subcontinent.

"If you take 'Akhand Bharat' seriously as an idea — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka — that's an expansionist idea, which means permanent, endless conflict. Every such right-wing ideology is expansionist. Hitler's 'Greater Germany' meant absorbing Eastern Europe. Zionism speaks of a 'Greater Israel.' So the real question is: is Akhand Bharat expansionist, or will India's current borders simply stay as they are — in which case, minorities inside those borders have to be made second-class, forced out, or reduced to labourers without full citizenship. That is the actual ideology underneath all of this."

The Diversion Underneath the Diversion

Engineer identified a second function served by sustained communal tension — one aimed less at Muslims directly and more at insulating the government from scrutiny over economic conditions affecting the Hindu majority itself.

"There's real pain in the body right now — inflation, unemployment — but instead of treating the actual cause of that pain, we're being given a painkiller. And the painkiller is Hindutva pride. I'm hungry, I'm unemployed — but our culture is superior, our religion is the greatest. That comfort is enough to make people go to sleep without addressing the real problem, the way a mother short on food might pretend to cook just so her hungry children fall asleep without asking further questions."

He pointed to India's recent slip from the world's fourth-largest to sixth-largest economy as a case study in this deflection — one he says received none of the sustained media scrutiny it deserved, in an environment where, in his account, a Godi media culture prefers to focus on ginned-up nationalist trivia rather than substantive accountability.

Is the Hindu Rashtra Already Here?

Asked directly whether an "undeclared Hindu Rashtra" is already a functioning reality, Engineer offered a carefully qualified answer — pointing simultaneously to troubling evidence and to a democratic check he believes still holds.

"India's democracy is still alive. In 2019 they won with a big majority. In 2024 they campaigned on getting 400 seats, saying openly they wanted to change the Constitution — and they came back with roughly 240, short of a majority on their own. That tells you our Constitution still carries real weight with citizens, and that people want this Constitution and this democracy to survive. Citizens still make government answerable to some degree — that hasn't disappeared."

But he was equally direct that a narrower version of the project may already be operative.

"If you define a 'lower-order' Hindu Rashtra as one where Muslims and Christians are made to feel like second-class citizens, you could say that version has already arrived. Free and fair elections are only one part of democracy — and even that part is now genuinely in question, given what we're seeing with voter roll manipulation, the SIR process, and how selectively the Election Commission chooses to respond. But full authoritarian capture — where a citizen truly cannot hold the government accountable at all — we haven't fully reached that yet, even if that's clearly the direction of travel."

He invoked a Bertolt Brecht line — paraphrased from memory — about a government that, unable to secure the electorate it wants, might as well dissolve the electorate itself, framing India's current electoral apparatus as disturbingly close to that inversion: not citizens choosing their government, but the machinery choosing its citizens.

What Should Actually Be Done

Engineer's prescriptions ran on two tracks he was explicit should proceed simultaneously, rather than sequentially.

The first, longer-term track centres on what he called re-anchoring public life in the shared ethical core running through India's own religious traditions — the compassion of Sant Tukaram, Sant Ravidas, and Kabir, the Islamic and Christian ethical injunctions toward the neighbour, and Buddhism's emphasis on compassion — as a genuine counterweight to hatred, rather than treating religious identity itself as inherently divisive.

"The idea of vasudhaiva kutumbakam — the world as one family — exists in Hindu tradition. When we exclude people as 'illegal Bangladeshis,' where does that value go? These ethical values across religions aren't opposed to each other. They complement one another. We need to reinforce them, put them back into our music, our performing arts, our culture — because cultural performance, when it happens, genuinely wins people's hearts."

But he was candid that such efforts currently operate at a fraction of the scale and resourcing of the machinery producing hatred.

"We simply don't have the resources or the platforms to spread this as widely as it needs to go. Educational institutions could be that platform — instead, they're increasingly being turned into platforms for spreading hate rather than connection. Whatever limited success groups like ours are having on the ground, it's genuinely insufficient against how deeply Hindutva messaging has penetrated."

The second, more urgent track is institutional and legal: pushing for state-level reforms that guarantee justice to every victim of communal violence regardless of religion, caste, or gender, and treating rigorous, careful documentation of ongoing violence as inseparable from that fight.

"Documentation is the first step toward justice. I genuinely cannot overstate its importance. If a delegation goes to the Prime Minister tomorrow and says violence is happening, the first question will be: show us the evidence. Documentation is that evidence — which is exactly why governments are afraid of it. Truthful documentation is itself a weapon in this fight."

He offered a personal illustration from his own fieldwork in Assam, monitoring the National Register of Citizens process.

"I was genuinely surprised when Assam's Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, named me directly in a press conference — calling my conversations with people facing eviction an act of sedition, and threatening to have me jailed. We're a small organization doing quiet documentation work. That a sitting Chief Minister felt the need to name us on camera tells you exactly how much the government fears documentation surviving as a record — because if it survives, it becomes a permanent stain on their record, and people start demanding change, reparations, compensation. You cannot fight any injustice without first documenting it."

The NRC's Real Numbers

Engineer used Assam's citizenship exercise as a case study in how inflated fear narratives function politically, regardless of their factual basis.

"Before the NRC, the claim circulating was that anywhere from 85 lakh to a crore illegal Bangladeshi Muslims were living in Assam. After the entire, deeply painful NRC process — which caused enormous hardship, especially for undocumented labourers and landless farmers — the actual excluded figure came to 19 lakh. And even within that 19 lakh, a very large share were Bengali Hindus who'd come from Bangladesh generations ago as refugees, exactly the population the CAA law was designed to protect. So the real number bore no resemblance to the figure used to generate fear in the first place — and demography should never be a government's concern at all. The Indian state is supposed to be religiously neutral. Whether the Muslim population is growing, or the Hindu population, or the Tamil-speaking population — that should simply not be its business."

A Different Kind of Answer on the Cow

Asked about a recent, notable instance of Muslim religious leadership proactively trying to defuse communal tension — organizations across the country offering, around Bakra Eid, to support formally declaring the cow India's national animal, in direct response to what they characterized as a hypocritical West Bengal law permitting the slaughter of cows over the age of fourteen — Engineer was unambiguous in his admiration, while offering a sober assessment of its likely reception.

"That was a genuinely good initiative from Muslim religious leadership. But declaring the cow a national animal won't stop cow slaughter across India — Muslims certainly won't do it, but India is far too diverse for that gesture alone to change practice everywhere. In the Northeast, in the South — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal — plenty of Hindus themselves eat beef, and cattle remain an inexpensive source of protein for many communities."

He invoked Gandhi's support for the Khilafat Movement as a historical template for what genuine reciprocity looks like — noting that not a single cow was reportedly slaughtered in India during the height of that movement between 1919 and 1922, achieved through empathy rather than legal compulsion.

"For a certain section of Hindu nationalists, the cow isn't really a matter of religious sentiment at all — it's a weapon. A tool of politics. A way to cast Muslims as villains: look, they eat our mother, so we shouldn't have to tolerate them, so violence against them becomes justified. For them, it was never a belief. It's a weapon, and a piece of politics."

Breaking the Bubble

Toward the close of the conversation, Engineer turned to a subtler dynamic — the sense of entitlement and permission that ordinary citizens, not just political leaders, have absorbed toward openly hostile speech about Muslims, particularly amplified through a growing ecosystem of small, hate-driven YouTube channels.

"In my honest experience, meeting Hindus across the country, this attitude doesn't reflect how most of them actually think — it belongs to a fairly small section. But repeated propaganda, through Godi media, through films like The Kerala Story and The Kashmir Files, through school textbooks, keeps manufacturing the association that Muslims aren't really part of this nation — that they're a threat to it. That narrative has genuinely taken root in a section of the population, even if it isn't the majority view it's often presented as."

He extended a candid, self-implicating point about media and information bubbles more broadly — one he agreed applied just as much to those working against communal hatred as to those spreading it.

"We all live in our own bubbles now, consuming the content that already suits us, and feeling reassured by it — 'everything is fine' — without genuinely seeing the other side. I agree those bubbles urgently need to be broken."

He closed by insisting that India's freedom struggle itself refutes any narrative of Muslims as guests in their own country, invoking the composition of names inscribed on India Gate's war memorials.

"Ninety percent of the martyrs' names inscribed at India Gate are Muslim names. This country's freedom came from everyone's sacrifice — Hindu, Muslim, Christian alike, and not only in the freedom struggle itself, but in this country's art, culture, and composite heritage. This is everyone's country, and our Constitution says exactly that: whoever is a citizen here, this country belongs to them."

What makes Engineer's account genuinely unsettling isn't any single claim within it, but the cumulative shift he describes: from a state that once merely failed to stop violence, to one he argues now actively completes it. Whether or not one accepts every element of that framing, the specific, checkable asymmetries he points to — in who gets encountered and whose home gets bulldozed, in who gets arrested after a riot and who doesn't, in who sits in jail five years without bail while the person filmed inciting violence walks free — are, by his account, precisely the kind of pattern that only becomes visible, and only becomes actionable, once someone bothers to write it down.