‘The Holocaust did not start with the gas chambers – it started with hate speech,’ declared former United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng in a UN video message ahead of Genocide Prevention Day in December 2019. ‘The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda started with hate speech.’ Dieng explained that genocide is a process: even when that end point seems remote, the process often begins with language that marks out a people as dangerous, alien or less than human.Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who succeeded Dieng as UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, agreed with her predecessor:‘Genocides do not start with bullets or machetes, they begin with hate speech… The Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina began with constant nationalist propaganda throughout party-controlled media channels demonising the Bosnian Muslim population … While the use of social media and digital platforms to spread hatred is relatively recent, the weaponisation of public discourse for political gain is unfortunately not new. As history continues to show, hate speech coupled with disinformation can lead to stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence.’As we turn our attention to the new India, we find that hate speech has grown in the years of the country’s stewardship by Narendra Modi into a pandemic of terrifying proportions.It Started with Words : The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India, Harsh Mander, Speaking Tiger Books LLP, 2026.How does hate speech build a portal to societal violence? Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political thinker who fled Nazi persecution, showed how totalitarian politics begins by isolating a targeted community from the social mainstream. Hate speech performs precisely this work. It marks a community out as alien, dangerous or polluting, and in doing so steadily narrows the space for dialogue. It ‘victimises individuals and narrows down the public debate, which is an essential feature of a totalitarian worldview’.Once spaces for dialogue among equals are choked, the targeted community no longer appears as a community of fellow human beings. It is transformed into a threat, a contagion, an enemy within. Violence then comes to appear not as violence, but as a necessary solution.Independent journalist Arshi Qureshi observes that ‘toxicity in news studios is now spilling on streets, resulting in attacks on Muslims, making them vulnerable…’ The same can be said for both online and offline hate speech. Hate speech ‘spreads rumours to instill fear among communities during periods of tension, followed by a systematic mobilisation of populations to participate in riots by local criminal networks’.Nazneen Mohsina, researching for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, identifies four patterns in the use of the internet by Hindutva actors to enable offline harm. First, social media has become a ‘virtual playground for extremist views’ and an ‘expanding echo chamber’. It is routinely deployed to foster hate against minority groups, particularly Muslims, but also dissenting voices.Second, it is often used to spread rumours that result in violence. Many instances of lynching are sparked by fake online rumours of cow slaughter or love jihad.Third, videos of lynching are widely shared on social media. This ‘performance terrorism’ helps perpetrators ‘gain legitimacy among violent Hindutva groups, brand themselves, attract more people to the cause and normalise violence against minorities’.Most directly dangerous is the fourth use Mohsina identifies: open calls to arms. Political leaders, religious figures and social media influencers have used these platforms to call for violence, even genocide and mass rape.On similar lines, the India Hate Lab in its report for the year 2023, drawing on Cherian George’s theory of hate-spin, traced ways in which hate speech contributed to hate violence. The first was the construction of the dominant group as victims and the minority group as dangerously engaged in a multitude of jihads. The most striking examples of this, as we have seen, were the claims of love jihad, that Muslim men seduce and marry Hindu women for religious conversion. This casts Muslim men as an existential threat to Hindu society.Also read: India Saw 1,318 Hate Speech Events in 2025; 98% of Them Targeted Muslims: ReportThe second was the calibrated tactic of both taking and giving offence (perfected by ‘entrepreneurial hate-spinners’ like Sudarshan News chairman Suresh Chavhanke), which incites and then justifies violence against Muslims.The third strategy was of active provocation, aimed at ‘eliciting a response from Muslim groups, which in turn is used to justify intensified waves of hate-spin and violence’. Ram Navami rallies, for example, instigated violence against Muslims across several Indian towns by ‘intentionally engaging in provocative behaviour’. By engaging in ‘performative righteous outrage’, far-right groups initiated violence while still maintaining their self-proclaimed victimhood.Senior BJP leaders frequently resort to ‘dangerous’ hate speech. ‘Far from mitigating instances of inflammatory hate speech, the current BJP government has fostered an environment where hate speech is not only tolerated but also rewarded.’And as we have seen, the juggernaut of hate speech is often led by Prime Minister Modi himself. Sociologist Raheel Dhattiwala discerns in Modi’s hate speeches an ‘ominous signal’. What worries her is not only that it may instigate and encourage violence.‘[I]t is also the ease with which Modi and his party raise anti-Muslim rhetoric which is equally troubling. The troublesome normality of scapegoating Muslims for every small and big problem is slowly permeating everyday life. The very mention of the word “Muslim” in a political or social context generates a certain frisson in many parts of India today.’One powerful example of ‘dangerous’ hate speech spilling into communal violence came in Delhi in February 2020. The report of a citizens’ committee comprisingIllustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.retired public officials led by former Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur, titled Uncertain Justice, found a months-long drive of anti-Muslim hate speech following the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in 2019 – which for the first time made religion an explicit criterion for access to Indian citizenship – as well as an aggressively divisive and hateful narrative pushed by BJP leaders campaigning in the Delhi elections that preceded the riots.This narrative included ‘calling for shooting bullets while branding anti-CAA protesters as “traitors”, “terrorists”, “rioters” and “jihadis”’, the report said. The police stood by and took no action to punish or prevent this runaway hate speech. Further amplified by television channels, together these created ‘a volatile tinderbox’, supplying the fuel that ignited into the communal clashes in northeast Delhi and claimed 53 lives.‘[T]he February violence emerged as the ultimate culmination of a larger communally divisive project that was set in motion before the eruption of violence…’ the report concluded.In Nazi Germany, Jews were referred to as ‘vermin’. Tutsi people were referred to as ‘cockroaches’ by the Hutu before the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The reference by our Union home minister Amit Shah to Muslims as termites raises the same fears for India.Gregory Stanton, the founding president of Genocide Watch, affirms that there are many signs that India is on the verge of genocide. This is unlikely to take the shape of mass exterminations of the kind that Jews were subjected to in Nazi Germany. Instead, it will assume the form of mob violence as hate increasingly colonises the consciousness of the majority.Excerpted from It Started With Words: The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India written by Harsh Mander and published by Speaking Tiger. Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.