If you read the works of Guruji Golwalkar and [V. D.] Savarkar, [Hindutva] stems from the idea of Hindu supremacy and the purity of the Aryan race — the idea that upper-caste Indians, like the Brahmins and the Kshatriyas, need to occupy the highest levels of power, and that everybody below them, which means the Shudras, the Dalits, and the lower castes in India, need to be treated as slaves. The original Hindutva ideology also sees Muslims and Christians as lesser [people].

This notion of the purity of the Hindu race is very similar to what the Nazis espoused. If you look at the work of Guruji Golwalkar and other members of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation], they professed their profound fascination with the Nazi ideology and vice versa, and their faith in the idea of supremacy.

The Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist party in [the state of] Maharashtra, played a crucial role in the Mumbai [Bombay] riots which led to [around] 1,000 Muslims being massacred [following the] demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. They made provocative speeches and wrote using provocative headlines which used slurs for Muslims. Afterwards, one of the members branched out and founded another Hindu nationalist party. I interviewed him in 2008 and asked him, ‘Who is that one figure in history who inspires you most?’ And he said, ‘Hitler.’ Then I asked, ‘What about Hitler do you love the most?’ And he said that he got his business done.

If you look at the current onslaught on Gaza and see the support for Israel on social media, a big chunk of it is from India. The irony is a lot of these people cheering on Israel have displayed pictures featuring Hitler and the swastika. If you look at the discourse today from the Hindu nationalists on Twitter [now X], they say that Netanyahu is probably the only leader in the world who knows how to show Muslims their place without appeasing the [rest of the] world.

A lot of ideologues in the RSS were actually colluding with the British during the freedom movement. It’s ironic — these Hindu nationalists talk about this country being theirs, but they had very little involvement in the freedom struggle of this country.

Savarkar has since been reimagined as a Hindu hero, and films are being made about his life right now. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in India, is facing defamation charges because he’s called Savarkar a fascist. But Savarkar famously asked the British for clemency when he was jailed in the Andamans. So, when the far right talks about protecting India from external forces, it’s ironic, because their heroes are people who were aiding and abetting the British.

And their heroes kept changing throughout history. Some elements of the Hindu nationalist movement had a fascination with Stalin and Marx. They took elements of everybody’s ideology. But in the present-day Hindu nationalist movement, leftist ideas are despised and hated. There is a concerted attack on two sets of people: they hate leftists, which explains the attack on the left-leaning news outlet NewsClick; they believe that leftists are a thorn in the side of Hindu nationalist politics. And they hate Muslims.

Modi’s entire election campaign this year was about the glorious past of India and why we need to bring it back. One advert the BJP released is a good example. It was a cartoon showing a glorious India with kings and queens and gold and diamonds — and then suddenly these Mughal-like people, Muslim-like, with the green flag in the background arrive and start plundering and looting.

Everybody says India is a secular country, but the brutal truth is the conversations that are happening today in public are conversations that have always happened in our households. There has always been this anti-Muslim sentiment in the living rooms of most upper-caste Hindu families. You can marry anybody except a Muslim, for example. They cover it up by saying, ‘Oh, they are beef eaters.’ Or [they say], ‘Their culture is very different from ours.’ But the crux of it is not the culture. It is the idea that these are people who do not belong here, that these are people who should have gone to Pakistan when they were given the opportunity. They say: ‘Muslims have like a dozen countries. We, Hindus, don’t have a single country. Why can’t we have a Hindu India?’

That’s exactly what Zionists say, which is why there’s so much bonding between Zionists and Hindu nationalists.

The idea of secularism is anathema to the idea of a Hindu India. But Hindu nationalists also believe Hindu India is a more liberal country, one which is more accepting of other cultures. They believe that when Islam came in, it dominated their culture. There is an inherent flaw in their argument: they talk about wanting to be accepting of everybody, when they are not.

Absolutely. In India, you will see a mob lynching Muslims on the streets. They get away with it because a big section of society believes that Muslims should stop eating beef, and that by eating beef they justify what’s happening to them. Islamophobia is at the crux of it. But when I make that argument, or when Muslim friends make that argument, the first thing we’re asked is, ‘But why do you always focus on the Muslim thing? Why are Muslims so obsessed with this?’

You want to say: it’s because we are a targeted community in this country. There are 220 million Muslims in India, the third largest Muslim population in the world, but we are being consistently targeted, and not just by Modi’s party. If you look at the opposition, at the Congress Party and other opposition leaders, if there are crimes against Muslims, they’re reluctant to speak out in solidarity so as to not appear pro-Muslim. That’s also Islamophobia.

I’m a child of the 1992 Bombay riots. I was eight or nine when they started. We were the only Muslim family in a predominantly Hindu locality. My father was a government schoolteacher; he was part of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and a well-known Urdu writer. We had an RSS school in that area too, and its students would come to our home and tie a thread to my father’s wrist as part of a traditional Hindu practice. During the annual puja ceremony at the neighbourhood temple, they would take water from our house. So it was a cosmopolitan set-up. I grew up in a Muslim household, but I never saw myself as different from the others. We never felt like there could be an attack on us.

But on 6 December 1992, when the mosque in Ayodhya was demolished by Hindu nationalists, there was a big poster somebody stuck on our door which said, ‘Let’s go to Ayodhya.’ I remember my mum waking up in the morning, and she was shivering. She had been speaking to her neighbour, her best friend of fifteen years, someone who had seen her through thick and thin, and this woman had told her: ‘There’s a fragrance coming from Ayodhya. The mosque has been demolished, and our Ram temple will be now built.’

Two days later, an anti-Muslim mob came to our house to attack me and my sister. We had a Sikh neighbour who threw us from the bathroom window, and we escaped in the middle of the night. There were very few neighbours who came to our rescue except for this Sikh man. For months, we had no idea if my father was alive.

We were forced to vacate our house and move to a Muslim ghetto in a place called Deonar. On the left side of our house there was Asia’s biggest rubbish dump; on the right was Asia’s biggest slaughterhouse. It was a place chosen [with] the worst smell. That’s where Muslims were supposed to live. My brother couldn’t get a credit card when he lived there because it was a Muslim area. And at the school my father put me in, I had to sit separately from the rest of the class because I was a Muslim.

What I see in present-day India, it’s a culmination of an idea that existed beforehand, one that kept showing its ugly face over the years. What it got from Modi was the legitimacy and respectability it didn’t have before.

It was the same thing with the British Empire. When Indians were fighting the British, they weren’t Hindus or Muslims. They were fighting as one entity. It’s only when India was divided that we became Hindus and Muslims. Partition was a period of bloodshed and also a period of hatred between two communities. And that scar never really left Indians.

We are living in a modern-day apartheid in India. We know about the Jim Crow laws in the United States: we have that for Indian Muslims in the present day. In the ten days after this year’s election results were announced, four Muslims were lynched after being accused of eating beef, ten Muslim homes were demolished in broad daylight on the same basis, and after the India–Pakistan [cricket] match in Pune, a Hindu nationalist mob came onto the streets shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ [Glory to Lord Rama — increasingly deployed as a Hindu chauvinist slogan] and flying the saffron flag from [a] JCB bulldozer.

The bulldozer is now a sign of a Hindu nationalist ideology, because it’s being used to target Muslim homes. Muslims in India face collective punishment from the police for so-called crimes. But what are these crimes? That they protest the hate crimes against them. That they eat beef. Whether they eat beef or not is a separate question. But the cops will go and check their refrigerators. This is the atmosphere.

I was nince when the Mumbai riots happened and I had to leave my house, but I was nineteen when the Gujarat riots happened in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat. A thousand Muslims were massacred, according to official figures; two thousand according to other sources.

That time I went to the relief camps where all the Muslims were staying. And where were the relief camps? In the dirtiest areas of Gujarat, of [the city of] Ahmedabad, the places that would smell, near dumps and sewage water. Even if they had been displaced in riots, even if their family members had been killed, Muslims were supposed to live in the places where Hindus would not go. Even today, Muslims mostly live in India’s most downtrodden areas. They are not allowed to be a part of mainstream India.

When I went to Gujarat for the first time, I put a bindi on my fore-head and went as a Hindu. There’s a respectability you get as a Hindu girl, right? Muslim women in the relief camps — they were women who had been burned, raped, gang-raped, women who had lost their children, husbands. The raw hatred that I saw for Muslims there was something else.

Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time. Soon after, he was not allowed permission to enter the United States. His visa was cancelled. And when he became prime minister, everybody [outside India] wondered how he could be elected after the carnage of 2002. But many of us rightly said that he was not elected despite it. He was elected because of what he did to Muslims in 2002.

A large section of Hindus saw him as their saviour, as a person who spoke their language. In fact, when 9/11 took place, Modi — then secretary of the BJP — went on a television show called The Big Fight and cherry-picked quotes from the Quran. He said that the Quran was a source of terror, that it spread terror around the world. During his first election campaign, he spoke in an area in North India and said explicitly that Muslims are plunderers and infiltrators. He didn’t use a dog whistle. He didn’t say ‘the children of Mughals’. He said ‘Muslims’, for the first time ever in an election speech.

Modi has now got a reduced majority following this year’s elections, and everybody is saying it’s because Indians are rejecting hate. I don’t think that’s logical at all. The result was not a reaction against the idea of hate. The result was a product of the fact the majority in this country are facing unemployment, agrarian crisis, and inflation. There’s no food. People can’t be fed the Ram temple all the time. At some point, they need food. It’s not that people are upset with Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics. They were fine with that as long as they had food on their plate.

There are multiple reasons the polls got it wrong. One, the mainstream media in India, the top news channels, all speak as an extension of the Modi government. They did interviews with the prime minister and said things like, ‘Oh, we’re sure you’re going to get 400 seats.’ They weren’t asking critical questions. They were pleasing him. This is a prime minister who hasn’t taken a single press conference in the last two terms of his rule. Instead, he cherry-picks journalists who will ask him questions like ‘How do you like to eat your mangoes? Where do you get your strength from? Where do you get the zeal to serve the country?’

The questions they ask are embarrassing. In fact, there’s one answer that’s recently gone viral, in which Modi talks about his mother’s death. ‘After my mother’s death,’ he says, ‘I feel like I wasn’t born biologically, I was divine-born.’ Any other leader would have been hauled over the coals for that. Instead, we have the media acting in subservience, looking at him like he’s Lord Rama incarnate.

The Indian media has prostrated itself before the Modi government to such an extent that some of us have stopped watching the news, because all you get is hatred against Muslims. ‘Love Jihad’, ‘land Jihad’, ‘property Jihad’, ‘Covid Jihad’ — every atrocity has the word ‘jihad’ attached to it.

The other reason the pollsters got it wrong was the same reason dictators never get the pulse of the people on the ground: because there’s so much fear about speaking up. So when these pollsters went to speak to people, a lot of them said, ‘Yeah, I’ve voted for Modi.’ They might not have voted for him, but they were afraid to voice their opinion. When I was on the ground reporting, the moment I’d switch on my camera, people would ask if we could speak without it.

There is a massive rural–urban divide. Look at the national capital: the BJP won all the seats. Urban India buys the myth of Modi being this global leader who was given the red-carpet treatment by Biden, who Georgia Meloni wants selfies with, who managed to make Russia stop the war in Ukraine for a few hours. It’s fake news, but that’s the myth that’s being perpetuated in India. Mainstream urban Indians love the Modi mythmaking. They see film stars being flown in, artists like Rihanna coming to perform, and they say, ‘This is a big moment for India,’ not realising that billionaires are pumping in the money to get these celebrities into India.

And then there is rural India. When the Ram Mandir [temple] was built in Ayodhya, there were Hindu houses that were demolished to create the corridor of the temple, and those households were never given houses back. As much as the average Hindu wants a Ram temple, they also want a roof over the head.

I don’t think the anti-Muslim hatred among the Hindu population has gone anywhere. But in this particular election, there were three strong elements that came together in a cohesive way.

One was opposition to the Indian constitution being changed if Modi got a majority. The lower-caste people who are protected by the constitution, Ambedkarites, they felt threatened by that prospect, because it would mean they would no longer get the equal rights mandated by the law. So Dalit unity was very strong in voting for the opposition.

The second was Muslim voters. There were stories of Muslim voter suppression all over the country, but despite that they voted in large numbers because they said this is a do-or-die election.

And the third was the people who were the most affected by the economic situation, the ones who have been unemployed for years. Modi made a promise, when he came to power in 2014, that poor people would get 500,000 rupees [about £ 4,700] into their bank accounts. The poor didn’t see that promise get fulfilled.

They are absolutely connected. Far-right leaders across the world find a great deal of similarity with Modi because they believe, whether it is the French or the Italians or others, that Modi is dealing with the same problem as they are, which is alleged Islamic fundamentalism, Muslims who are coming in large numbers and taking away their resources.

All these far-right leaders believe that Modi should be lauded for his efforts to show Muslims their place. If you remember the riots in Leicester in 2022, there were multiple reports by the BBC showing that much of the hate and fake news that led to the situation emanated from India. We have Hindu right-wing groups in the United States right now which are thriving because of the solidarity that they’re getting from other far-right groups there, including Zionist movements. There was a piece in [left-wing Jewish magazine] Jewish Currents last year about how Hindu nationalist groups in the United States are trying to create an outfit like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] to lobby for Hindu rights in the US. And it’s been very successful. Every time a US senator speaks about what’s happening in India, this Hindu far-right group in the US pushes back.

On paper, India still advocates for a Palestinian state. Having said that, on 7 October, the BJP put out a tweet saying that that was what could have happened in India if Modi was not prime minister. India cannot move away from its historical position, on paper at least. But the reality is that a big section of this Hindu nationalist project, which also stems from support from the government, is aligned ideologically with the Zionist movement. You might say we want a Palestinian state to be recognised, but in reality, you’ll see support for Netanyahu and what he’s doing in Gaza.

The solidarity that you see for the people of Palestine in Kashmir stems from the fact that a lot of Kashmiris believe that their problem is very similar to that of the people of Gaza, specifically that of being held hostage in their own land. During the G20 summit, Modi got leaders from Europe to [visit] Kashmir. Why Kashmir? He took them to Kashmir to emphasise the idea that he has emancipated Kashmir and integrated it into mainstream India. An area that used to be the symbol of resistance, where all the marches and rallies used to happen — the Indian government made sure they had planted this big national flag in it.

Kashmiris came out and voted in large numbers in this election because they wanted to express themselves. They wanted to put their freedom on the agenda. India’s home minister said that the numbers proved they have brought normalcy to Kashmir — but, on the ground, people were saying this was the only time they are allowed to speak. They have been maimed, their journalists are being killed, their human rights activists like Khuram Parvez are behind bars on terror charges. Their leaders are under house arrest. The Jamiya Masjid, which they use to host the Eid prayers, has been shut for the last five years. Government employees who protest on the streets are removed from their jobs.

The Kashmiris resent the fact that India wants the piece of land, not the people who reside there. In these elections the BJP did not field any candidate from Kashmir. They were proxies. But the person who won the election in Kashmir was Abdul Rashid, a separatist leader who has been behind bars since 2019.

I’d be the first person to really want to glean some hope from this. As a Muslim, and as a journalist who’s been on the receiving end of this government’s tirades, I would love some relief. But we saw what’s happened with Arundhati Roy. Within ten days of coming to power, the government slapped a charge against her for a speech that she gave about Kashmir in 2010. So the government has made its intentions very clear to me. If there are four lynchings of Muslims in ten days, if journalists are being targeted, if I have been sent multiple notices recently, unlike my colleagues, I’m going to look at this sceptically. Yes, I see people asserting their voting right to tell Modi what they want, but is that necessarily a man-date for pluralism and secularism? I don’t think so.

It’s one thing to say that because Modi has got a reduced majority, democracy has returned in India. For me to have that optimism, I want to see that reflected on the ground.