We are officially entering the second quarter of the 21st century. As every year, this moment has again given us some time to think and reflect. For a country like India, which is embracing a new world, we are constrained to ask; what have we achieved, where have we arrived in our thirst to become a global power; and have we taken the right path?Amidst all the infrastructure boom, and life itself taking an unimaginable digital turn, 2025 provoked me to ask something more basic, more fundamental, that may alter the very ethical basis of our lives. There is no easy way to say this, but the last year, 2025, marked yet another year in which our children, our future generation, saw politics of hate triumphing over voices of conscience in our democracy. Many may think that what I call politics of hate is actually a new dawn for Indian nationalism. I don’t disagree with such a hypothesis. But is it perhaps time for all of us to think whether this new majoritarian nationalism has begotten a new wave of hate in our society. Has all the talk of India’s new found muscle united Indian people, like it did during our freedom struggle, or has it only been successful in dividing our society along the lines of faith, caste, ethnicity, and gender? We currently have a ruling dispensation that has targeted one whole minority community as an internal enemy of our nation. The gap between the rich and poor has deepened so much that the latest World Inequality Report released in December lists India as one of the most unequal countries; where the richest 10% owns 65% of the country’ wealth of which the top 1% holds 40% of the total wealth. In contrast, the bottom 50% receive only 15% of India’s wealth.What’s worse is that the ruling party BJP has captained the Indian ship towards more and more hate and discrimination against the powerless, even while speedily handing over the financial reins to the most powerful moneyed elites.However, what had me worried this year is something that should have us all troubled about the path we have taken. A series of events in 2025 showed an extraordinary perpetuation of hate. They showed how we are being nudged, every moment and every day, to become indifferent; indifferent towards our own people’s exploitation and misery at the hands of those who want power at any cost. The biggest event of the year was Operation Sindoor. Indian security forces carried out unprecedented air strikes on terror hubs in Pakistan in response to the brutal terrorist attack on innocent tourists in Pahalgam on April 22, 2025. But what was supposed to be a strategic war between two states metamorphosed into an internal hate campaign in which Hindutva forces directed their anger and aversion towards Kashmiris residing in India. Kashmiri students in various universities were made targets of organised violence; Kashmiri youth were looked at with suspicion in their offices and residences, and were forced to leave their workplaces and universities. Blackouts and the security apparatus pinning down Muslim people in various cities became the order of the day. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Several BJP leaders found in Operation Sindoor an opportunity to embolden their hate campaign against Indian Muslims. One of them in Madhya Pradesh even went on to liken one of our army officers, who happened to be a Muslim, as a “sister” of Jihadis who the Indian government used against Pakistan. At the same time, Hindutva online army trolled incessantly perhaps the only voices of conscience in such a situation of hate mongering. Remember, Himanshi Narwal, the wife of the 26-year-old naval officer who was killed by terrorists in the Pahalgam attack. Her photo in which she sat in a state of shock beside the dead body of her husband was one of the most powerful images that reminded us of the human costs of a war. But within days, she invited the wrath of Hindutva trolls after she opposed political targeting of Indian Muslims and Kashmiris on Indian soil. “People going against Muslims or Kashmiris – we don’t want this. We want peace and only peace,” Narwal said. She said, of course, she wanted justice but only those people who have wronged her husband should be punished.Her statement that pointed out the immorality of the hate campaign against Muslims in the name of Operation Sindoor was more than enough for her to become one of the primary targets of Hindutva forces. Within hours, a big section of internet users who had earlier mourned her loss posted abusive comments. Some even accused her of dishonouring her husband as she refused to blame ordinary Kashmiris and Muslims for the husband’s death. There were others, too, who questioned her character and made unfounded claims about her friendship and relationship with Kashmiri men while studying in Delhi University. Can there be anything more lowly than this?Well, she was not the only victim of the Pahalgam attack to face such an ordeal. Arathi R Menon, the daughter of a man from Kerala state who was killed in the shootings, also had to face similar abuses online after she praised two Kashmiri men who helped and rescued her during the terrorist attack. As if such trespasses in people’s lives weren’t enough, the media ran a full-bodied war hysteria, even when the government carefully worded its statements in order to be seen, not as an aggressor, but a victim of terrorism. However, the ruling party unofficially gave a license to the big media to whip up war hysteria and disseminate fake news. Some television channels reported that the Indian security forces may capture Karachi, some reported on multiple attacks on Pakistan’s military bases when there was none. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.All of these intended to embolden Hindu nationalism in India ended up giving an advantage to Pakistan in the diplomatic world. In the aftermath of Operation Sindoor, while Pakistan cleverly washed it hands off from the Pahalgam by drafting a statement that condemned the attack and got important powers to be a signatory in the United Nations Security Council, India’s position contrastingly was supported by only two nations: Afghanistan and Israel, in spite of the big noise around the all party delegation that went to various countries to drive opinion against Pakistan. The big media in trying to whip up Hindu nationalism and steer a hate campaign against Indian minorities ended up harming India’s cause internationally. Could there be a more stark case of anti-India nationalism? In domestic space, too, the ruling BJP worked towards making Hindu-Muslim polarisation more evident in the garb of running a crusade against illegal infiltration in India, or what was popularised as a war against “ghuspathiyas”.So what did such a campaign spawn? We had Assam’s BJP chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma openly calling all Bengali Muslims in Assam as infiltrators. Almost every day, he stoked insecurities and anxieties to provoke sentiments against one whole community by giving hateful statements. All for what: To win another election and deflect attention from his own governance failures. Police forces across India descended on Muslim migrant workers, and labelled them as Bangladeshis without ascertaining their identities. Their identity cards were assumed fake and a number of them were illegally deported to Bangladesh. Many Bengali Muslim workers were rescued from Bangladesh borders by the opposition parties. If police were short on their efforts, vigilante groups filled their roles. In many places, while Muslim migrant workers were targeted violently, even Hindu migrant workers, often Bengali speaking, were not spared. They were falsely identified as Bangladeshi infiltrators and beaten up before they could be rescued for being legitimately Indian. The end of the year saw one of the most ghastly incidents when a Dalit migrant worker from Chhattisgarh was lynched to death by alleged RSS workers in Palakkad, Kerala on suspicion that he was a Bangaledshi “infiltrator”. In the Parliament, the prime minister Narendra Modi and the home minister Amit Shah gave unequivocal legitimacy to such incidents by openly espousing the campaign against infiltrators. Election after election, they spoke about waging a war against supposed infiltrators in hyperbolic remarks, but when asked the Modi government could not give a single data point on the estimated number of infiltrators in India. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The Election Commission of India, too, toed the line and will likely be held accountable for fuelling such a hate campaign in the future. The apex election body began a Special Intensive Revision to clean up, sanitise the electoral rolls – an exercise that was widely spun by the ruling BJP as a government effort to identify infiltrators in our electoral rolls. The exercise became hugely controversial, with a number of people complaining about wrongful deletions and opposition parties alleging that the new voters were carefully added to the electoral rolls to make the BJP’s voter base bulkier than before. With a pan-India SIR going on currently, experts have now suggested that the total number of deletions could be around 10 crore at the end of the whole exercise – which if proven to be true has the ability to fundamentally alter the electorate. It is simply beyond comprehension how in an exercise that has been popularised as a pioneering effort to identify and remove illegal voters in India, neither the government nor the election commission could not tell us an estimated number of illegal immigrants in India. The noise, the dog whistling, around infiltration is so much, that all other questions were drowned out. Have we asked enough about the government’s own intelligence failure in the Pahalgam attack? Have we bothered to ask what has been the Union home ministry’s efforts to curb illegal infiltration if the number of “infiltrators” has indeed increased in India? Then there are other pertinent questions which will be deemed as unpatriotic if one dares to ask them. What is the government doing to stem the fall of the Indian rupee, which has led to backbreaking price rise of even essential commodities. The rupee will soon touch Rs 100 for one US dollar. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi conducted three big press conferences in which he spoke about the possibility of a large-scale vote theft through manipulation of electoral rolls. He gave evidence of such a trend in at least three constituencies, but the media either blacked the allegations out or ridiculed the opposition. Because there is probably nothing that the opposition does could be pertinent, even when the Election Commission was let off lightly without its chiefs giving concrete responses to such allegations. There were images that hit our hearts like a bullet in 2025. Thousands of aspirants sitting on an airstrip in Odisha to ensure that they find a place in around 100 vacancies for lowly home guards positions in the government in one such case in point. Where are the jobs on our road to Viksit Bharat? One dare not ask. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortySimilarly, I will not dare ask why one airline was allowed to become a near monopoly. We had to face a situation in 2025 where it could shut shop on a whim one day, without having to worry about pushing passengers and common people under the lorry. The government’s inefficiency was so evident that it was found looking for credible answers for days. We are also not encouraged to ask why the newly introduced Nuclear Energy Act that allowed private companies in this sensitive sector has conveniently let off private companies with very little accountability in case a mishap like Bhopal gas disaster happens. Why are all the demands of more accountability, higher liability for private suppliers being drowned out by the media?Or, why are two companies being given all the contracts, from ports, to airports, from malls to mines , from hydropower to highways. We should not be asking these questions because the government may not like it, that’s the feeling all over. At the same time, all those who dared to speak for the powerless and helpless were labelled as a part of a “syndicate”, the new buzz word by government’s supporters, a Syndicate that is working overtime to tarnish India’s image globally.Economists like Jean Dreze and Ritika Khera were called anti-Indian when they opposed the union government’s sudden decision to replace the celebrated Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act with a diluted scheme in which the Centre shifted its responsibility of generating employment for the poor onto the states. Even when it has performed poorly on the employment front, the government has taken away the minimum guarantee of employment that the poor of our country had. But the media spoke about not this aspect but on the new name of its replacement – VB-G RAM G – that has come in the place of Mahatma Gandhi in the new name of the Act. Activists who spoke against communalism and spoke in favour of the poor, such as Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima or even Khalid Saifi have been languishing in jail for over five years but the police haven’t been able to substantiate the charges of terrorism against them. In 2025, we saw even the judiciary capitulating, when the Delhi High Court decided to give the Delhi police even more time to substantiate its charges against Umar Khalid and others while denying them bail. All these years, the police hasn’t been able to start a trial. If you want to know more about the blatant injustice these non violent activists are facing, read Betwa Sharma’s reports in the news portal Article14. Then, we all saw how victims of terrorism like Himanshi Narwal and Arathi Menon were brutally trolled for being the voice of reason and conscience when Internet users and a big section of the media was targeting Indian Muslims during Operation Sindoor. People like Hany Babu, Surendra Gadling, or Rona Wilson who never lusted for power but devoted their entire lives in supporting and speaking up for the most powerless have been incarcerated on unsubstantiated charges, and have had to struggle for bail in the Bhima Koregaon case before the courts took pity on them this year. They are out now on bail but still seen as anti- nationals. College and school students were brutally beaten up at India Gate for peacefully demonstrating against the government’s failure to check the deadly air pollution that has handicapped normal life. If that wasn’t enough, some of them were booked under anti-terror charges.Anyone who dared to register dissent, including those who protested against the Supreme Court’s decision to forcefully remove dogs on streets, met with the heavy hand of the cop’s stick. Even when we were watching the Indian state’s petty handling, we were allowed to demand what the government and the ruling party wanted us to demand. Vigilante Hindutva groups were given a free hand to check on every Muslim shop and force them to declare that the shop is run by a Muslim. Why? Because they think such a disclosure may help bigoted Hindus to boycott Muslim shops. Some BJP legislators’ biggest development work these days is to do rounds of local markets and ask small-time Muslim vendors to disclose that he or she is a Muslim. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.The formidable bulldozer baba, or Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath’s government has now asked the court to drop all charges against the culprits who killed Mohammad Akhlaq which was India’s most gruesome lynching case a few years ago. At the same time, an Indian court has suspended the life sentence of a convicted rapist Kuleep Sengar, who also happened to be a BJP MLA, although the SC corrected the injustice soon to stayed the order. There is more. Since it is Christmas time, the Hindutva vigilante groups are going about their daily run in stopping street vendors from selling Santa caps and other X mas paraphernalia, while the more serious ones are busy threatening and attacking churches in our hinterland to stop Christmas celebrations. A daily look at the newspapers will give you numerous such examples where Christmas celebrations are seen by some in our country as something that may upend Indian values and traditions.Is this merely fringe politics? What’s more worrying is that they have full patronage from the ruling BJP everywhere. 2025 has been evidence of how such fringes have become mainstream, when media, the government, and even a big section of people didn’t ask questions that bothered them fundamentally but were swayed by the excitement of the perverse oneupmanship game over the powerless in some cases, Muslims and Christians in some cases, and the poor in general in most cases. Yet again, yet another year, 2025 ascertained that we are living in greatly absurd times. War hysteria was whipped up in order to show the government in a muscular and hypernationalistic light, but when the US president Donald Trump, not our very own prime minister, called off the war on social media, no questions were asked. Trump is out there to harm India’s business interests by imposing a 50% tariff on India, yet he remains the most celebrated figure among India’s Hindutva groups for his over zealous anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political rhetoric. Such is the absurdity that when the government ran a campaign against infiltrators, there were organised celebrations. But when Indians were falsely identified as Bangaldeshis and illegally deported to Bangladesh only to be rescued later, no questions were asked. When a Dalit migrant worker was lynched by vigilante mobs, no accountability was sought for. And when the same mob stopped a poor street vendor to sell X mas things, it was celebrated as our nationalistic fervour. As the year ended, the ideological fountainhead of all such politics, the RSS, had a point to make. Its chief Mohan Bhagwat remarked what may sound like an oxymoron. Bhagwat forcefully said that the RSS wasn’t against Muslims but that “Hindustan is a Hindu Nation” that doesn’t require constitutional approval. “The Sun rises in the east; we don’t know since when this has been happening. So, do we need constitutional approval for that, too?,” he asked. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyAt one go, Bhagwat derided the constitution, almost threw it in the bin. The hegemony that the Sangh parivar wants in India, by dumbing down citizens, by getting the government to arrest dissenters, by preventing people to speak up openly, is not merely a sign of our absurd times but a disease that we may soon struggle to overlook. Hate has come to be normalised, while voices of conscience that give the Indian nation its ethical heft, are being muzzled with an iron hand. 2025 was a year that saw the cementing of such a trend. I ask myself and I urge you too to ask yourself this – when we are trying to keep our children away from cosmetic threats like air and water pollution, or protect them from uncertainties, how long should we wait for them to stop becoming robotic witnesses to the injustices and hate that has come to dominate public life? Or do we wish for them to get scarred permanently as they enter adulthood in what may be a life-altering second quarter of the 21st century? Hoping that we find some tangible answers soon.