The pre-2014 scenario: the Hindu-Muslim riot as a political toolIn independent India, till the 2000s, riots were the most common form of violence between Hindus and Muslims. This trend reached its peak in the 1980s during the Ayodhya movement. In 1989, processions organised in thousands of cities and villages to mobilise support by carrying bricks intended for the construction of the Ram temple even sparked a wave of riots on a national scale. Nevertheless, riots between Hindus and Muslims remained a sporadic phenomenon: after some time, the outbreak was followed by a return to a certain degree of normality.This is because riots between Hindus and Muslims were part of political life and served power-related calculations, as Paul Brass has clearly demonstrated through his concept of the “institutionalised riot system”. There were variations on this model. Sometimes, the opponents behind the riot belonged to the ruling party, the Congress, but were affiliated with a faction seeking to destabilise a chief minister’s faction. These tactics reflected the extent of factionalism within this party, which, as suggested by Rajni Kothari’s analysis of the ‘Congress system,’ has long been its own opposition. This use of riots by Congress members to destabilise a leader from their own party in the name of maintaining law and order was observed in Andhra Pradesh in 1990, many years after Brass studied it for the first time. Beginning in the 1980s, a variant of this instrumentalist approach gained traction: violence between Hindus and Muslims now served to polarise society along religious lines. This strategy of polarisation offered two advantages to the Hindu nationalist movement.First, it led Hindu voters to vote more heavily for self-proclaimed defenders of Hinduism, since the violence had made them feel more Hindu. The electoral rationale of the riots of the 1980s and 1990s was demonstrated by Steven Wilkinson, who, using a database compiled with Ashutosh Varshney covering riots from 1950 to 1995, provided evidence that “both riots and deaths do tend to cluster in the months before elections, and then drop off sharply in the months after an election is held.” The 1989 riots at Bhagalpur, Jaipur, Indore and elsewhere were a case in point.Second, the polarisation of society through the crystallisation of Hindu-Muslim antagonism allowed Hindu nationalists to rally the majority community against the Other. This need for unity was particularly acute in the 1980s and 1990s following the rise of caste-based tensions within the Hindu community. This phenomenon was primarily due to the reservations issue. The so-called ‘higher’ castes took to the streets to protest these measures, which they viewed as discriminatory. This scenario first unfolded in 1985 in Gujarat, where violence between members of the dominant Patel caste and communities of the Other Backward Classes claimed numerous victims. Spurred on by Hindu nationalists who singled out Muslims as scapegoats, the violence took on a ‘communal’ character. This renewed polarisation of Gujarati society paved the way for the BJP’s rise to power. These events were repeated on a national scale in the early 1990s after V.P. Singh implemented the Mandal Commission Report: immediately the BJP withdrew from the governing coalition, and its leader, L.K. Advani, embarked on a Rath Yatra across India that was intended to transcend caste divisions and that was punctuated by numerous riots.Since violence had a political objective, it was not supposed to last too long – particularly to prevent the BJP from reaping electoral benefits from it. We saw this logic at work after the Gujarat pogrom when Narendra Modi dissolved the state assembly and called for early elections to capitalise on the public sentiment stemming from months of clashes. Modi worked to exploit this sentiment during an election campaign in which he denounced the threat that Islamists and Muslims in general posed to Hindus. And the BJP won a majority of the seats thanks to the support it received in the constituencies that had been hardest hit by the violence. Indeed, the BJP won 42 out of 50 seats in the three districts most heavily affected by this violence – Panchmahals, Dahod, and Vadodara (where it won all 13 MLA seats). Aseem Prakash shows that in the 13 districts affected by communal violence – which accounted for 66% of the total electorate – the BJP performed well: it received 71% of its votes there and won 91 out of 116 seats, marking a gain of 21 seats. In contrast, the Congress made gains in “riot-free districts” (+9% in terms of valid votes and an increase of 17 seats compared to 1998), at the expense of the BJP (-3% and 18 fewer seats). Polarisation allowed the BJP to defuse caste divisions and attract the Hindu masses. A Dalit interviewee from Ahmedabad told Ward Berenschot: “After the riots, there were elections. At that time, Vankars and Chamars had become Hindus [sic], so they voted for a Hindu. So the Hindu won.” An exit poll noted that while 76% of ‘upper’ castes and 82% of Patels voted BJP, OBC castes also supported the party – between 54 and 61% depending on their jati. From mass violence to systemic violence The nature of communal violence began to change in the 2000s, following the BJP’s rise to power in many states. On the one hand, the party no longer needed to rely as heavily on polarisation to win elections (being in power, it could draw on other bureaucratic and financial resources). On the other hand, it ran the risk of appearing incapable of enforcing law and order if violence continued while it was in power. Not to mention the damage to its image that such violence could cause, particularly abroad – hadn’t Modi become persona non grata in the West after the 2002 pogrom?Communal violence has therefore taken on a different form that has stabilised around the following characteristics since 2014: it targets Muslims individually, in an increasingly daily manner, with the aim of eliminating this community one way or another. This is why we can no longer speak of Hindu-Muslim violence, but rather of anti-Muslim violence.This trend is particularly evident in the normalisation of lynching, as documented in Zafarul Islam Khan’s latest book, Mob Lynching in India, A Record: 2014–2024 (Pharos Media). In many cases, the defense of the sacred cow is the root cause of these lynchings. Farmers suspected of taking cows to the slaughterhouse have been beaten to death. This has given rise to another macabre ritual in which self-proclaimed defenders of the cow – the gau rakshaks – patrol highways to inspect suspicious trucks. When these trucks are driven by a Muslim and are transporting cattle, the beating can result in death. IndiaSpend estimates that in 2017 there were 34 cow-related incidents, compared to 25 in 2016, 13 in 2015, 3 in 2014, 1 in 2013, and 1 in 2012. Of the 28 victims during the period ending in June 2017, 24 were Muslim. In 2018, this online publication launched another website specifically to document cow-related lynchings, but the website had to be shut down shortly thereafter. Today, Zafarul Islam Khan documents 1,733 lynchings that occurred between 2014 and 2024. This figure reflects the spread of the phenomenon, which is also amplified by social media, as these targeted attacks are often filmed and the videos posted to serve as warnings. In fact, their impact on the Muslim minority has been strong, both psychologically and economically, with some farmers giving up cattle raising, and Muslims at large refraining from wearing a skullcap or even growing a beard, and avoiding speaking Urdu in public. In parallel, we are witnessing an unprecedented ghettoisation of Muslims, who not only prefer to cluster together for safety reasons but can no longer find housing in mixed neighbourhoods.The reason is that the motives behind anti-Muslim violence have changed: it is no longer about polarising society, but about erasing the “Other” from the public sphere – or even from the human race. The motivation of those in power is no longer instrumental but purely ideological. Narendra Modi claims that he wants to close a 1,200-year chapter of slavery that began with the Muslim invasions, and Ajit Doval, his National Security Advisor, states that it is time to take revenge on history:“Our villages were burned. Our civilisation was destroyed. Our temples were looted, and we watched helplessly as silent spectators. This history presents us with a challenge that every young person in India today should feel a burning passion for. The word “revenge” isn’t ideal, but revenge itself is a powerful force. We have to take revenge for our history.”The idea of revenge, which legitimises violence, takes many different forms. It involves not only stripping Muslims of their citizenship by depriving them of the right to vote, economically crippling them, and confining them to ghettos, but also physically persecuting them. But the intensity of the violence here reflects another perspective: the denial of humanity. In fact, displaying signs of religious affiliation has been enough to justify the murder of Muslims. This is how the very first victim of the Narendra Modi era was killed in June 2014: Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, a 24-year-old computer engineer, was lynched in Pune as he was returning from the mosque “because he was wearing a skull cap and had a beard”. Even more significantly, the “Bombay High Court ruled that appearing to be Muslim constituted provocation and therefore partially exonerated the killers, who were released on bail … because they had no other reason to kill Mohsin.”Such crimes have become recurrent. For example, three maulvis from a small town in Uttar Pradesh who were traveling by train to Delhi to visit the Jama Masjid and the Nizamuddin dargah were attacked by other passengers in their compartment because their “skull caps and scarves had irked them”.But it is not just a matter of rendering the other invisible; he must also be tortured. While in some cases the physical elimination of the Other takes the form of a summary execution – by knife or firearm – in others, we witness endless torture that is sometimes also filmed and circulated on social media, as in the cases of Pehlu Khan, Tabrez Ansari and Rakbar Khan. Rakbar, a farmer who ran a dairy in Mewat, and his friend Aslam, were bringing back two dairy cows from the Alwar district when they were attacked by five armed men who identified themselves as “cow protectors”. Aslam, who survived, heard them exchange telling remarks: “‘Vijay, break his legs’; ‘Dharmender, hit him hard on the head’; ‘And Naresh, you break his hands.’.” N.C. Asthana, a retired police officer, compared this attitude to that of the Nazis. In both cases, he observes, there is a desire – not primarily to eliminate, but to subjugate a segment of the population, reducing them to the status of a “defeated people” and “subhumans” (Untermensch), to borrow a concept dear to Hitler . If Muslims are “a people” that needs to be subjugated, this explains the relentless cruelty directed even at children, for all members of this “(sub-)people” must suffer – all the more so because they are not perceived as belonging to the human race. An 11-year-old Muslim boy who had stolen a cell phone was stripped naked before four of his fingers were cut off. Alongside children, Muslim women are also a prime target, in ways that – once again – may be more or less extreme, but in every case reflect an attempt at dehumanisation. In terms of “symbolic” violence, the auctioning of Muslim women presented as “sulli” (a pejorative term applied to Muslim women) sent shockwaves: more than 80 women known for their work in the public sphere – as journalists, artists, activists, and so on – had their names and photos posted on an app hosted by GitHub called “Sulli Deals.” One of the women exposed in this way reported: “People were bidding five rupees (67 cents; 48 pence) and 10 rupees; they were rating women based on their body parts, describing sexual acts, and threatening rape.” Rape, specifically, is the most widespread form of physical violence perpetrated against Muslim women and even girls. Hindu nationalist leaders – including women – are increasingly calling for violence against Muslim women. In 2019, Sunita Singh Gaur, president of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha in Ramkola, Uttar Pradesh, stated: “There is only one solution for them (Muslims). Hindu brothers should form a group of 10 and gang-rape their mothers and sisters openly on the streets…and then hang her in the middle of the bazaar for others to see.”The commission of rape was undoubtedly encouraged by this type of propaganda, especially when rape was “justified” as punishment for an offense against Hinduism. Thus, in 2016, in the Mewat region (Haryana), a 20-year-old woman and her 14-year-old cousin were raped by four men who accused them of eating beef – they also beat the girls’ aunt and uncle to death. Even young girls have not been spared, as evidenced by the rape of an 8-year-old in 2018 in Jammu and Kashmir. §The anti-Muslim violence we are witnessing today in India is paradoxical. On the one hand, it claims fewer victims than the pogroms and even the riots that occurred before 2014. On the other hand, it has taken on an ethnocidal dimension that was largely absent until then. In independent India up until the early 2000s, this violence was part of the political game and therefore remained within certain limits. It was eruptive, instrumental and collective. Since 2014, it has followed a different logic: that of revenge – a revenge that must be inflicted on all Muslims, regardless of gender or age, because the entire community must suffer and cease to occupy a space claimed exclusively by Hindus, the Hindu Rashtra. Lynchings and even riots serve to express this vengeance: the 2020 Delhi riot was not intended to polarise the public before an election, but to punish following the BJP’s defeat. Today’s anti-muslim violence is, therefore, routinised, ethnocidal and, in the case of lynchings, individualised. This pattern of behaviour was introduced by Hindu nationalist groups. Is it spreading throughout the population, as the concept of “mob lynching” suggests? If so, a point of no return would be reached, as has happened in some of India’s neighbouring countries. Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.