In his 2009 book, The Caged Phoenix – Can India Fly? Dipankar Gupta, the highly respected sociologist, had observed, with brutal professionalism: “For the ordinary Indian who comes from the majority community of Hindus, what happens to Muslims periodically is of no great interest. During the killings the Hindus may become very Hindu, but that does not sustain them over a long period. Even as their Hindu sensibilities are sharpened an overwhelming majority would not step out to kill Muslims but would look kindly upon those who do so under state support.”Now, pray, do read a page-six story in The Indian Express (Delhi edition, dated July 2, 2026), and, ponder how since 2009 our “Hindu sensibilities” have not only been sharpened but have been weaponised, and, how we have come to feel good about this sense of communal violence.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The IE story is simple, a tale of everyday occurrences in hundreds of streets and towns across India – a car grazed by a biker or an auto-rickshaw, and a few heated words between two drivers, maybe even a scuffle, and then two antagonists go their respective ways. But it acquires a different hue when the dispute may be between a Hindu and a Muslim. That too in Ghaziabad, in Uttar Pradesh, land lorded over by Adityanath, a self-styled ‘baba’ who intermittently keeps talking rough to the Muslims.In this incident, the ‘grazer’ was a 20-year-old Muslim boy on a motorcycle and the car grazed was being driven by “a real estate businessman named Rahul Mavi.” The car-owner and his friends felt sufficiently enraged to beat up the offending motorbike fellow to such an extent that the 20-year-old succumbed to his injuries.The IE reporter quotes the bewildered father: “Was a scratch so big that someone should be killed? Even if a car is destroyed, nobody kills the other person.” A question that would gnaw the conscience of any human being.Who can or should answer a father’s question in our supposedly spiritually-renewed Naya Bharat? This was not a death caused in a fit of road rage. The Express story has enough details to suggest a display of a new sense of empowerment in the majority community, an aggressive assertiveness, a kind of license to put “them” in their place, a feeling of immunity from consequences of visiting fatal violence on a young man from the minority community.Plausibly the Muslim motor-biker was guilty of – what Mohan Bhagwat once disapprovingly dubbed – as ‘boisterous’ behaviour on the part of the Minority community. Perhaps he dared to look the real-estate businessman in the eye. Maybe his ‘body language’ was not submissive enough even in the presence of violent intimidation, challenging his assailants to work out the Hindu virility. Or, could the dispute turn out differently – and, less quarrelsomely – if a Hindu, rather than a Muslim, was riding the motor-bike?It is easy – and easier on our conscience – to brush aside these doubts and questions as ‘secular’ nit-picking. Unconsciously the majority community will be inclined to dismiss the Muslim youth death as an aberration. That would certainly salve the guilty conscience, and, then, move on to the daily business of negotiating a way out of everyday corruption.There is no getting away from the brutal fact that our new found addiction to collective aggression and macho-ism is very much in step with the legitimacy and respect that state-led and state-sponsored violence have acquired from the Trump administration in the Middle East. No less consequential is Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza.Under that most cynical man on earth, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has reduced use of violence – disproportionate, deadly and destructive – against hapless Palestinians to a routine and commonplace operation; and, we in India, especially the Hindu middle classes, have applauded, by our silence, this deployment. An unredeeming and unredeemable demagogue that he is, Netanyahu is clawing his way out to political survival; but, we in India have mentally acquiesced in this Israeli narrative of justifiable violence in Gaza. Whatever geostrategic calculations may have been factored in by the Modi government, our diplomatic stance reveals our own infatuation with the idea of violence against the dissenter, the rebel, and the protestor at home.Also read: Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam’s Imprisonments Haunt Judiciary as CJI Praises ‘Najeeb’ RulingMany, many decades ago a Mahatma initiated us into the soul-lifting joys and satisfaction of civil disobedience and non-violence; and, the world marvelled at how millions of ‘dumb’ Indians could summon their inner resilience to stand up against a mighty colonial power; now, we now disdainfully look down upon any talk of moral values or ethical ethos not as ‘soft power’ but as soft-headedness. We now take pride in being unapologetic practitioners of hard-power.The only trouble is that we cannot replicate what Israel does to its neighbours. China has taught us a big lesson about the folly of over-reaching ourselves. Pakistan will no longer oblige us and has made it abundantly – and, painfully – clear that there will be a bloody nose for a bloody nose. Other neighbuors have finessed the art of pin-pricking our inflated sense of self-importance.Because violence or threat of violence against the outsiders/neighbours is no longer a rewarding choice, we turn our aroused “sensibilities” against the hapless minorities at home. Both the Israeli prime minister and the US president have given a sense of legitimacy and endorsement to our new ruling classes as they struggle to retain their very, very tenuous toe-hold on the Hindus’ collective imagination. The ruling clique may take much satisfaction from the deadly violence that was inflicted on a Muslim boy in Loni, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, Bharat a gratifying portent of Israelification of the Hindu mind. Loni today, India tomorrow.Harish Khare was editor-in-chief of The Tribune.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 .