EDITORIAL: Reading the latest report by the US-based think tank India Hate Lab, one is struck by an unsettling sense of deja vu.
The findings, released on January 13, do not so much surprise as they confirm how routine and institutionalised communal vilification has become in that country.
As with last year’s edition, the report meticulously chronicles hate speech directed at India’s non-Hindu communities, with Muslims bearing the brunt of this sustained hostility. If there was any difference from last year’s report, it was not in the nature of the findings, but in the rising volume, intensity and pervasiveness of religiously targeted messaging, underscoring how deeply embedded such rhetoric has become in the country’s contemporary political landscape.
The numbers are sobering. In 2025, the report records more than 1,318 hate speech incidents, averaging nearly four events a day, with 1,156 cases explicitly aimed at Muslims, Christians targeted in 29 instances, and both communities facing vitriol together in 133 incidents.
Overall, this marks a 13 percent increase from the 1,165 cases reported in 2024, and a whopping 97 percent surge compared to 2023, when 668 such incidents were documented, clearly reflecting the accelerating trajectory of communal polarisation.
More troubling still is the report’s central diagnosis: incendiary rhetoric has ceased to be just an election campaign-season weapon and has instead hardened into a permanent feature of national life.
Hate speech is no longer episodic or opportunistic. It operates as a continuous, all-hours tool for Hindu far-right mobilisation, shaping political discourse, policymaking and street-level action alike.
Nevertheless, it still escalates sharply around flashpoint events. A 16-day period in April and May, which featured the Pahalgam incident, Ram Navami processions and armed hostilities with Pakistan, saw 98 recorded events of anti-Muslim speech and mobilisation, while a spate of hate speech cases targeting Christians surfaced around Christmas.
Most such instances, unsurprisingly, were recorded in BJP-ruled states, with Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh leading the pack.
And further complicating this situation, and in fact intensifying this ecosystem of hate, was the pernicious role of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and X.
Most incidents inciting hatred and violence against minority communities were documented on video, either originating online or rapidly circulating across platforms, with live streams amplifying their reach nationwide and defying policies that social media companies claim bar the spread of such content.
India Hate Lab has, then, confirmed what has been evident since 2014 when the BJP first assumed power.
The party’s majoritarian ideological project, reinforced by its partner Hindu nationalist organisations, is no longer contested at the margins. It is entrenched at the centre of the state, actively reshaping, if not outright mutilating, the secular foundations of the Indian polity. This amplification of anti-minority sentiment is only one facet of a broader, decade-long campaign to reshape India’s narrative through the lens of Hindutva ideology.
Muslims and Christians are cast as perpetual outsiders and existential threats, while an ancient Hindu nation, portrayed as having been long oppressed under Muslim rule, is depicted as now gearing to reclaim its rightful place.
What is most disturbing is that this worldview, reinforced by a host of conspiracy theories – from alleged ‘jihadist’ schemes to supposed mass conversions – has seeped into the very fabric of India’s governance, shaping laws and policies that legitimise draconian interventions against so-called love jihad, other alleged Muslim transgressions and purported conversions of Hindus by Christians. So, what we have before us is the machinery of hate solidifying into concrete structures and policies, edging India towards becoming the Hindu nation long envisioned by the Hindutva movement, and in the process normalising intolerance as a defining feature of its political and social life.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026