“When members of the police force don their uniforms, they are required to shed their personal predilections and biases, be they religious, racial, casteist or otherwise. They must be true to the call of duty attached to their office and their uniform with absolute and total integrity. Unfortunately, in the case on hand, this did not happen,” Justice Sanjay Kumar observed in the ruling, delivered by a Bench which also included Justice Satish Chandra Sharma.

Murder most foul, no FIR

The case was based on the complaints made by a teenager, Mohammad Afzal Mohammad Sharif, who allegedly witnessed four men — including one who was later identified to have political connections — fatally attacking a man in an autorickshaw during the May 2023 riots. The men, allegedly mistakenly assuming the boy was a Muslim, assaulted him and left him to die with head injuries.

It was after this incident that both Afzal and his father then went to the police station to file a complaint about the murder he witnessed and the assault on himself, but the police took no action. A subsequent appeal to the Superintendent of the Police (SP) of Akola also came to naught.  The murder victim was identified as Vilas Mahadevrao Gaikwad, who had been plying an autorickshaw owned by a Muslim. Afzal had claimed that Gaikwad was killed under the mistaken impression that he was a Muslim.

In 2023, two groups clashed in Akola, leading to the death of a man, over a social media post.

Sharif, who was a minor (17) at the time of the alleged incident, had earlier approached the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court complaining that the police officers concerned had failed in their duty by not registering an FIR with respect to the alleged attack and assault on him. He claimed that on his way back home that fateful night, he witnessed four unknown persons assaulting an autorickshaw driver. They then assaulted him, too, and damaged his vehicle. Sharif “asserted that he was an eyewitness to the murderous assault on the person in the auto rickshaw, whose name was revealed to him later as Vilas Mahadevrao Gaikwad.”

The petitioner also stated that it was well within the knowledge of the people of Akola that the deceased was plying the autorickshaw of a Muslim, which bore a sticker with the name “Garib Nawaz”. The appellant stated that under the mistaken identity/belief that the deceased was a Muslim, the four unknown assailants had caused his death and, thereafter, attacked him.

Sharif also told the SC that though an FIR was registered with respect to the murder of the autorickshaw driver, no FIR was registered over the alleged assault on him following which he approached the High Court, which dismissed his plea.

The SC said, “Though the affidavits filed by the police inspector of the Old City Police Station, Akola, tried to attribute motives to the appellant and the same was willingly accepted and acted upon by the High Court, we are not persuaded to agree at this stage. It was for the police to investigate the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations made by the appellant, a 17-year-old boy, who asserted that he was an eyewitness to the murder of Vilas Mahadevrao Gaikwad and was himself assaulted by the very same assailants.”

“If, in fact, the deceased was really murdered under the impression that he belonged to Muslim community and the assailants were not of that community, that was a fact that had to be ascertained after thorough and proper investigation. When the appellant claimed that he could identify one of the four assailants, that claim also required to be followed up with detailed investigation by ascertaining the location of the person so identified at the relevant time through mobile phone location, call data records, etc.,” the court said.

Negligence by the Police

Upset over the lack of progress in a case of alleged murder during the May 2023 communal riots over a social media post in Maharashtra’s Akola, the Supreme Court on Thursday directed setting up of a “a Special Investigation Team (SIT), comprising senior police officers of both Hindu and Muslim communities”.

“It was for the police to investigate the truth or otherwise of the specific allegations made by the appellant, a 17-year-old boy, who asserted that he was an eyewitness to the murder of Vilas Mahadevrao Gaikwad and was himself assaulted by the very same assailants… If, in fact, the deceased was really murdered under the impression that he belonged to Muslim community and the assailants were not of that community, that was a fact that had to be ascertained after thorough and proper investigation,” Justice Kumar pointed out.

The court took a stern view of the Akola SP’s failure to act on Afzal’s complaint, observing that “this conduct on the part of a superior police officer of no less a rank than a Superintendent of Police is indeed a cause for great concern”.

“Law requires, nay, ordains that its sentinels be vigilant, prompt and objective in enforcing and securing its mandate. To what extent the guardians of the law, viz., the police, discharge this task without bias and subjectivity is the question that arises in the case on hand,” the court noted.

SC orders SIT probe

Allowing an appeal by a witness in the case, Mohammad Afzal Mohammad Sharif, a bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and S C Sharma said, the SC directed the Maharashtra Home Secretary to constitute an SIT comprising senior police officers of “both Hindu and Muslim communities, to undertake an investigation into all the allegations made by the appellant, by registering an FIR in connection with the assault upon him on May 13, 2023, and take appropriate action thereon as warranted”. Significantly, the court also ordered the placing on record of the SIT probe report in three months. The State Home Secretary was also directed to initiate appropriate disciplinary action against erring police officials for their “patent dereliction of duties”.

SC order can be read here.

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The post Akola 2023 targeted violence: Police officers must shed communal colours when they put on their uniforms says Supreme Court appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Following the bloody assassination of Gauri Lankesh on September 5, 2017, in the lead up to state elections in Karnataka, the right-wing rumour-mill began circulating “information” about 24 murders of so-called members of the supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claiming a moral equivalence to the deaths of four slain rationalists. Romig’s investigations into these claims, evident in this excerpt, not just unravelled the truth but also speaks of the de-humanisation that such equivalence ensures. That was the first list. The second list is more chilling, it was unearthed during the investigations into Gauri’s murder by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) that found two lists of names—the thirty-four people whom the conspirators ostensibly planned or hoped to kill! This included the veteran theatre director and public intellectual, Girish Karnad, the professor and translator, K.S. Bhagawan, Nataraj Huliyar, and CS Dwarkanath both regular contributor to Lankesh Patrike. This excerpt elaborates on this second list too.

The editors are thankful to the author and to Westland Books for permission to publish this excerpt.

CHAPTER 17

The Lists

Vish’s words troubled me. I knew that I could never fully understand all the complex forces at work in a place where I was just a visitor, no matter how much I interviewed and studied and commissioned translations of texts whose languages I couldn’t read. I worried, for one, about the complaint that so many BJP members had thrown at me on my last visit to Bangalore when I asked them about Gauri’s murder: that some two dozen Hindu activists have been murdered in Karnataka in recent years by Muslim fanatics, but that neither the press nor the police care—they care only about Gauri Lankesh. I worried that they were right and that my own obvious biases had blinded me.

During the 2018 state election campaign, the complaints about the twenty- four murders only grew. “Condemn the killing of BJP and RSS workers under Congress rule,” Amit Shah, the president of the BJP, said on an election-season visit to Karnataka. “More than 24 workers have died and the police hasn’t taken any action against the killers. They are roaming around free.” Modi said that the BJP is about “ease of doing business,” while the Congress in Karnataka is about “ease of doing murders.” Many BJP leaders said that all twenty-four were murdered by “terrorists.”

I followed up repeatedly with two BJP leaders who’d told me about the murders when I visited party headquarters in January, asking them to provide me with a list of names so that I could learn more, but neither responded. As far as I could find, an actual list had circulated only once: in July 2017, the legislator Shobha Karandlaje submitted a complaint to the central government with a list of twenty-three men who she said were “Hindu activists” who had been murdered by “jihadi elements.” “IT IS A BLOOD BATH IN KARNATAKA,” the letter begins. Fortunately for me, in February and March 2018, a superb and intrepid reporter for the website Scroll named Sruthisagar Yamunan spent weeks traveling around Karnataka to investigate each of the twenty-three names first-hand. One of the names on Karandlaje’s list, he noted, was ambiguous, and could refer to two different victims, so he investigated both, bringing the total number of cases up to twenty-four. He met with the families of all but one of the men on the list, talked to as many investigating officers as possible, and studied every police report.

Yamunan discovered that the very first man on the list is not, in fact, dead. (To her credit, Karandlaje called the man to apologize for including him after his aliveness came to light.) Two committed suicide. Two were apparently murdered by their sisters. According to police and families, the motives for a majority of the murders were real estate, political, or romantic rivalries. Three of the victims could in no way be described as Hindu activists. Among those who were, some were apparently killed by fellow Hindutva activists or BJP members. Several of the victims’ families made a point of telling Yamunan that they have no problem with Muslims and live in peace with their Muslim neighbours. And several were shocked and unhappy to learn that their loved ones’ names appeared on such a list. “I request people to not join any political party,” one widow told Yamunan; her husband, she said, was a BJP politician whose rival had hired a hit man to kill him. “They will use you and then throw you away.” Many of these non-jihad motives, Yamunan found, were clearly reported in local newspapers long before Karandlaje compiled her list.

In ten cases, Yamunan found, the accused perpetrators were indeed Muslim. All of these perpetrators were linked specifically to a hard-line Islamist organization called the People’s Front of India, or PFI, that operates in Kerala and Karnataka. And most of these ten murders occurred in coastal Karnataka, the region of the state where religious tensions run deepest, especially in Mangalore, a diverse city of around half a million people that’s known as a banking and university centre.

Kavitha told me that in coastal Karnataka the political climate is so fraught that news vendors kept Gauri’s paper hidden, offering it for sale only when asked. “If they kept it out in the stall, the owner would be beaten up,” she said. It wasn’t always this way. Mangalore used to be famous as a cosmopolitan, progressive city. Gauri had a particular admiration for Mangalore’s history of social reform, including an early school for Dalits. The novelist Vivek Shanbhag, who grew up in coastal Karnataka, wrote that decades ago there was a shared sense of community among Hindus, Muslims, and Christians “that words like secularism and tolerance cannot capture.” More apt, he suggested, was the Kannada word “sahabalve,” which literally means “life together.” “Mangalore was a very, very forward looking, very educated place,” he told me. “I can’t believe that it has deteriorated to this level.”

Now Mangalore is perhaps the most religiously segregated corner of the state. A senior police officer who’s served for years in coastal Karnataka spoke to me about the situation on condition of anonymity, given its political sensitivity. In Mangalore, he said, the Muslim population is wealthier and better educated than in most places in India. This actually makes tensions worse, he said, because both Hindus and Muslims feel they are competing directly from positions of strength, and ostentatious consumption on the part of young men from both sides—nice cars, flashy motorcycles—tends to fan resentments. Another source of tension is that the Muslim prosperity is often new wealth, earned at lucrative jobs in the Gulf by Muslim men who in previous generations would likely have been farm laborers for Hindu landowners. And in recent years, both sides have become markedly more religiously conservative. As the Kannada novelist Sara Aboobacker put it, “There is Hindu Talibanisation and there is Muslim Talibanisation.”

In recent decades, the police officer said, especially after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Hindus and Muslims have both built up aggressive religious organizations in coastal Karnataka, each egged on by the growth of the other side. But their memberships consist “mainly of these riffraff boys who had nothing else to do, who had a lot of money, and who didn’t hesitate to commit small crimes or revengeful crimes.” In particular, the PFI on the Muslim side and the Bajrang Dal on the Hindu side would provoke each other: the PFI stealing Hindu cows, the Bajrang Dal attacking Muslim cow transports. The Hindu side became very active with what’s known as “moral policing,” with a special focus on attacking Muslim boys who talked to or merely sat next to Hindu girls. The PFI reciprocated, attacking Hindu boys seen with Muslim girls (although much less often, he said). Often the two sides function simply as gangs, using religion as a cover for turf-based criminal operations, such as land grabbing and illegal sand mining. As they always do, the political parties treat the rival gangs opportunistically: the Congress Party patronizes the Muslim groups just as surely as the BJP patronizes the Hindutva groups. In its early years, Gauri’s Communal Harmony Forum often shared the stage with the PFI and its precursor, the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, naively accepting them as a Muslim rights organization. When the PFI’s culpability in communal disharmony became obvious, the Communal Harmony Forum cut ties with them.

The two sides clash often in street fights, the police officer told me, especially in election seasons. Some of these fights result in murders, and the murders have spun into an endless cycle of revenge killings, “always tit for tat.” A murder that happens in Mangalore today, he said, can usually be traced back in a chain to a murder that happened in 1999. In recent years there have been so many prison murders in Mangalore that the wardens have been forced to segregate Hindus and Muslims into separate barracks. In Mangalore, he noted, these retaliatory murders are never committed with guns, because a gun wound “doesn’t create that violent scene that is required to drive a message. So it is a policy that you actually commit these murders with sharp weapons and make many cuts on the body. The message should be very, very strong, so the brutality should be visible.”

He said it’s certainly true that Muslim fundamentalists committed some of the murders on Karandlaje’s list, and also that those victims have gotten far less attention than Gauri, but the context is completely different. Here, he said, it’s “rowdies trying to eliminate each other.” In 2022, the journalist Johnson T. A. did a study of communal murders in coastal Karnataka and found that most were retaliatory, with an equal number on each “side”; the murdered Muslim activists have gotten just as little popular attention as the Hindutva activists.

Yamunan reported that two of the ten murders committed by Muslims on Karandlaje’s list happened in street fights between Muslim and Hindu toughs at official celebrations of Tipu Sultan, which had become a flash point. Two others were reportedly murdered in revenge for aggressive cow-protection vigilantism (one of whose killers was later stabbed to death in prison with a serving spoon). Some cases blurred the line between religious conflict and gang war. In one case of a Hindu activist murdered by a Muslim activist, police told Yamunan that drug turf was a factor: the victim and perpetrator were both marijuana dealers. In the face of this rowdy, macho, endlessly retributive political violence, the RSS and BJP loudly play the victim without acknowledging that their side commits the same violence, racking up a comparable body count among their opponents. The murders on both sides are outrageous and intolerable. But they are not lynchings, nor are they assassinations of elderly writers on their doorsteps.

When the discrepancies in Karandlaje’s list were brought to her attention, she called it an “oversight” and said that she would release a revised list. She never did, and she was clearly unchastened. A few months later, she raised an even more inflammatory charge. In coastal Karnataka, an eighteen- year-old Hindutva activist named Paresh Mesta was found dead in a lake, and Karandlaje loudly and repeatedly insisted that “jihadi elements” had split his head open, poured boiling oil on his body, cut off his tattoos of Hindu symbols, and castrated him. The post-mortem report showed no signs of assault and concluded that he had slipped into the lake and drowned, most likely because he was drunk.

I feel that I now have the facts about the twenty-three or twenty-four murders that BJP leaders kept insisting that I examine. They were lying about those murders, and they knew they were lying. By constantly arguing in bad faith in this way, they make it impossible to engage seriously with their position. It’s an appalling thing to do.

But I’m also appalled with myself—I just spent sixteen hundred words arguing, essentially, that I should care less about those murders than the BJP thinks I should. I think often of a passage from an essay by T. M. Krishna, the renowned South Indian Carnatic singer. “The BJP and company have not only poisoned the minds of their own supporters, they have achieved a larger goal,” Krishna wrote. “They have made the rest of us crass and inhuman to the extent that we are unable to empathise when an RSS member is killed. Of course, this only makes their case for a monolithic Hindu Rashtra stronger and, hence, politically convenient. I know we need to stop this cycle, rediscover empathy, the ethical and sublime, but I do not know how.”

• • •

After the arrests of the first suspects for Gauri’s murder, a very different list came to light. On my previous visit to Bangalore, I’d learned that Indian progressives had developed a habit of talking, often with gallows humour, about the List: an imagined ranking of who was most likely to die next. It turned out that the List was real. In the diaries that the SIT recovered from the arrested men, they found two lists of names—the thirty-four people whom the conspirators ostensibly planned or hoped to kill. The first name on one list was Girish Karnad. The first on the other was K. S. Bhagawan, aged seventy-three, a highly outspoken professor and translator, whom the Sanatan Sanstha often denounced on their websites. devout hindu oruanizations demand immediate arrest of heretic prof. bhauayan! ran one of their headlines in 2015, after Bhagawan declared publicly that Rama is not a god. Two months after Gauri’s murder, police had to escort Bhagawan to safety after a fiery speech he delivered in his hometown of Mysore, a couple hours from Bangalore.

According to the SIT, the conspirators, after killing Gauri, had decided Bhagawan would be their next target. In early 2018, the SIT had been eavesdropping on the phone calls of the first arrestee, K. T. Naveen Kumar, and had at first planned to wait and keep listening in to gain more information on his co-conspirators. But when they realized from his conversations that an assassination attempt on Bhagawan was imminent, they swept in and arrested him.

One afternoon when I was in Mysore, I arranged to meet Bhagawan in the café of my hotel. A cheerful man with a shock of thick white hair, he entered briskly along with a large man in a shiny grey suit. “This is my gunman!” he explained. The bodyguard joined him, he said, in 2015. “I gave a lecture on the Bhagavad Gita, which is said to be a very important document of Hinduism,” he recalled. “Certain portions of the Gita must be burnt, I said. I did not burn them, but I said they should be.” Some people “didn’t like it,” he said, chuckling with delight at the memory. “They attacked my house, pelting stones and all that. Immediately the Karnataka government provided me security. There are three policemen in our house, and one gunman will be always with me.”

“It seems that this group that killed Gauri Lankesh also intended to go after you,” I said.

“But they will not,” he said blithely.

He seemed indifferent to my questions about threats and assassinations; he was more eager to discuss literature and philosophy, which he did with relish. He told me he “developed a critical attitude toward the so-called Hinduism” after reading Kuvempu, the greatest of Kannada poets, who wrote a version of the Ramayana that “removed all these Brahminical values.” The thing we call Hinduism, he said, is nothing more than Brahminism. “I don’t believe in religion,” he said. “I believe in spirituality.”

He talked in detail about his work translating English literature into Kannada, including a number of Shakespeare’s plays; more than once he sent the gunman to his car to see if he could find a copy of one or another of his books. He said that he’s now writing a new analysis of the Ramayana. “Nowhere is Rama an ideal person,” he said. “He was only a killer, killing person after person and branding them as demons.” I told him I didn’t think the stone throwers were going to like that one, either.

M. Kalburgi, he said, “was an intimate friend of mine. Great man. Great scholar. And a true follower of Basavanna.” Gauri, he said, published many of his articles in her paper, and also a book he wrote denouncing the

proposed Rama temple in Ayodhya. “The pity is, those who killed them, they’re all Shudras, non-Brahmins. They all belong to the lower strata of society. You see how Brahminism has brainwashed them. The ideology is given by the Brahmin, but no Brahmin is caught so far.”

After a while we went to his apartment, which is up a flight of stairs, with a terrace outside the door, upon which two uniformed police officers had set up a sort of sniper’s nest, complete with a massive semiautomatic gun laid out on a blanket. The cops rose to their feet as we ascended the stairs, then went back to their distractions from their boring job, one looking at videos on his phone, the other leafing through a newspaper.

I asked Bhagawan if he worried much about his safety. “No, no, no, not at all,” he said. “I feel very happy.” “You seem happy,” I said. “Why don’t you worry?”

“I don’t know,” he said, uninterested in the question. “My worry is about writing only. I must write well. I must read great books. That’s my only concern.” I asked him if his wife worried about his safety.

“No, no, no, not at all, not at all, not at all,” he said. “In fact, she told me, every man is going to die, today or tomorrow. Why worry? You do whatever work you want to do, she said. So, from that day onwards I became completely free of mortal concern. I don’t think about death at all. Death comes on its own. Why should I think of it?”

Girish Karnad also seemed unbothered that he’d topped a hit list. (His son, Raghu, told me later that Karnad was sceptical of these lists.) One well- connected journalist told me that according to the SIT the killers were casing Karnad’s house right around the time I visited him there in January. In August 2018, five prominent left-wing activists and intellectuals were arrested for supposedly inciting a riot; later they were additionally accused of plotting to assassinate Modi. In protest, Karnad attended an event marking the first anniversary of Gauri’s death, oxygen tank on his lap, wearing a sign around his neck that read me too urban naxal. “If speaking up means being a Naxal, then I am an urban Naxal,” he told reporters. “I am proud to be a part of the hit list.”

Others were feeling understandably less defiant. “I want to erase it,” said Nataraj Huliyar, a long-time writer for P. Lankesh’s paper whose name appeared on a list. “I’m afraid my mother might see it.”

Another name on a hit list was that of the lawyer C. S. Dwarakanath, who also wrote regularly for P. Lankesh. An armed policeman sits in the foyer of his office to protect him. A thoughtful, gentle man, Dwarakanath told me that as a student he was actually an RSS member, but Lankesh transformed him. Now his hero was Ambedkar, the author of the Indian Constitution and the prophet of Dalit liberation. He suspected that he was being targeted for a lecture he delivered in Mangalore that was critical of the proposed Rama temple in Ayodhya. There was an uproar when he said that nobody knows where Rama was born or his date of birth—but he was merely quoting the text of a Supreme Court ruling. His point, he said, was that “Rama is in the heart of the people. Don’t impose any Rama on them.” He cited the great mystic poet Kabir, who wrote that there were four Ramas: the first is on the throne of Ayodhya, the second is in the heart of every human, the third is in every particle, and the fourth is beyond human comprehension. “That was my argument,” he said. “They never understood it, because their minds are blocked.” (Bhagawan, he thought, spoke too harshly. “Some people have a very good opinion of Rama and Sita,” he said. “We should not hurt their feelings.”) He used to appear regularly on TV debates, but now that he’s on the hit list, his family won’t let him.

The police told Kavitha that Gauri was “a great soul” because her death had prevented all those people on the hit lists from being killed. “That makes you feel her death didn’t go in vain,” she said.

Note: The book which has been widely reviewed including by the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Tribune India was also a 2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Nonfiction. The. The Pulitzer Board called it “a captivating account of a crusading South Indian’s murder, a mystery rich in local culture and politics that also connects to such global themes as authoritarianism, fundamentalism and other threats to free expression. Sabrangindia is grateful for permission from the authors and publishers to publish four excerpts, at intervals of the book. 

(The first excerpt was published some days ago and may be read here. Parts two, three and four of more excerpts from the book to be also published at intervals)

Note from the Editors: We would like to express our heartfelt solidarity with the family of Gauri Lankesh, Indira Lankesh, Kavitha and Esha Laneksh, who have with pathos and determination built on the gaping vacuum created by Gauri Lankesh’s assassination. Gauri was also a close a dear activist friend of Sabrangindia’s co-editor, Teesta Setalvad.

Related:

Storms battered her from outside, but she stood, an unwavering flame: Gauri Lankesh

Honour for killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi in Karnataka, public felicitation and terms like “Hindu tigers” for accused Amit Baddi and Ganesh…

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Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive

The post Contrasting two lists: one with “facts” on right-wing deaths, the second, targeting other writers after Gauri Lankesh appeared first on SabrangIndia.

PUCL has announced that it will lobby with the Governor and the President to prevent the bill from receiving assent, arguing that its legality is questionable and that it infringes upon the fundamental right to freedom of conscience, free speech, interfaith dialogue, equality, and individual choice. The organisation has warned that the bill’s punitive provisions are excessive and likely to be struck down by the courts if challenged.

Key concerns with the bill

PUCL pointed to several problematic provisions across the bill:

1. Overbroad definitions: The definitions under Section 2 are excessively wide, arbitrary, and untested for reasonableness. Concepts such as “allurement” and “coercion” are defined in ways far broader than similar state laws, and they introduce psychological pressure as a basis for criminal liability, which current police frameworks are ill-equipped to handle.
2. Prohibitory and punitive provisions: Section 3 declares conversions unlawful and, when read alongside Section 5, makes even voluntary adult conversions punishable. The bill also criminalises any form of abetment or “convincing,” which could include ordinary interfaith discussions, thereby stifling free expression.
3. Marriage and interfaith implications: The bill contains new restrictions affecting the right to marry, including potential implications for same-sex marriages.
4. ‘Ghar Wapsi’ and ambiguities: Section 3’s explanations, including provisions for “reconversion” to one’s previous faith, are vague and could be interpreted to support forced reconversions (“ghar wapsi”) targeting Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Ambedkarite communities. The law fails to clarify temporal limits for prior conversions, leaving room for discriminatory enforcement.
5. Draconian sentences: Punishments are extraordinarily severe: a minimum of seven years imprisonment (extendable to 14 years) and fines of ₹5 lakh for general violations; longer sentences and higher fines apply for women, minors, SC/ST individuals, and mass conversions. PUCL asserts that such mandatory sentencing is unconstitutional.
6. Invasive administrative oversight: The bill mandates intrusive District Magistrate inquiries into every conversion, potentially affecting interfaith marriages. Parties who “counsel, convince, or procure” conversions are criminalised, which constitutes a disproportionate restriction on free speech and interfaith dialogue.
7. Burden of proof on the accused: Section 12 places the burden of proof on individuals accused of facilitating conversions, violating the fundamental principle that the prosecution bears the burden of proof.

Conclusion

The PUCL asserts that the Rajasthan anti-conversion bill is an unconstitutional, overreaching law that undermines democratic principles and individual liberties. By attempting to regulate personal faith and interfaith interactions through coercive administrative and punitive measures, the bill threatens to marginalise minority communities and stifle free expression. The organisation is committed to lobbying at the highest levels of the state and central government to prevent the bill from becoming law.

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The post PUCL slams recently passed Rajasthan anti-conversion bill as “draconian and unconstitutional” appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The book which has been widely reviewed including by the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus and Tribune India was also a 2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Nonfiction. The Pulitzer Board called it “a captivating account of a crusading South Indian’s murder, a mystery rich in local culture and politics that also connects to such global themes as authoritarianism, fundamentalism and other threats to free expression.” Sabrangindia is grateful for permission from the authors and publishers to publish four excerpts, at intervals of the book.

The characteristic spunk that epitomized Gauri Lankesh, was evident in the courageous move she made for English to Kannada writing, taking over the mantle of Editor of the iconic Lankesh Patrike, on her father, Parvathi Lankesh’s demise. Her spoken and written Kannada at the time was sketchy and defying the rather patronizing advice of her then colleagues in the weekly, she jumped right in, penning editorials at the start in what the author describes as “clunky Kannada.” It was her editorship of this weekly that later morphed into Gauri Lankesh Patrike that radicalized her, and transformed her into an activist journalist. This chapter from the book also deals with her close involvement with the syncretic Baba Budangiri (Boudhangiri) movement in the early 2000s that preceded the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.

CHAPTER 11

The Ayodhya of the South

It was not long after Sreedhar launched Agni that Lankesh died and Gauri became editor of his paper. Lankesh Patrike didn’t miss a week. Its first issue under Gauri was a tribute to her father. And then the exodus began. Many of the paper’s staffers and writers were there solely for Lankesh, and with Lankesh gone, they quickly left, too. Yet she took the helm of the paper with surprising confidence. Early on she placed a phone call to Chandre Gowda, who wrote a weekly humour column for her father’s Lankesh Patrike, to discuss his further contributions. When he asked who was calling, she said, “It’s me, your mother.” He was so impressed by her openness and pluck that he took her to meet his extended family in their rural villages. “She was very innocent, just like a child,” he wrote. “She would not mind going anywhere, meeting anyone and dining with anyone.” On one such visit, Gauri’s drinking and smoking scandalized Gowda’s neighbours. But his aunt was as impressed as he was. “If we have daughters like this, what do we want sons for?” she said. He was the only Lankesh-era writer who stayed with her to the end, writing his column until her very last issue.

Other Lankesh loyalists were repelled by her show of, as they saw it, unearned arrogance and stubbornness. “We did snigger at her,” Pratibha Nandakumar recalls. Within nine months nearly every staffer and writer who’d worked for Lankesh had quit. Circulation plummeted. Longtime readers complained, according to one writer, that “Lankesh’s tabloid has become as weak as his weak-looking daughter.”

The biggest complaint with Gauri’s leadership was that she was barely literate in Kannada, the language of the paper. How could she edit a paper that, in many readers’ minds, had captured that language’s essence? Her entire education had been in English; at her elementary school in Basavanagudi, students were scolded if they spoke in Kannada. In college she failed her Kannada exams twice in a row, and disuse had eroded her skills from there. When she was away from Bangalore, her letters home to her parents were in English. The Times of India’s Bangalore bureau had hired her on the assumption that she, as the daughter of a genius of Kannada, would at least be able to read press releases in the language. She bluffed her way through, passing off the task to a Kannada-fluent colleague. One editor made the mistake of assigning her to cover the World Kannada Conference in Mysore. The speakers’ words “simply flew over my head,” she later wrote.

But as the new editor of Lankesh Patrike, she stopped trying to bluff. Thirty-eight years old, she resolved that she would conquer Kannada once and for all, and she met that resolution with impressive speed. Her new colleagues suggested that, at least at first, she could write her editorials in English, and they’d translate for her. But she refused, and wrote in her clunky Kannada from the very first issue. Within a couple years, she’d improved enough to catch errors that the proof-reader had missed. She took to heart her father’s philosophy that you’ll reach your readers best if you write simply, honestly, and unpretentiously. She’d always been stronger in spoken Kannada, so she wrote as she spoke, colloquially, Rajghatta writes, “in free- flowing street Kannada.”

She was unfailingly frank about her Kannada deficit. “There are several problems in my Kannada even now,” she wrote (in Kannada) in 2013. “Lacking a rich Kannada vocabulary is a major weakness.” Some jeered anyway at her Kannada, and also for how little she knew of her father’s work. She venerated her father, yet at the time of his death she’d read very little of his writing, because so little had been translated into English. She made a crash course of this, too, immersing herself in his columns, a project that revealed to her at last what made his paper so special and deepened her understanding and appreciation of Karnataka and Kannada culture.

• • •

IN AN INTERVIEW IN March 2000—two months after she took over Lankesh Patrike—Gauri was asked bluntly about her new job: “Your critics point out that your career graph has been far from spectacular, and that for the past decade your career has been either stagnating or going downhill. Do you think this was a lucky break for you?” Gauri answered, “I would be the first person to admit that my career was stagnating like nobody’s business. Perhaps it was because I did not want to take risks. Maybe it was because my personal life has not exactly been terrific. I was concentrating more on finding personal happiness than on chasing a career. Today, I am happy with myself, and don’t mind whatever price I have had to pay for it.”

The interviewer asked if she felt able to withstand the threats and insults that any tabloid editor is subject to. “I think being a woman is quite useful in this situation,” Gauri said, “because if any of our reporters met a politician who was angry with my father, the politician would use the foulest language against my father. But if they badmouth a woman, they will lose respect and face in the society themselves! So being a woman is my security right now.”

“Your being a woman may not dissuade them from attacking you physically,” the interviewer replied. “They will know you are particularly vulnerable as you are single and living alone.”

Gauri dismissed it: “I am not afraid of physical attacks at all.”

It didn’t take long for her to kick up controversy. After she published an investigative report on eight powerful Hindu mathas, or monasteries, in the coastal Karnataka city of Udupi, right-wing activists of the Sangh Parivar responded with fury, seizing copies of Lankesh Patrike from newsstands by force and setting them on fire. At an angry rally in a city square, the activists threatened Gauri and her writers as police looked on and took no action.

Like her father, Gauri didn’t hesitate to insult the paper’s friends or even its contributors. The writer Rahamat Tarikere recalls that Gauri had invited him to review a book for the paper. But before he had a chance to do so, a reporter for the paper asked him to comment on a campaign by some Muslim fundamentalists against a fellow member of the Muslim Progressive Writers Forum. Tarikere was slow to respond, so the Lankesh Patrike writer denounced him, in print, as a fundamentalist. He wrote for the paper anyway. Gauri was “blunt, rash, and obstinate,” he wrote after her death. But these qualities, he thought, were balanced by her “simplicity, humaneness, and commitment.”

Lankesh’s legacy loomed over her editorship. She refused to sit at his desk or in his chair; she put her own desk next to his and maintained it like a shrine. Like her father’s, Gauri’s version of Lankesh Patrike accepted no advertisements, mocked the powerful with belittling nicknames, sided unvaryingly with the oppressed, and deplored euphemisms of any kind. But Gauri mostly jettisoned the paper’s literary side. “She had no sense of literature, actually,” her friend Vivek Shanbhag, the novelist, said with a laugh. “Nor did she have people who could help her with that in her paper. So nobody looked to Lankesh Patrike to read a story or a review. That aspect was completely gone.”

More than anything, her friends said, editing the paper radicalized her. After spending much of her adult life removed from Karnataka, she suddenly found herself immersed in its problems: the labour complaints of Bangalore’s municipal sanitation workers, or the persistence of disturbingly retrograde local superstitions such as made snana, wherein “low” caste Hindus roll on the ground over leftover food from a ceremonial meal eaten by Brahmins. (The practice was finally outlawed in Karnataka in 2017.) She took on causes, too, that her father hadn’t concerned himself with, in part by learning from her mistakes. Early in her tenure, one of her reporters wrote a story that was casually derogatory toward transgender people, and Gauri published it. Members of the transgender community sued the paper, and her lawyer, B. T. Venkatesh, took Gauri to meet with them. She came away from the encounter a full-throated defender of their cause forever after. “She was the first woman journalist to support sexual minorities’ movement,” wrote the Bangalore-based transgender activist Akkai. Gauri later published a Kannada translation of the memoirs of the Trans activist A. Revathi and often covered LGBTQ struggles in the paper. The Trans community called her akka, or elder sister. When she died, they were at the forefront of fundraising for the protests in response to her murder.

At first, Gauri held on to traditional ideas of journalistic neutrality. After two decades of inculcation by journalism schools and mainstream-media jobs, she felt that journalism and activism were two realms best kept distinct. Her awakening to activist journalism came on a mountaintop 170 miles west of Bangalore.

• • •

HIGH ON A MOUNTAIN RANGE called Baba Budangiri, in central Karnataka’s Chikmagalur district, there is a shrine in a small cave shrouded by clouds. The mountains are named for Baba Budan, a Muslim Sufi saint who once lived in the shrine. According to one legend, on his return home from taking the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Baba Budan exited the Arabian Peninsula with seven raw coffee beans smuggled in his beard, thereby evading the strict export controls that allowed the Arabs to maintain a monopoly on coffee cultivation. Baba Budan planted the beans at home and introduced India to the delights of coffee. But there are so many legends surrounding this cave that it’s impossible to reduce the place to any single uncontradictory spiritual narrative. Some Muslims believe that the shrine began as the home of a direct disciple of Muhammad’s named Hazrat Dada Hayath Meer Khalandar; some Hindus call that same person Dattatreya and believe he was a combined avatar of all three of the paramount gods of Hinduism: Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. For centuries, Dada versus Dattatreya wasn’t a debate; the blended legends only enhanced the site’s power for Hindus and Muslims alike.

Inside its tight, dank confines, the cave is crowded with markers of both religions: at one end, several Sufi tombs; at another, a Hindu idol draped with flowers and slathered with mud. The presiding priest is a Muslim who performs traditionally Hindu rituals: lighting the oil lamp, offering puja, blessing each visitor with holy water. The shrine’s official name is Sri Guru Dattatreya Bababudan Swamy Dargah—an amazing mash-up of Hindu and Muslim names and terms.

Hinduism and Islam might look on paper like stark and irreconcilable opposites, but the kind of fusion observable at Baba Budangiri has long been commonplace across India. In Bengal there was Satya Pir, a Muslim holy man who’s also thought to be an avatar of Vishnu. In Varanasi there was the beloved mystic poet Kabir, whose critiques of both Hinduism and Islam led him to a faith that borrowed from both. In Punjab, Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, also took inspiration from both Hindu scriptures and the Quran. But perhaps more than any other region in India, Karnataka proliferates in syncretic sites like Baba Budangiri, where Islam and Hinduism don’t just coexist but converge.

So much of the unique beauty of Hinduism throughout its long history flows from its open-mindedness, its dazzling diversity in practice and devotion and interpretation across the subcontinent. Swami Vivekananda famously declared that Hinduism recognizes all religions as true. Once, when referred to as a Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Parsi, a Jew”; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the future founder of Pakistan, cracked in response, “Only a Hindu could say that.”

The religion we call Hinduism is extraordinarily multifarious, especially from region to region. In fact, “Hindu” originated as an outsider’s word for Indians that became, under the British, a colonial umbrella term for all the countless non-Abrahamic religious practices, philosophical traditions, and spiritual affiliations of the Indian subcontinent. The idea that there is a religion called “Hinduism” emerged from a foreign occupier’s attempt, out of fear and confusion, to simplify and codify an impossibly diverse constellation of faiths in the subcontinent, to force a Western religious structure onto a spiritual paradigm whose very specialness derives from its complexity and decentralized multiplicity. Unlike any other religion, it has always been wonderfully difficult even to define what Hinduism is in any universally satisfactory way. You can’t call it polytheistic, because there are monotheistic and even atheistic Hindus. There is not a single tenet that all Hindus must believe to be Hindu, nor a single rite that all must perform. This is not to say that Hinduism is at all vague or noncommittal, like a sort of South Asian Unitarian Universalism, but simply that it’s never uniform. At a certain point you just have to surrender to a (fittingly) circular definition: Hinduism is the religion that Hindus practice.

Syncretic sites like Baba Budangiri are the religion’s frontiers, where its porousness is most tangible. In any religion, the policing of such sites is the surest sign of a hard shift toward orthodoxy—toward an attempt to rigidly define. On most days, Baba Budangiri still appears to be quite harmonious. In fact, it’s become the most hotly contested syncretic site in all of Karnataka and the central rallying point for the state’s Hindutva groups. To them, syncretism itself is intolerable, and they chose Baba Budangiri to make an example of.

The trouble began around 1984, when Hindutva activists first organized an event on Baba Budangiri that became a large, festive, and increasingly hostile yearly rally called Dattatreya Jayanti. Soon they were referring to this newly coined practice as a long-held tradition. In the mid-1990s, a time of surging Hindutva activism, the Dattatreya Jayanti expanded and became rowdier, replete with demands to “liberate” the cave from “Muslim control” and vilifications of its Muslim caretaker. Sangh Parivar and BJP leaders in Karnataka began talking about making Baba Budangiri “the Ayodhya of the South.”

The Sangh Parivar had learned in Ayodhya that inflaming communal tensions (or even inventing them outright) was a winning electoral and ideological strategy. The BJP had been looking for a foothold in Karnataka, which it considered its “gateway to the South,” so it was natural that it would seek out a site in which it could provoke interreligious conflict. Baba Budangiri seemed just the place. And the BJP has benefited enormously. Several of Karnataka’s current BJP leaders made their names as Hindutva activists at Baba Budangiri, and the BJP came to dominate Chikmagalur district, which prior to the conflict had long been a Congress Party stronghold.

In the 1990s, Hindutva activists repeatedly attempted to install in the shrine Hindu idols that had previously never been a part of the place, despite a Supreme Court order, issued in light of the agitations, that prohibited all practices at the shrine that did not exist prior to June 1975. (Police took no action in response to any violation of this order.) Led by Sangh Parivar organizations and by the Karnataka-based fringe group Sri Ram Sena, Hindutva activists increasingly vandalized Muslim homes, vehicles, and shops in the area. In 1999, a prominent BJP politician threatened to deploy “suicide squads” to liberate the shrine.

Progressive Kannadigas were increasingly alarmed. A consortium of secular activist organizations called the Bababudangiri Harmony Forum formed to counteract the Hindutva activists, and in October 2001 they asked some local literary celebrities to issue a press statement drawing attention to the worsening climate at the mountain shrine. The first person they asked was Girish Karnad, who immediately agreed and one-upped them: Why don’t we all visit the shrine on a fact-finding mission and hold a press conference there? And he suggested another writer to invite along: Gauri Lankesh. He’d thought of her, he admitted to me, not for her platform or because she was particularly engaged in the issue but simply because he didn’t want the delegation to be entirely male.

Her first impulse was to decline. At that point she’d been editing Lankesh Patrike for nearly two years, and she was so consumed by the work that she felt she couldn’t spare the time. But then, in an impulsive decision that would reroute her life, she changed her mind, and they made the journey up to Baba Budangiri that very day.

When they reached the shrine, Gauri was profoundly moved by its merger of Hindu and Muslim practices. It was a place, she said later, that “uplifts the blueprint of secularism laid out in our constitution. It is a symbol of that very idea.” Likewise, the activists of the Bababudangiri Harmony Forum were impressed by Gauri’s energy and good humor. She’d found her people. It was atop that mountain that she began her transition from “objective” journalist to activist-journalist. “That’s where she flowered,” Girish Karnad told me. “That was the beginning of Gauri Lankesh’s career.” When they came back downhill, Gauri assumed the lead of the delegation’s response. “She handled the press. She called the chief minister and said why don’t you meet us,” one of the Harmony Forum organizers told me. “I wouldn’t have had the guts to ring the chief minister and ask for a meeting, but she did.”

• • •

JUST A FEW MONTHS after Gauri’s first visit to Baba Budangiri came the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. The unchecked violence left Indian Muslims and progressives like Gauri deeply shaken.

India’s 200 million Muslims, who represent approximately 14 percent of India’s total population, are the world’s largest religious minority. There are roughly as many Muslims in India as in Pakistan; Indonesia is the only country in the world with a larger Muslim population. For the past century, Hindutva activists have complained that India, and the Congress Party in particular, has given Indian Muslims preferential treatment—that they are being “appeased.” But by many measures, Muslims are India’s most oppressed minority. In most states Muslims earn on average even less than Dalits. The proportion of Muslims in prestigious positions is far below their proportion in the general population; that’s true in the civil services, the judiciary, the legislature, the universities, and white-collar professions. Muslims are severely underrepresented among government employees, and those who are hired overwhelmingly work at the lowest levels. The numbers are especially stark in the military and intelligence branches, which seem to find India’s Muslims collectively suspicious. Only 2 percent of India’s military is Muslim. There has never been a Muslim officer of the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian equivalent of the CIA, since its founding in 1968.

Muslim political representation is almost non-existent. No state has a Muslim chief minister, and no Muslim chief minister outside Jammu and Kashmir has ever completed a full term. “Low” caste Hindus have a proportion of reserved legislative seats to counteract discrimination against them; Muslims have none. In 2022, the BJP became the first ruling party in Indian history with not a single Muslim legislator in its ranks: none in the upper house of Parliament, none in the lower house, none in any state. And because the Congress Party fears the BJP accusation that it appeases Muslims, Congress, too, now seldom runs Muslim candidates and rarely even refers to Muslims and their particular problems.

One of those problems is forced ghettoization. Its long been nearly impossible for a Muslim to rent an apartment in many Indian urban neighborhoods. The ghetto neighborhoods Muslims are pushed into are neglected by municipal authorities and tend to lack basic facilities: clean water, schools, parks. Much like the redlining of Black neighborhoods in the United States, Indian banks have been found to mark Muslim neighborhoods as “negative geographical zones” where loans are discouraged. Muslims who live in predominantly Hindu neighborhoods often suffer the most in episodes of religious violence; the aim of a pogrom is to ethnically cleanse. But when Muslims then retreat to the relative safety of a ghetto, Hindutva complains about their aloofness. “Wherever Muslims live, they don’t like to live in co-existence with others, they don’t like to mingle with others,” the BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said on April 12, 2002— immediately after the Gujarat pogrom.

To Hindutva, Muslims are always one undifferentiated mass, collectively guilty for whatever transgression, real or imagined, that any member of their faith is supposed to have committed, either in the present or in centuries in the past. There are three associations that Hindutva insists on applying to Indian Muslims: the Mughals, Pakistan, and terrorism. Historically speaking, Hindutva has a particular obsession with the Mughals, the Muslim empire that made its first conquest in India in 1526 and rapidly declined after 1707. (They never entirely controlled South India.) In the Hindutva worldview, the Mughals robbed Hindus of a mythical golden age. Hindutva leaders, Modi included, often complain of the centuries of “servitude” that India endured under the Mughals, and heavily imply that contemporary Indian Muslims, by extension, are no better than foreign invaders. The Hindutva version of Mughal history relies heavily on texts authored by the colonial British, who exaggerated the Mughals’ brutality and foreignness so that they could present themselves as liberators. The real history is much more complicated, but it’s irrelevant to how Indian Muslims are treated now.

As for Pakistan, Hindutva assumes that all Muslims are fifth columnists with secret loyalty to the nation’s most hated enemy, traitors unless proven otherwise. “It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan,” the Hindutva ideologue M. S. Golwalkar wrote in his most popular book. “On the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold.” In fact, India’s large Muslim population owes itself to the fact that at partition, so many millions of Indian Muslims actively decided against Muslim Pakistan in favour of pluralist India. According to the Hindutva narrative, Indian Muslims spend most of their time plotting to bring down the nation and applauding the Pakistani cricket team. In my own experience, Indian Muslims are much more likely to be busy forwarding goofy Bollywood memes on WhatsApp, like any other Indian. Hindutva wants to paint all Indian Muslims as ignorant fundamentalists and to erase all Muslim contributions to Indian life: not just syncretic sites like Baba Budangiri but also the Taj Mahal, and Muslim movie stars, and the entirety of Urdu culture, with all the exquisite sophistication of its poetry, its music, its manners.

Hindutva activists and politicians often use the word “terrorists” as a synonym for Indian Muslims. There have undoubtedly been horrifying terrorist attacks committed by Muslims on Indian soil (although some of the worst attacks originated from Pakistan). But the threat and scale of terrorism is always, almost by definition, wildly exaggerated. The number of Indians killed in terror attacks is a minuscule fraction of those killed in pogroms, which the terror attacks are typically staged in response to—which is not at all to excuse them but simply to put them in context. And as should be too obvious to say, only an infinitesimal number of Muslims, Indian or Pakistani, have anything to do with terrorism. It’s a wretched cycle: Hindutva tries to force Muslims, already a beleaguered minority, into total submission, and a tiny number of Muslims reacts with impotent and self-defeating acts of sensational violence, which only feeds the Hindutva argument that Muslims need to be forced into submission. Since 2008, the number of terror attacks perpetrated in India by Muslims has sharply declined. But such is the nature of terror attacks that the fear of them lingers long, especially when politicians keep whipping it up.

As soon as Modi took office in 2014, the position of Indian Muslims became palpably more precarious. Lynch mobs murdered scores of Muslims suspected of slaughtering or selling cattle, in supposed defence of the cow as a sacred animal. In 2015, after one of the most notorious of such lynchings, in which a man was slaughtered in his home by neighbours who suspected, inaccurately, that he was storing beef, a BJP politician offered the murderers jobs, and a BJP chief minister invited them to a party rally. In 2018, a Modi cabinet minister garlanded and fed sweets to eight men who’d been convicted of murdering a Muslim meat trader. Modi didn’t say a word about the lynchings for over two years.

• • •

THE VIOLENCE IN GUJARAT pushed Gauri to intensify her involvement at Baba Budangiri, the communal flash point in her own backyard. It was through her enthusiastic adoption of that cause that she met for the first time, in 2002, her loyal friend Shivasundar, who would soon become her closest colleague in her journalism and in her activism. Shivasundar had long experience as an activist, but Gauri was green. “She came across as concerned but very urban educated, a little arrogant, a little dismissive about the kind of activism on the street,” he recalled. But something about Baba Budangiri struck her irrevocably, and she applied herself to the problem with the zeal of a convert. Soon she was not simply reporting on the news from Baba Budangiri but making news, headlining counterdemonstrations, using her office as a protest-planning hub.

“It is no secret that the monkeys of the Bajrang Dal are gearing up to create disruptions at Bababudangiri this year,” Gauri wrote in late 2003, about one of the most aggressive RSS affiliates. Hindutva activists had been hoisting banners at the shrine with threatening phrases: “muscle power,” “streams of blood,” “destroy the enemy.” The atmosphere had grown so heated that the state government banned outdoor gatherings in Chikmagalur, the city nearest to the shrine, in an attempt to prevent mass protests. Gauri was determined to go anyway, and on the way up the mountain she and another activist with the Harmony Forum, an English professor named V. S. Sreedhara, spontaneously got out of the car they were in and hitched a ride in a truck to enter town less conspicuously. “It was a very filmy romantic escapade,” Sreedhara told me. “She said it was like we were eloping. Even in those tense moments she would joke like that.”

Gauri sneaked into town wearing a burqa, then threw it off outside the police station and shouted slogans until she was hauled into custody. Hundreds of other activists were also arrested, and they walked into jail singing anthems in unison. They spent two days massed together in the city’s newly constructed jail. “We inaugurated it,” Shivasundar said with a mischievous grin. They slept on the floor, and drinking water, when it finally arrived, was provided by the jailer in garbage barrels. “But none of these difficulties hurt our confidence or lessened our zeal,” Gauri wrote. “On the contrary, the two days brought us closer together, inspired us to keep up the fight and nourished our spirits…. The jail was indeed like a microcosm of Karnataka. It had young boys and girls, progressive thinkers, communists, Muslim community leaders, artists, journalists, teachers, women activists, farmers’ leaders and politicians from across Karnataka.” Even a handful of Bajrang Dal activists were accidentally arrested along with them. “It looked like they were complete converts to the cause of social harmony after the two-day stay with us,” she wrote. The new issue of Lankesh Patrike had to go to print the night the group was arrested, so she dictated her column from the jail by mobile phone.

While the communal-harmony activists sat in jail, the Hindutva activists held a huge rally, unbothered by the police, and their speeches targeted Gauri and Girish Karnad above all. “Gauri!” crowed Pramod Muthalik, leader of the Sri Ram Sena, as the crowd jeered. “Respected Gauri Lankesh! The police should have left you free. Had they not arrested her, she would have learned the true meaning of harmony. She would have been stripped stark naked and made to stand on top of that hill!”

Among those arrested with Gauri was Agni Sreedhar, the ex-don, whose tabloid Agni was then in its fifth year. He and Gauri had become rival editors, and they’d sometimes make snide oblique remarks about each other in their editorials—especially Gauri, who disdained Sreedhar’s gangster past and scoffed at the idea that he’d reformed. But politically they were largely aligned, especially when it came to promoting communal harmony and opposing the ascendant right wing. (I found a photo of Sreedhar protesting a visit Narendra Modi made to Bangalore in 2013, the year before he was elected prime minister; Sreedhar was holding a sign that read: modi hitler, uo back, uo back.)

Some weeks after their stint in jail, the harmony activists were finally permitted to stage their own mass rally; Sreedhar and Gauri shared the stage. Sreedhar told me very proudly about the speech he gave, in which, as he often does, he leveraged his gangster reputation for dramatic effect. “Now we have only one option,” he told the crowd, which, as he recalls, numbered ten or twenty thousand. “We have to break heads. Are you ready?” The crowd, he said, “became frenzied,” and he kept whipping them up until finally delivering the punch line: “Now I’ll tell you the target: you have to break open your own head.” Then he chastised them for buying into his parody of inflammatory rhetoric. “You were ready to break open someone else’s head. But you’re not ready to open your own mind.”

Building on their growing solidarity after the mass arrest of 2003, secular organizers launched an even larger umbrella group of like-minded activists called the Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum, aimed at easing religious conflict and tackling bigotry wherever they arose in the state. Its membership was a roll call of Karnataka’s progressives. Gauri’s Lankesh Patrike became one of the movement’s most eager platforms.

For all her passionate commitment to communal harmony and angry opposition to bigotry against Muslims, Gauri was never an apologist for conservative Islam. Once a Muslim organization invited her to speak at a large meeting on human rights, and she was miffed when she realized she was the only woman in attendance. Next time, she told the crowd directly, if you don’t bring women in, I won’t come. And from then on the organization included Muslim women in their meetings, too. Prayer baffled her. One activist colleague remembers that when they were arrested on the way to Baba Budangiri, several Muslims were jailed with them, and Gauri was dumbstruck when they got up early to observe the dawn prayer. “She burst out laughing, saying, ‘We are in prison. I can’t understand this religiosity.’ ”

All the same, Gauri once personally translated into Kannada and published a classic text of Sufi Islam: Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes. I asked her friend Mamta Sagar why she might have done so. “It’s easy for us to create the Other out of Muslims because we don’t give them space to say anything,” she said. The void is filled, she said, with a steady patter of negative comments about Muslims: that they’re dirty, they’re violent, they hate Hindus. Gauri was dismayed when one of the greatest Kannada novelists, S. L. Bhyrappa, started writing overtly anti-Muslim novels that became bestsellers. In this context, Sagar said, “bringing in more Islamic references which are positive is important. Maybe that’s why she did it.”

Beginning with Baba Budangiri, the local defense of Indian pluralism became Gauri’s signature cause. “The arrest made her a kind of celebrity,” one activist told me. “From then on she was in demand—every forum, whatever little cause they were fighting, they invited her and she managed to go.” She’d always been opinionated, but it was Baba Budangiri that radicalized her into an unequivocal leftist—even if her brand of leftism always remained a bit vague—and an unabashed activist, positions that she immediately reflected in the pages of Lankesh Patrike. She liked to say that she had three children: her niece Esha, her newspaper, and the Communal Harmony Forum.

(Parts two, three and four of more excerpts from the book to be also published at intervals)

Note from the Editors: We would like to express our heartfelt solidarity with the family of Gauri Lankesh, Indira Lankesh, Kavitha and Esha Laneksh, who have with pathos and determination built on the gaping vacuum created by Gauri Lankesh’s assassination. Gauri was also a close a dear activist friend of Sabrangindia’s co-editor, Teesta Setalvad.

Related:

Storms battered her from outside, but she stood, an unwavering flame: Gauri Lankesh

Honour for killers of Gauri Lankesh and MM Kalburgi in Karnataka, public felicitation and terms like “Hindu tigers” for accused Amit Baddi and Ganesh…

Protest in Karnataka as activists condemns felicitation of Gauri Lankesh murder accused by right-wing groups

Murderers or Martyrs? The dangerous glorification of murdered Gauri Lankesh’s accused by Hindutva groups

Gauri Lankesh assassination: 6 years down, no closure for family and friends, justice elusive

The post The emergence of Gauri Lankesh, a fiery no-nonsense editor in Kannada appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Maninagar, I have been told, was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initial political karmabhoomi during his formative years. While covering Sachivalaya for the Times of India (1997-2012), a senior bureaucrat told me that during the Emergency days (1975–77), Modi would hide in the house of an RSS pracharak to avoid arrest. This babu, who retired a few years ago and lived in Maninagar, told me he personally knew this RSS pracharak, “a simple soul, always ready to help.”

A known Hindutva bastion, Modi represented the Maninagar constituency in the state legislative assembly thrice — 2002, 2007, and 2012. Expectedly, following the stabbing incident, in which the accused happens to be a Muslim and the victim a Hindu, there was strong protest led by the saffron brigade over the alleged failure of the administration, led by a Christian principal, to keep outlaws in the school under control.

Following the ghastly incident, I happened to interact with the principal of another school. Fear was writ large on his face: what if such an incident happened in his school? Wouldn’t he be beaten up like the Seventh Day School principal was? What if a similar crowd entered his school premises? He had no clue how to control it, nor any idea how to deal with what he called “increasing incidents of violence among schoolchildren, which we are witnessing in front of our own eyes.”

Even as I was speaking with this principal, I came to know that the Ahmedabad district education office (DEO) had called a meeting of school principals where discussions were held on how to prevent incidents like the one in the Maninagar school. I asked this principal what had happened in the meeting. While I wasn’t apprised of the details, he told me he had taken “a few precautionary measures.”

And what were these? “We have started checking the school bags of all the children studying in secondary classes, and we confiscated whatever sharp objects were found,” the principal revealed, adding, “While scissors were found in many children’s bags and we took them all, telling them they were in our lock and key and would be returned when they had crafts period, three children had knives in their bags.”

The principal claimed — and this struck me like a bolt from the blue — “All three were Muslims. One of them carried a rather long knife, which the child told me was used for slaughtering goats. We called the child’s father, whose immediate reaction was that his son was being targeted because he was a Muslim. I told him, we don’t discriminate on religious lines; otherwise, we wouldn’t be admitting Muslims in our school.”

The principal, who headed a private school, further claimed that he had “observed” violent incidents happening “mostly among students admitted under the 25 percent quota for socially and economically backward children under the Right to Education Act. They study for free, for which the government compensates us. We cannot fail them till they reach the eighth standard. They have to be compulsorily promoted. They can’t be rusticated either. So, they become careless. In my school, 50 percent of these children are Muslim.”

A teacher with whom I later interacted told me that in his school — one of the better ones providing “quality” education — following the school authorities’ directions, “we search the children’s bags of one classroom every day. It’s such a headache. Many children — especially those admitted under RTE — are found to keep some sharp object in their bags. Some remove the screw from the pencil sharpener and keep the blades in their bags. Do we teach children or do this security check?”

I mentioned all this to someone close to me. This person, who did not want to be named, said that while he couldn’t comment on the Seventh Day School incident per se, in the late 1990s and 2000s, when he studied at a top Ahmedabad school, he personally witnessed how Muslim children were targeted. “One of the very decent boys, a brilliant one, would be called ‘Oy Miya,’ used as an insult; he was rarely addressed by name. He wouldn’t react, but surely this is the type of atmosphere that prevails in many schools. One must understand the psychology of such children.”

I was reminded of what a well-known cultural personality told me when we met around the time I joined the Times of India in 1993 as part of my acquaintance drive. He told me about a top school, preferred by Gujarati parents for their children. Telling me his daughter studied there, he said, “A day ahead of the 15th August function, the teacher told the children they must compulsorily attend flag hoisting, underlining, ‘those who don’t attend are Miyabhai.’ My daughter asked what is this Miyabhai… I was at a loss to tell her the teacher was spreading communal hatred through such a statement.”

Courtesy: CounterView

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The entire text of the open letter may be read here:

To:
The Chairperson,
The Select Committee on “The Punjab Prevention of Offences against Holy
Scriptures Act, 2025,
Punjab Legislative Assembly,
Chandigarh-160001

Subject: Objections to “The Punjab Prevention of Offences Against Holy Scriptures Act, 2025.”

Dear Chairperson,

We, the undersigned, are members of Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), a collective of former public servants belonging to the All India Services and Central Civil Services. Our group, which has no political affiliations, is committed to the promotion of the foundational values of our Republic and the observance of norms of Constitutional conduct. Anguished over the continuing decline in secular, democratic and liberal values of the Constitution, we write to place on record our grave concerns regarding The Punjab Prevention of Offences against Holy Scriptures Act, 2025 (PPOHS Act) that stands referred to the Committee.

It will be pertinent to recall here that on two earlier occasions – in 2015 and 2018 – the Punjab Government had sought to amend the provision relating to sacrilege contained in Section 295A of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code, 1860 (now re-enacted as Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023). Both attempts proved unsuccessful as the proposed amendments failed to meet the test of constitutionality.

In an Open Letter dated September 3, 2018 addressed to the then Chief Minister of Punjab CCG had strongly opposed the 2018 amendment on grounds of incompatibility with the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. The letter also highlighted its potential for misuse and detriment to the State’s social fabric. These objections apply with equal force to the proposal under consideration.

We submit that the move of the Punjab Government to enact a Special Law supplementing Section 299 of the BNS constitutes an assault on India’s democratic and constitutional foundations. By adopting loosely and broadly constructed definitions of “Holy Scripture” and “Offences,” the draft Bill abandons the basic jurisprudential safeguards of criminal justice. In a constitutional democracy, statutes prescribing draconian punishments, such as life imprisonment and severe monetary penalties, must stipulate the establishment of mens rea. The proposed Act discards this standard, extending criminal liability to even accidental or bona fide acts involving religious texts. Such an Act will effectively impose strict liability in criminal law, a concept alien to due process and incompatible with Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution. The import of strict liability into criminal law militates against the principle that penal sanctions must be reserved for deliberate acts. In doing so, the proposed legislation risks criminalizing protected expression, chilling legitimate activity, and reducing the rule of law to an instrument of repression.

Essentially, our opposition to the proposed legislation rests on the following grounds.

• Draconian laws against sacrilege and blasphemy go against the very grain of a secular polity like ours. Instead of circumscribing the role of religion in matters of the state, the proposed Act will only enlarge it. It will also reinforce sectarian tendencies and strengthen the hands of religious extremists of various hues.
• Blasphemy laws imperil the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression enshrined in the Constitution. Besides inhibiting free speech, they give a handle to anyone claiming to be hurt to pursue ill-founded and motivated prosecutions. They also discourage serious research and re-interpretation of religious texts, consolidating the hold of religious fundamentalism. Moreover, laws seeking to restrict freedoms of speech and belief engender spiralling demands for more and more restrictive laws. It has been observed that wherever sacrilege has been made a major offence, it has “fostered an environment of intolerance and impunity, and led to violations of a broad range of human rights”.  (Freedom House, 2010).
• Experience of the implementation of blasphemy laws across the border and in theocratic states elsewhere shows that they are often deployed against religious and other minorities and weaker sections to demoralise and subjugate them and also to settle personal and political scores. The risk of exacerbation of communal tensions is patent in a state like Punjab, where sects considered as heretical by the established orthodoxy have a significant following amongst Dalits.
• Existing provisions in the BNS (formerly the IPC) are quite adequate to deal with insults to religion and scriptures. The incidence of such acts cannot be curbed by enhancing the severity of the punishment prescribed. Only the certitude and swiftness of trial and punishment can act as a real deterrent, and that is predicated on an effective criminal justice system backed by political and administrative will.
• The proposed statute is bad in law. It is poorly drafted: the term ‘sacrilege’ is undefined and the definition of ‘Holy Scriptures’ is open-ended, speaking of ‘Scriptures considered sacred and held as ‘Holy’ by respective religious denominations’. The rationale of listing the religious texts of only four major faiths is unclear and inscrutable. In the case of Hinduism, only one text is cited, whereas a multitude of texts commencing with the Vedas are held sacred by the Hindus.
• By prescribing life imprisonment, the proposed amendment makes sacrilege a major offence. This is excessive and disproportionate in view of the Supreme Court ruling on Sec. 295-A IPC (in Ramjilal Modi vs State of UP, AIR 1957 SC 620) to the effect that the said provision attracting a maximum penalty of 4 years could apply only to the “aggravated form of insult to religion”.
• It is evident that a legislation that has not been thought through as to its ramifications, is imprecise in its definition of what constitutes an offence and is capable of multiple interpretations, is bound to be exploited by vested interests for their partisan ends, and aggravate the risk of police repression.
• The nation has already paid a heavy price for our past sins of pandering to extremist sentiments of various religions for short-term political ends. This has brought about a situation today where the very idea of an inclusive, pluralistic and liberal India and Indian-ness is endangered. The empowerment of sectarian and illiberal ideas and ideologies has resulted in the targeting of minorities and a general increase in social disharmony. The need of the hour is for all responsible stakeholders to act to reduce the space provided to religious fundamentalists of all kind – not open up further space to them.

At the current juncture, when the need to uphold our secular values has become more critical than ever before, we sincerely hope that the Legislature will stand by those values and urge the Hon’ble Committee to recommend the withdrawal of the Bill in its entirety.

Satyameva Jayate

Constitutional Conduct Group (79 signatories, as below)

Related:

Defiling religious texts to carry same sentence as murder in Punjab!

Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan

Indian Ulema Must Oppose Anti-Blasphemy Laws

Corporal Punishment for Blasphemy or Apostasy not in line with Quranic Ethos?

The post Punjab law against blasphemy unconstitutional, open invitation to oppressive misuse: CCG appeared first on SabrangIndia.

There is a popular proverb related to education which says that if an incompetent person is appointed as teacher, the academic lives of generations of students are doomed. And when there are many such ‘teachers’ whose only qualification is having been trained in the far right, Hindutva wisdom appointed at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), what pray shall be the future of school social science education?

Recently, the NCERT released a ‘Special Module’ (for text/teaching) titled ‘Partition Horrors’. This module is described as a ‘supplementary resource’ for Classes 6 to 8 (middle to senior school) – not part of regular textbooks – and is meant to be used for ‘projects, posters, discussions and debates.’ The contents of this module, in fact, is supplementary resource material to pinpoint or understand those men/organisations responsible (read guilty) for the Partition of India as claimed but, in fact, presents an altogether a sectarian narrative driven by the body’s RSS masters.

The Module was released on August 14, 2025 as part of “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day” following PM Modi’s 2021 directive which stated that “Partition’s pains can never be forgotten. Millions of our sisters and brothers were displaced, and many lost their lives due to mindless hate and violence. In memory of the struggles and sacrifices of our people, August 14, will be observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.”

On detailed perusal, `The whole document is full of manipulation, contradictions, and untruths aiming   to hide more than it tries to convey about the Partition. We can divide the NCERT truths into following sections.

Falsehood 1: Muslim League leader Jinnah and political Islam founded two-nation theory

The document states that “Partition was primarily the result of flawed ideas, misconceptions, and erroneous decisions.” The party of Indian Muslims, the Muslim League [ML], held a conference in Lahore in 1940. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, said that Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures”. [page 5]

The module also traces Partition to Muslim leaders’ belief in a separate identity rooted in “political Islam”. It goes on to stress that “on the basis of religion, culture, customs, history, sources of inspiration, and worldviews, Muslim leaders called themselves as fundamentally separate from Hindus. The root of this lay in the ideology of political Islam, which denies the possibility of any permanent or equal relationship with non-Muslims.” [page 6].

It is true that ML under the leadership of MA Jinnah declared his firm faith in India being not one nation. His argument was that,

“The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their views on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Musalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different, and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise their victories and defeats overlap.” 

Facts concealed

This statement of Jinnah in defence of two-nation theory is reproduced twice in the short document (pages 4 & 6) but the authors shamelessly hide what Hindu nationalists aligned with Hindu Mahasabha and RSS had been arrogantly arguing for decades preceding Jinnah’s statement.

Privileged Caste Hindu nationalists of Bengal propounded the two-nation theory

Long-long before the appearance of Muslim advocates of the two-nation theory, the ball was set rolling by High Caste Hindu nationalists at the end of the 19^th century in Bengal. Raj Narain Basu (1826–1899), the maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh, and his close associate Nabha Gopal Mitra (1840-94) were the co-fathers of two-nation theory and Hindu nationalism in India. Basu established a society for the promotion of national feelings among the educated natives which in fact stood for preaching the superiority of Hinduism. He organized meetings proclaiming that Hinduism despite its Casteism presented a much higher social idealism than ever reached by the Christian or Islamic civilization.

Basu was the first person to conceive the idea of a Maha Hindu Samiti (All India Hindu Association) and helped in the formation of Bharat Dharma Mahamandal, a precursor of Hindu Mahasabha. He believed that through this organization Hindus would be able to establish an Aryan nation in India. He visualized a powerful Hindu nation not only overtaking India but the whole world. He also saw,

“[The] noble and puissant Hindu nation rousing herself after sleep and rushing headlong towards progress with divine prowess. I see this rejuvenated nation again illumining the world by her knowledge, spirituality and culture, and the glory of Hindu nation again spreading over the whole world.”

[Cited in Majumdar, R. C., History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol. I (Calcutta: Firma KL Mukhpadhyay, 1971), 295–296.]

Nabha Gopal Mitra started organising an annual Hindu Mela (fête). It used to be a gathering on the last day of every Bengali year and highlighted the Hindu nature of all aspects of Hindu Bengali life and continued uninterrupted between 1867 and 1880. Mitra also started a National Society and a National Paper for promoting unity and feelings of nationalism among Hindus. Mitra argued in his paper that the Hindus positively formed a nation by themselves. According to him,

“[The] basis of national unity in India is the Hindu religion. Hindu nationality embraces all the Hindus of India irrespective of their locality or language.”

[Cited in Majumdar, R. C., Three Phases of India’s Struggle for Freedom (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1961), p. 8.]

1. C. Majumdar, a favourite of Hindutva intellectuals and a prominent researcher of the rise of Hindu nationalism in Bengal, had no difficulty in arriving at the truth that

“Nabha Gopal forestalled Jinnah’s theory of two nations by more than half a century… [And since then] consciously or unconsciously, the Hindu character was deeply imprinted on nationalism all over India.” [Ibid.] 

Role of Arya Samaj 

The Arya Samaj in northern India aggressively preached that Hindu and Muslim communities in India were, in fact, two different nations. Bhai Parmanand (1876–1947), a leading light of the Arya Samaj in northern India who was also a leader of Hindu Mahasabha, declared Hindus and Muslims as two nations. The following words of his seems to have been borrowed by Jinnah in his March 1940 speech at Lahore quoted in the NCERT module.

“In history the Hindus revere the memory of Prithvi Raj, Partap, Shivaji and, Beragi Bir, who fought for the honour and freedom of this land (against the Muslims), while the Mahomedans look upon the invaders of India, like Muhammad Bin Qasim and rulers like Aurangzeb as their national heroes…[whereas] in the religious field, the Hindus draw their inspiration from the Ramayan, the Mahabharat, and the Geeta. The Musalmans, on the other hand, derive their inspiration from the Quran and the Hadis. Thus, the things that divide are far more vital than the things which unite.”

[Parmanand, Bhai in pamphlet titled, ‘The Hindu National Movement’, cited in B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1990), 35–36, first Published December 1940, Thackers Publishers, Bombay.]

Parmanand as early as 1908–9, called for the total exchange of Hindu and Muslim populations in two specific areas. According to his plan, elaborated in his autobiography,

“The territory beyond Sind should be united with Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province into a great Musalman kingdom. The Hindus of the region should come away, while at the same time Mussalman in the rest of India should go and settle in this territory.”

[Parmanand, Bhai, The Story of My Life, S. Chand, Delhi, 1982, p. 36.]

Another Arya Samaj luminary Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) in 1924 proposed partition of India into Muslim India and non-Muslim India. He articulated his two-nation theory in the following words:

     “Under my scheme the Muslims will have four Muslim States: (1) The Pathan Province of the North Western Frontier (2) Western Punjab (3) Sindh and (4) Eastern Bengal. If there are compact Muslim communities in any other part of India, sufficiently large to form a Province, they should be similarly constituted. But it should be distinctly understood that this is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.”

[Rai, Lala Lajpat, ‘Hindu-Muslim Problem XI’, The Tribune, Lahore, December 14, 1924, p. 8.] 

Hindu nationalist (supremacist) Moonje, Lala Har Dayal, Savarkar and Golwalkar as pioneers of two-nation theory

Dr. B. S. Moonje was another Hindu Mahasabha and RSS leader who carried forward the flag of Hindu Separatism long before Muslim League’s Pakistan resolution of March 1940. While addressing the third session of the Oudh Hindu Mahasabha in 1923, he declared: 

“Just as England belongs to the English, France to the French, and Germany to the Germans, India belongs to the Hindus. If Hindus get organized, they can humble the English and their stooges, the Muslims…The Hindus henceforth create their own world which will prosper through shuddhi [literally meaning purification, the term was used for conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism]and sangathan [organization].“

[Cited in Dhanki, J. S., Lala Lajpat Rai and Indian Nationalism, S Publications, Jullundur, 1990, p. 378.]

Lala Har Dayal (1884–1938), a well-known name in the Ghadar Party circles, too, long before the Muslim League’s demand for a separate homeland for Muslims, not only demanded the formation of a Hindu nation in India but also urged the conquest and Hinduisation of Afghanistan. In a significant political statement in 1925, published in the Pratap of Kanpur, he stated:

“I declare that the future of the Hindu race, of Hindustan and of the Punjab, rests on these four pillars: (1) Hindu Sangathan, (2) Hindu Raj, (3) Shuddhi of Muslims, and (4) Conquest and Shuddhi of Afghanistan and the Frontiers. So long as the Hindu Nation does not accomplish these four things, the safety of our children and great grandchildren will be ever in danger, and the safety of Hindu race will be impossible. The Hindu race has but one history, and its institutions are homogenous. But the Musalman and Christians are far removed from the confines of Hindustan, for their religions are alien and they love Persian, Arab, and European institutions. Thus, just as one removes foreign matter from the eye, Shuddhi must be made of these two religions. Afghanistan and the hilly regions of the frontier were formerly part of India, but are at present under the domination of Islam […] Just as there is Hindu religion in Nepal, so there must be Hindu institutions in Afghanistan and the frontier territory; otherwise, it is useless to win Swaraj.”

[Cited in Ambedkar, B. R., Pakistan or the Partition of India, Maharashtra Government, Bombay, 1990, p. 129.]

It was RSS’ ‘Veer’ V. D. Savarkar (1883-1966), the originator of the politics of Hindutva, who developed the most elaborate two-nation theory. The fact should not be missed that Muslim League passed its Pakistan resolution in 1940, but Savarkar propagated the two-nation theory long before it. While delivering the presidential address to the 19th session Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in 1937, Savarkar declared unequivocally,

“As it is, there are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India. Several infantile politicians commit the serious mistake in supposing that India is already welded into a harmonious nation, or that it could be welded thus for the mere wish to do so…Let us bravely face unpleasant facts as they are. India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Moslems, in India.”

[Samagar Savarkar Wangmaya (Collected Works of Savarkar), Hindu Mahasabha, Poona, 1963, p.296.]

It was no abrupt belief of Muslims (and Christians) being separate nations. Savarkar in his controversial book Hindutva as early as 1923 decreed:

“Christians and Mohamedan [sic] communities…cannot be recognized as Hindus as since their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu Sanskriti [culture] as a whole. They belong, or feel that they belong, to a cultural unit altogether different from the Hindu one. Their heroes and their hero worship their fairs and their festivals, their ideals and their outlook on-life, have now ceased to be common with ours.”

[Maratha [V. D. Savarkar], Hindutva, VV Kelkar, Nagpur, 1923, p. 88.]

[1] How religiously RSS believed in two-nation theory even after the birth of a democratic-secular India was made clear when the English organ of the RSS, Organiser, on the very eve of Independence (August 14, 1947) editorially reaffirmed its faith in two-nation theory in the following words:

“Let us no longer allow ourselves to be influenced by false notions of nationhood. Much of the mental confusion and the present and future troubles can be removed by the ready recognition of the simple fact that in Hindusthan only the Hindus form the nation and the national structure must be built on that safe and sound foundation…the nation itself must be built up of Hindus, on Hindu traditions, culture, ideas and aspirations.” 

The ‘Hindu’ narratives make it clear that two-nation theory was the product of Hindu nationalists and Partition was a primary holy task which Hindu nationalists took upon themselves. The module does not bother to tell us that it was borrowed by Jinnah only in late 1930s. A leading English daily of India editorially stated:

“It was a theory which long preceded Jinnah, having been expounded by such names as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya in the late nineteenth-century Bengal and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in the early part of the twentieth, among countless others.”

[Editorial: ‘Two-nation Gujarat’, The Times of India, April 18, 2002.]

Despite all the above-mentioned facts available in the RSS/Hindu Mahasabha archives the authors of the module continue the tirade that “Muslim leaders called themselves as fundamentally separate from Hindus. The root of this lay in the ideology of political Islam, which denies the possibility of any permanent [sic] or equal relationship with non-Muslims.”

Falsehood 2: Muslim League as party of all Indian Muslims

The module attempts to create a narrative that Muslim League represented all Muslims of India since it “won 73 out of 78 seats reserved for Muslims” in March 1946 elections to the Constituent Assembly. The authors do not disclose that Muslim League won due to highly restricted system of franchise in which a tiny minority of Muslims voted. The Muslim League was able to secure most of the Muslim seats due to the advantage it enjoyed under the prevalent restricted franchise at that time. The elections were held under the Sixth Schedule of the 1935 Act, which excluded the mass of peasants, most small shopkeepers and traders, and countless others from the rolls through tax, property and educational qualifications. According to Granville Austin, a renowned authority on making of Indian constitution, “Only 28.5 percent, of the adult population of the provinces could vote in the provincial assembly elections of early 1946…Economically and socially depressed portions of the population were virtually disenfranchised by the terms of the 1935 Act.”

[Austin, Granville, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, OUP, Delhi, 2014. pp. 12-13.]

Amongst Muslims it was far less due to prevalent poverty and want of education. For example, in Bihar where Muslim League secured 34 out of 40 Muslim seats in Provincial Assembly elections, the eligible Muslim electorate consisted only of 7.8 percent of the total population. It could win as Muslim elite/High Caste backed it whereas 92.2% Muslims of Bihar remained disenfranchised. It was the case in almost all other provinces.   [Ghosh, Papiya, Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 40s, Routledge, Delhi, 2010, 79.]

Savarkar led Hindu Mahasabha ran coalition governments with Jinnah led Muslim League

The Module describes Jinnah led ML as party of Indian Muslims but fails to take note of the fact that it was this party of Muslims with which Hindu Mahasabha led by Savarkar entered into alliances in order to break the united freedom struggle, specially, the 1942 Quit India Movement against the British rulers. While delivering Presidential address to the 24th session of Hindu Mahasabha at Cawnpore (Kanpur) in 1942, he defended hobnobbing with the Muslim League in the following words,

“In practical politics also the Mahasabha knows that we must advance through reasonable compromises. Witness the fact that only recently in Sind, the Sind-Hindu-Sabha on invitation had taken the responsibility of joining hands with the League itself in running coalition Government. The case of Bengal is well known. Wild Leaguers whom even the Congress with all its submissiveness could not placate grew quite reasonably compromising and sociable as soon as they came in contact with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Coalition Government, under the premiership of Mr. Fazlul Huq and the able lead of our esteemed Mahasabha leader Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerji, functioned successfully for a year or so to the benefit of both the communities. Moreover, further events also proved demonstratively that the Hindu Mahasabhaits endeavoured to capture the centres of political power only in the public interests and not for the leaves and fishes of the office.” [Ibid, pp. 479-480.]

Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League formed a coalition government in NWFP also.

The module, not surprisingly, attempts to defend Jinnah, a co-traveller two-nation theorist. Jinnah is quoted to have said “I never thought it would happen. I never expected to see Pakistan in my lifetime” [page 9]. The message module wants to convey is Jinnah did not expect it, but Congress got Pakistan delivered to Jinnah!

Falsehood 3: Congress Guilty of Partition

In a section titled “Who was responsible for Partition” [page 6], the NCERT module reads: “Ultimately, on August 15, 1947, India was divided. But this was not the doing of any one person. There were three elements responsible for the Partition of India: Jinnah, who demanded it; second, the Congress, which accepted it; and third, Mountbatten, who implemented it. But Mountbatten proved to be guilty of a major blunder.” [page 8]

However, according to the module Congress was primarily responsible for Partition because in 1947 “for the first time Indian leaders themselves willingly handed over vast part of the country permanently outside the national fold-along with tens of crores of its citizens-without even their consent. This was a unique event in human history, when a nation’s own leaders, without a war, peacefully and in closed meetings, suddenly severed crores of their people from the country”. [page 10]

When the present bosses at NCERT trained in RSS ‘boudhik shivirs’ (ideological orientation camps) blame Congress for Partition it is the pot calling the kettle black. It is a highly questionable claim which even facts mentioned in the module do not corroborate. We are told, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel called it “bitter medicine,” while Jawaharlal Nehru described it as “bad” but “unavoidable” [page 5]. Elsewhere, the module reads: “Nehru and Patel accepted Partition to avert civil war and anarchy. Once they did, Gandhi too gave up his opposition”. [page 8] It is interesting to note that for concurring to Partition both wavering Nehru and Iron Man Patel are depicted on the same page!

If the authors of NCERT module had cared to read history honestly, Rammanohar Lohia, a renowned freedom fighter and Socialist leader, the truth would not have been crucified. He was unambiguous in holding that the Hindu communalist who shouted loudest for Akhand or united Bharat, “helped Britain and the Muslim League partition the country…They did nothing whatever, to bring the Muslim close to the Hindu within a single nation. They did almost everything to estrange them from each other. Such estrangement is the root cause of partition.”

[Lohia, Rammanohar, Guilty Men of India’s Partition, BR Publishing, Delhi, 2012, p. 2.]

Falsehood 4: British Rulers Did Not Want Partition

The module reflects the combined Hindu Mahasabha and RSS dilemma of how to navigate the issue of their loyalty to the colonial masters in independent India. Though it declares “Mountbatten proved to be guilty of a major blunder”, the defence of this monster is not far away. Giving him a character certificate, the document goes to declare that “he was not the cause of it” [page 8] Instead of presenting testimonies of the victims (of all religions) of Partition which are available in abundance, the module presents indefensible defence of Mountbatten. It prominently displays the following statement of his: “I did not Partition India. The plan for partition had been accepted by the Indian leaders themselves. My role was to execute it in the most peaceful way possible…I accept the blame for haste…But I do not accept the blame for the violence which followed. That was the responsibility of Indians themselves”. [page 6]”

The document brazenly attempts to belittle the role of British colonial rulers in partitioning India as part of its imperialist project. It is bone chilling to read that it “had long been the known position of the British government that it was against Partition, Congress leaders underestimated Jinnah. Also, Viceroy Lord Wavell repeatedly made it clear, ever since 1940 up to March 1947, that Partition would not resolve the Hindu-Muslim problem. It would only lead to mass violence, administrative collapse, and long-term hostility. His words proved prophetic”. [page 10] There could not have been more shameless defence of colonial masters’ project of ‘Divide and Rule’.

Shockingly, NCERT, appears to be working overtime to de-colonize Indian education resorts to a hardened Anglophile, Nirad C. Chaudhuri in support of the lie that British did not want Partition. Nirad’s quote reads: “I assert with confidence that not even at the end of 1946 did anybody in India believe in the possibility of a partition in the country…The Hindus and the British alike foreswore the principle of unity of India which they had always professed.”

The authors of this document, in fact, borrowed defence of the British rulers from Golwalkar. The most prominent ideologue of RSS did not believe that colonial rule was an injustice or unnatural. In a speech on 8 June 1942, at a time when freedom struggle was rearing to rise to the call of the Quit India movement, Golwalkar declared:

“[the] Sangh does not want to blame anybody else for the present degraded state of the society. When the people start blaming others, then there is weakness in them. It is futile to blame the strong for the injustice done to the weak … [The] Sangh does not want to waste its invaluable time in abusing or criticizing others. If we know that large fish eat the smaller ones, it is outright madness to blame the big fish. Law of nature, whether good or bad, is true all the time. This rule does not change by terming it unjust.”

[Golwalkar, M. S., Shri Guruji Samagr Darshan [Collected Works of Golwalkar in Hindi] vol. 1 (Nagpur: Bhartiya Vichar Sadhna, 1974), pp. 11-12.]

Soft on culpability of Sir Cyril Radcliff

Authors of the module appear as apologists for the crimes of Sir Cyril Radcliff who supervised the land division between India and Pakistan. Radcliff was the person who caused additional blood bath as maps of both the countries were not available even after two days of Partition. The module rightly stated that

“The demarcation of borders was hastily done. Sir Cyril Radcliff was given only five weeks to draw the boundaries. In Punjab, even two days after 15 August 1947, millions of people did not know whether they were in India or in Pakistan…This recklessness and disregard for the fate of crores of people, and all critical matters was a grave act of negligence”. [pages 8-9]

NCERT shies away from censuring him and decided to print his photograph with the following apology of his: “I had no alternative, the time at my disposal was so short that I could not do a better job. I was given a job to do and I did my best, though it may not have been very good.” [page 10]

Falsehood 5: Silence on Partition violence by RSS

The module gives details of horrendous communal violence during Partition. “Nearly1.5 crores were forced to cross the new borders…Communal hostility spread between India’s major religious communities…Another horrifying aspect was the large-scale sexual violence against women and girls. In many places, women jumped into wells to protect themselves”. [page 2]

We know that Muslim National Guards (MNG) created by Muslim League as storm-troopers to maim and kill the opponents played a nefarious role in the partition violence, but they were not the only one. Sardar Patel, the first home minister of independent India in a letter to Golwalkar who was then Supremo of RSS, dated 11 September 1948 corroborated the fact that RSS also had killer gangs. He stated: “Organizing the Hindus and helping them is one thing but going in for revenge for its sufferings on innocent and helpless men, women and children is quite another thing…It was not necessary to spread poison in order to enthuse the Hindus and organize for their protection. As a final result of the poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji.”

Cited in Justice on Trial, RSS, Bangalore, 1962, pp.26-28.

Truth: It was an AXIS OF HINDU MAHASABHA-RSS-JINNAH which got India Partitioned

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a peerless researcher of the communal politics in pre-independence India, underlying the close affinity and camaraderie between Hindu Mahasabha and Muslim League on the issue of the Two-nation theory wrote:

“Strange it may appear, Mr. Savarkar and Mr. Jinnah instead of being opposed to each other on the one nation versus two nations issue are in complete agreement about it. Both agree, not only agree but insist that there are two nations in India—one the Muslim nation and the other Hindu nation.”[i] 

[Ambedkar, B. R., Pakistan or the Partition of India, Govt. of Maharashtra, Bombay, 1990 [Reprint of 1940 edition], p. 142.]

Ambedkar agonized by the evil designs of Savarkar regarding the Two-nation theory and Hindutva rhetoric over it, wrote, as early as 1940, that,

“Hindu nation will be enabled to occupy a predominant position that is due to it and the Muslim nation made to live in the position of subordinate co-operation with the Hindu nation”. [Ibid., 143.]

The Hindutva lies about Partition of India presented as facts in Partition Horrors would not have been otherwise as the whole project is supervised by a specialist who specializes in historical negationism (denying the truths of the past which simultaneously means presenting false history), Michel Danino, an Indian writer of French origin. He secured Indian citizenship only in 2003. Modi government conferred on him Padma Shri award, India’s fourth-highest civilian award, in 2017.  He is a vocal supporter of Hindutva who enjoys, “[historical] controversies in a kind of perverse way”. [https://indianexpress.com/article/education/academia-margins-to-ncert-row-french-born-scholars-tryst-with-indias-past-10197438/] He is there to undo history and, in the process, undoing the glorious history of making of democratic-secular-egalitarian India. The irony is that it is happening in PM Modi declared Immortality Period (Amrit Kal) of the nation!

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The post NCERT’s ‘Partition Horrors’: A brazen exercise in white-washing the ‘crimes’ of the Hindu Mahasabha & RSS appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The conspiracy unveiled

Initial investigation began after the school’s headmaster, Suleman Gorinaik, filed a complaint with the Saundatti police station when several students complained of nausea and a foul smell in the drinking water. Prompt medical attention helped avert a major tragedy, and all affected students recovered quickly, according to Superintendent of Police Bheemashankar S. Guled, as per the TNM report.

As the investigation progressed, police discovered that the school’s water tank had been intentionally poisoned with pesticides. Surveillance, forensic evidence, and witness accounts led to the arrest of three individuals on August 2:

• Sagar Patil, taluk president of the Hindutva outfit Sri Ram Sene in Saundatti,
• Krishna Madar, a local resident coerced into participation, and
• Magangouda Patil, an accomplice who assisted in procuring the poison.

According to SP Guled, the entire plot was masterminded by Sagar Patil, who allegedly sought to have Headmaster Gorinaik transferred or suspended from his post, motivated purely by communal animosity. Gorinaik, a respected educator who had served the school for 13 years, was well-liked by the local community, a fact that did not sit well with certain hard-line elements, according to the report of TOI.

A child manipulated

According to the Indian Express, police investigations revealed that Krishna Madar, acting under Patil’s direction, had purchased three types of pesticides, mixed them, and transferred the toxic concoction into a soft drink bottle. He then handed this bottle to a minor student, luring the child with Rs 500, chocolates, and condiments, and instructed him to empty the contents into the school’s drinking water tank. The minor, unaware of the gravity of the act, complied.

The police have confirmed that the soft drink bottle was recovered from the crime scene, and forensic analysis detected traces of insecticide inside. The minor child will now serve as a prosecution witness under legal protection, given his vulnerable status, as per TNM.

Blackmail and coercion

One of the most disturbing elements of the investigation is the role of blackmail in furthering the conspiracy. Police have stated that Sagar Patil coerced Krishna Madar into participating by threatening to reveal his inter-faith romantic relationship. According to the Belagavi SP, Patil weaponised communal shame and social stigma around inter-faith relationships to push Madar into executing a dangerous plot that endangered the lives of children, as per The Hindu.

Arrests and legal action

All three conspirators, Sagar Patil, Krishna Madar, and Magangouda Patil, have been arrested and remanded to judicial custody. Belagavi police have invoked stringent provisions under criminal law to charge the accused with criminal conspiracy, attempt to cause grievous hurt, poisoning, and endangering life, among others.

The minor student, whose role was manipulated, will not face charges and is being treated as a victim in the broader scheme, as per media reports.

Chief Minister’s strong condemnation

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah took to social media to strongly condemn the incident, describing it as a “heinous” and “unforgivable” act rooted in religious bigotry. “The headmaster of the government school in Hulikatti village, Savadatti taluk, Belagavi district, belongs to the Muslim community. With the malicious intent of having him transferred elsewhere, Sagar Patil, the taluk president of Shriram Sena, along with two others, has been arrested for poisoning the drinking water of school children. In this incident that occurred 15 days ago, several children fell ill, but fortunately, no lives were lost,” he stated in a post on X dated August 3.

“Religious fundamentalism and communal hatred can lead to heinous acts, and this incident, which could have resulted in the massacre of innocent children, is a testament to that. In the land of the Sharanas, who proclaimed, “Compassion is the root of religion,” how could such cruelty and hatred arise? Even at this moment, I cannot believe it,” the CM wrote, expressing disbelief that such hatred could manifest in Karnataka, “the land of the Sharanas” — a reference to the state’s egalitarian cultural heritage.

Taking aim at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Siddaramaiah further questioned whether senior BJP figures — including Sri Ram Sene chief Pramod Mutalik, BJP State President B.Y. Vijayendra, and Leader of Opposition R. Ashoka — would take moral responsibility for the acts perpetrated by those aligned with Hindutva ideologies. “Leaders who always support such socially destructive acts should now come forward and atone for their sins,” he declared.

A call to action against hate

The CM also highlighted the formation of a special task force to counter hate speech and prevent communal riots. “To curb hate speeches and communal riots, we have formed a special task force, and we are taking all possible legal measures against such elements. For all our efforts to bear fruit, the public must also raise their voices against such forces, resist them, and file complaints,” Siddaramaiah stated, urging citizens to report such conspiracies, resist communal forces, and stand up against sectarianism.

He concluded by praising the local police, especially the Belagavi team, for swiftly uncovering the conspiracy. “Congratulations to the police personnel who foiled the evil plot to massacre children. I have full confidence that the judicial system will deliver appropriate punishment to the culprits who committed such a heinous act”.

The complete post may be read here: 

ಬೆಳಗಾವಿ ಜಿಲ್ಲೆಯ ಸವದತ್ತಿ ತಾಲೂಕಿನ ಹೂಲಿಕಟ್ಟಿ ಗ್ರಾಮದ ಸರ್ಕಾರಿ ಶಾಲೆಯ ಮುಖ್ಯೋಪಾಧ್ಯಾಯರು ಮುಸ್ಲಿಂ ಸಮುದಾಯಕ್ಕೆ ಸೇರಿದವರು, ಅವರನ್ನು ತಮ್ಮ ಊರಿನಿಂದ ಬೇರೆಡೆಗೆ ವರ್ಗಾವಣೆ ಮಾಡಿಸಬೇಕೆಂಬ ದುರುದ್ದೇಶದಿಂದ ಶಾಲಾಮಕ್ಕಳ ಕುಡಿಯುವ ನೀರಿಗೆ ವಿಷ ಹಾಕಿದ ಶ್ರೀರಾಮ ಸೇನೆಯ ತಾಲೂಕು ಅಧ್ಯಕ್ಷ ಸಾಗರ ಪಾಟೀಲ ಸೇರಿದಂತೆ ಒಟ್ಟು ಮೂವರನ್ನು…

— Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) August 3, 2025

SP Guled had noted that the police solved the case using a combination of scientific evidence, interrogation of students, and surveillance records.

Conclusion

The poisoning plot in Belagavi is a stark reminder of how hate-driven ideology can metastasize into lethal violence, even targeting children. The police’s timely intervention prevented what could have been a mass poisoning. But the incident raises larger questions about the rise of communal vigilantism, the weaponisation of school spaces, and the moral decay that accompanies unchecked religious extremism.

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The post Communal Conspiracy in Karnataka School: Sri Ram Sene leader orchestrates poisoning to target Muslim headmaster appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Though no injuries were reported, violence quickly escalated—resulting in stone pelting, arson, and damage to both private and public property. Police fired tear gas shells to disperse the mob, as reported by The Hindu. Among the damaged property were two cars, a motorcycle that was set on fire, a bakery, and a place of worship, according to Special Inspector General (Kolhapur Range) Sunil Phulari, as reported by The Hindu.

Communal violence

The man whose social media post allegedly triggered the violence was detained by the police, but authorities clarified that he was not originally from Yavat, as per The Indian Express. Preliminary investigations are underway to ascertain whether the individual has links to any organized groups, officials confirmed.

Superintendent of Police (Pune Rural) Sandip Singh Gill told the media that the first alert came in around 12:30 pm on August 1, after which the individual was promptly detained. However, as the post went viral, villagers began assembling outside the Yavat Police Station. While officers engaged with community members in a bid to defuse tensions, violence erupted across multiple localities including Sahakar Nagar, Station Road, and Indira Nagar, where property was vandalised and the accused’s home was torched, according to  Indian Express).

Phulari emphasised that the outbreak was sudden, and that the police will take action not only against local participants but also against outsiders who incited or took part in the violence, as per Indian Express.

Prior tensions and Shivaji Statue vandalism

This incident comes in the wake of earlier unrest. On July 26, a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the village was reportedly vandalised, setting off simmering tensions between communities. The following day, citizens across communities jointly condemned the vandalism, staging peaceful protests, as reported by Hindustan Times. Subsequently, Hindutva groups and BJP leaders organized a rally under the banner of Hindu Jan Akrosh Morcha on August 1 to protest the desecration, according to Indian Express. However, authorities have asserted that the August 2 violence was unrelated to this event. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has claimed that, “The meeting held on Thursday [August 1] by the Hindu Jan Akrosh Morcha had no connection with the violence that occurred on Friday. The violence started because an outsider posted a wrong status implying that a priest had committed rape or something of that sort, which caused tension and people came onto the streets”. It is unclear how the said conclusion was reached as the investigation is still underway. According to Hindustan Times, he further remarked, “Some persons keep such objectionable posts just to create tension,” and assured that strict action would be taken against those responsible for such content and the ensuing violence.

Political and police response

Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, also the guardian minister of Pune district, visited Yavat and confirmed that the situation was under control, with multiple State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) platoons deployed in the area.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis addressed the press, stating, “The violence erupted because an outsider posted a wrong status,” and blamed such posts for attempting to deliberately foment unrest. He confirmed that the police had to resort to lathi-charge to quell the disturbances, as per Hindustan Times.

Authorities imposed Section 144 CrPC in Yavat to prevent unlawful gatherings and deployed over 200 personnel and 15 senior officers to maintain peace. Peace appeals were issued by both police and local community leaders, with officer Gill urging residents to report any provocative content to authorities instead of taking matters into their own hands.

FIRs, arrests and ongoing investigation

By Saturday evening, police had registered five First Information Reports (FIRs), including four against more than 500 individuals involved in vandalism and arson. Of these, the identities of over 100 people have been confirmed, and 17 have been taken into custody so far, as per Deccan Herald.

Police have formed three special teams to identify and arrest the remaining suspects. Investigators are relying on CCTV footage, viral videos, and other digital evidence to trace those involved. Over 50 individuals were questioned on Sunday and released after preliminary inquiry, as per Indian Express.

SP Gill reiterated that the preliminary probe has not yet revealed any pre-planned conspiracy, but maintained that “no conclusions can be drawn until the inquiry is completed.”

As of now, commercial establishments have reopened, and the situation in Yavat is under control, but tensions remain palpable in a community that had, until recently, lived in relative harmony.

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The post Communal violence erupts in Yavat, Pune over social media post; 17 arrested, multiple FIRs registered appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It is a strange fact that while the RSS and its leaders have never made any secret as to what their agenda is, there are many apologists – many of them quite sincere – who repeatedly state that ‘they are not really like that’, ‘Oh but they have changed’, ‘You don’t think they really believe that do you?’ etc.

One of the issues on which the RSS made its thoughts very clear was their rejection of the Constitution of India when it was passed in 1949 and their determination to replace it with the Manusmriti. This is also something that its apologists, both honest and dishonest, have attempted to cover up repeatedly. It is a fact, however, that at the time when the Constitution was passed not only did the RSS publicly burn effigies of Dr. Ambedkar and J. Nehru in the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi but Sankar Subbar Aiyer wrote in the Organiser in an article entitled ‘Manu rules Our Hearts’ and Savarkar saw Manusmriti ‘as the scripture that is most worshippable after the Vedas’ and is the ‘basis of the spiritual and divine march of the nation.’ Golwalkar glorified Manu as ‘the first, greatest and the wisest law lawgiver of mankind.’

It is very strange and particularly ominous for Kerala that Sashi Tharoor recently commented that the RSS had ‘moved on’ from its earlier commitment to the Manusmriti (maybe he is the one moving on).

It is important to remember, therefore, that on the 5th of August, 2019 at the time of the bhoomi pooja of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, not only were the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of UP present making a mockery of the secular nature of our Constitution but the RSS Sarsangchalak, Mohan Bhagwat, was also present. He made a short speech on the occasion, reciting only a single shloka from the Manusmriti in Sanskrit:

एतद् देशप्रसूतस्य सकाशादग्रजन्मनः ।
स्वं स्वं चरित्रं शिक्षेरन् पृथिव्यां सर्वमानवाः ॥ २० ॥

From a first-born (i.e, a Brahmana), born in that country
Let all men on earth learn their respective duties.

It is, therefore, clear that the RSS is pursuing its agenda of bringing the entire country within the confines of its Manuvadi Hindutva project which it hopes to bring to fruition in 2025, the centenary year of its foundation.

It was often thought that Kerala has a special ‘exceptionalism’ that makes it immune to penetration by the Hindutva forces. Unfortunately, this is an illusion. Kerala has a very special place in the RSS agenda and its earlier lack of success in the electoral arena made it design a series of methods in order to create what it calls the correct ‘Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala. It has been relentless in its implementation of these methods in the State. Success in Kerala is of especial importance to the RSS which Golwalkar described as a fortress of all three internal enemies of Hindutva – Muslims, Christians and communists. He said ‘hostile elements within the country pose a far greater menace to national security than aggressors from outside.’ (A Bunch of Thoughts, 1966). His commitment to the capture of this fortress is evident from the fact that he visited Kerala every year until his death.

There should be no doubts about the fact that the Manuvadi Hindutva project aims to destroy everything that makes Kerala unique – its strong syncretic cultural and religious forms and observances that weld various communities together in a common Malayali identity, its vibrant culture of progressive, avant garde literature, cinema, dance forms and theatre, its strong social reform Renaissance movement that pushed back caste oppression, patriarchal dominance, feudal ways of thinking and brought about social transformation in the State, its promotion of rational and scientific thinking and its history of struggle and sacrifice against both colonial and class exploitation.

Manuvadi Hindutva promotes inequality in every sphere. It denies women all rights, it glorifies birth-based inequality and vocations, it justifies upper caste domination of society and religion, it extols economic exploitation and it discriminates against non-Hindus whom it seeks to deprive of their rights to equal citizenship.

It would seem that understanding the real objectives of the Manuvadi-Hindutva project would make it impossible to achieve. Truth, however, is more complicated. A large number of people do not believe the bitter truth about their co-religionists and caste brethren just as many are prepared to support their country, right or wrong. In addition, those in charge of successfully bringing this project to fruition employ guile, media management, use of money and power, lies and arousal of hatred against minorities, oppressed castes and women to successfully add dimensions to their project that are acceptable and even welcomed by large sections of people. The RSS has honed its skills with years of experience of making the victims of its project its supporters and implementers.

The belief in Kerala’s ‘exceptionalism’ which would make it immune to RSS machinations has also contributed to the rather complacent attitude displayed to many of its activities. The RSS itself has had no illusions about the difficulties it will face in what it calls the creation of a Hindu atmosphere in the State and has, therefore, adopted a multi-pronged approach to furthering its objectives in the State. Some elements of this have been utilized successfully in other parts of the country, some are unique to its tactics in Kerala. To successfully counter the RSS march forward, a deep study of its activities in the State is necessary. Along with this, mobilizing masses of people against its machinations is also essential.

As early as 1942, Golwalkar deputed 2 pracharaks, Thengadi and Oak, to set up shakhas in Malabar and Travancore. This was at a time when the young communist party was growing in popularity as it took up the issues of the exploited tenants, agricultural workers, and workers in the beedi, coir, cashew etc. industries. Casteist feudal elements were greatly opposed to both the Congress and Communist movements and the Raja of Nilambur and the Zamorin of Calicut helped establish the first shakhas in Kozhikode and Kannur districts. Dominant caste landlords – many of who belonged to the Congress – were also supportive. In 1943, the first training camp was organized in Kozhikode. Golwalkar attended this and was told by Thengadi that the communist movement was the biggest obstacle in the growth of the organization. He instructed Thengadi to do what was needed to break the movement. After the assassination of Gandhi, RSS camps were raided for weapons by Communists who also disrupted their activities. The RSS also used violence against its opponents. This was described by the poet, ONV Kurup who recalled being beaten up along with other progressive writers at Golwalkar’s instigation. Golwalkar justified the use of violence by using the analogy of the necessity to use the surgeon’s knife to save a life, in this case it was to save the Hindu society.

The role played by the RSS in the ‘Liberation Struggle’ against the first EMS Government is often forgotten. Not only did its cadres play an important role in organizing the struggle and ensuring the participation of a large number of caste Hindus, both men and women, and the ‘liberal’ Vajpayee addressed a large public meeting in Kottayam, exhorting his listeners to bring down the Government. When it was removed, the RSS celebrated with ‘Vijayaya divasams’ in many parts of the country.

Violent attacks by the RSS were also witnessed against the beedi workers who organized the Dinesh Beedi Co-operative when they were driven out of employment at Ganesh Beedi factories with the connivance of the RSS with the owner who was a staunch RSS supporter. Several Dinesh Beedi factories were bombed, killing and maiming many workers. Militant leaders of the beedi workers were also attacked and killed in well-planned attacks. The Communists also retaliated. While they lost more cadres they were also able to act in self-defence.

Since 1948, the RSS has used ‘temple movements’ aimed at uniting large masses of Hindus and targeting a minority group simultaneously. This is necessary in order to create a strong sense of ‘Hindu’ unity without erasing the inequalities of caste. While the placing of idols in the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in late 1948 was the beginning of its most significant mobilization that bore fruit five decades later, the earliest such movement in South India was launched to construct a Vivekananda Memorial at the southernmost tip of the country. It was met with opposition from the Christian fishing community in the area and this was utilized by the RSS and its various Parivar units including the BJP to garner support in the region. It was an RSS cadre from Kerala, PB Lakshmanan, who actually broke the cross that the fishermen had placed there. Most political parties and heads of governments contributed to the construction of the Memorial, a notable exception being Com. EMS Namboodripad who was Chief Minister of Kerala at the time. Even M. Karunanidhi contributed to the cause illustrating how difficult it is for even secular leaders to remain firm in their defence of their Constitutional responsibilities at a time when popular sentiment seems to be in favour of their doing the opposite. Of course, how much of this popular sentiment is genuine and how much the creation of media and vested interests is a moot question that needs serious study and attention.

To make a dent in Kerala, the RSS decided fairly early that it should not concentrate on fighting elections and trying to steadily augment electoral gains. It realized that the composition of the Kerala polity with large numbers of people belonging to the minority communities, large sections of the majority community opposed to its politics because of its involvement in class struggles and social movements and a strong, vibrant Communist movement would not allow it to make electoral gains that would propel it to power. It therefore developed and honed its strategy of infiltrating different sections of Kerala society by various means until a situation was created that it could use for achieving impressive electoral success. It therefore concentrated its efforts on taking over temples and using them as a base for various activities that would create the Hindu atmosphere it had been feeling the lack of since its inception, it would create new and utilize traditional observances that would not only strengthen a sense of Hindu identity and but would also erode strongly held syncretic beliefs between members of different religious communities. In addition, it would also use methods like social service in the fields of health, education and ‘feeding’ to gain the support of the poorer and socially oppressed sections. Women of all classes and castes who are generally extremely religious-minded were specially targeted with programmes of religious instructions, bhajan singing, temple visits and regular performance of old and new rituals while patriarchal norms and ideals of pativrata were regularly inculcated and strengthened among them.

The 2023 publication, ‘Elections Can Wait: The Politics of constructing a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, South India’ by Dayal Paleri and R.Santosh (IIT Chennai) is a detailed analysis of the way in which organisations affiliated to the RSS have worked at various levels in Kodangallur in Thrissur district. Its work started here in 1966 with the establishment of a single shakha and since then it has worked tirelessly ‘in the world of the everyday and the ordinary, from the workplaces, schools and communities, where the realities of Hindu nationalism are created and maintained.’

After its entry into the area, the RSS established branches of 3 organisations – Desiya Seva Bharathi (for social welfare activities), Kerala Kshetra Samarakshana Samiti (for Temple ‘protection’) and Vivekananda Vedic Vision Kendra. ‘The attempt to create a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ by these organisations ultimately aims at building a hegemonic and exclusivist Hindutva sociality, public sphere and subjectivities devoid of the impurities of other religions and irreligiosities of the secular ethos of Kerala society. The Hindutva organisations assume that their paramount mission is to bring about a foundational cultural transformation of society centred on a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ which they believe will naturally lead to the political and electoral preferences of people becoming solely confined to Hindutva politics’.

The Sree Kurumba Bhagavathy temple situated in the heart of Kodangallur dominates the area. It was closed to the ‘lower caste people’ until the strong social reform movements led by the SNDP and other organisations of oppressed social groups. The area also saw intense peasant mobilisations against rural distress and exploitation that led to the growing influence of the Communist movement. This influence has remained strong until very recently. As a result, not only the temple but its surroundings became open, public spaces and the 3 days temple festival not only attracted large numbers of Muslims but many of them were actively involved in its organization.

The 70s and 80s saw movements for land acquisition by the landless led by the Communists and much conflict with the landlords. The RSS actively supported the landlords and were responsible for several violent attacks on Communist leaders and cadres. The RSS started recruiting rich businessmen belonging to the lower castes and this drew members of these communities into its base. Since the 80s, when most of the struggles for occupation of land had been successfully concluded and many of the previously landless became landed and new business groups were emerging due to migrations to the Gulf (and of course much of the credit for these social processes goes to the Communists), the RSS benefited from the support of sections of these newly affluent groups and was able to shift from violent class attacks on the struggling poor and their leaders to social welfare activities. It has been noted that while these did gain some sympathy for the RSS workers the welfare activities of the State, specially under the LDF, are extremely effective as are its focus on public health and education. I should add here that I live in a BJP-ruled State and visit another MP, very often. While government education and health services are abysmal I have not seen any kind of welfare activities being carried out by RSS cadres. It seems that they carry these out in some places in Kerala only to compete with the Left-ruled Govt.

It was the focus on activities around the temple that have, however, paid the greatest dividends to the RSS in Kodangallur. Today there is a wall built around the temple to protect it from the polluting presence of Christians and Muslims, the participation of these communities in the Temple festivals and gatherings is now minimal and RSS supporters and members now oversee not only the temple management but the organization of events in and around the temple and the use of its spaces for conducting ceremonies and rituals for Hindu men, women and children creating the ‘Hindu atmosphere’ that is their objective. Today, the BJP is the single largest party in the Kodangallur municipality.

What was achieved in Kodangallur has been sought to be replicated across the State through various Temple activities and pilgrimages. It is the Sabarimala temple and the pilgrimage in which tens of thousands participate that has been the focus of the Sangh Parivar and its supporters over several decades since 1950 when the original temple caught fire.

The Sabarimala temple had been a religious site visited by members of all communities in earlier years. A Muslim friend of the deity Ayappa, Varava, has his own place in the various beliefs and rituals associated with the place. In fact, he even has his own place within the temple. A church, at a short distance from the temple, is visited by the pilgrims at the end of the pilgrimage. Many changes have, however, occurred. While Varava still occupies a place in the temple there are attempts being made to convert him into a Hindu and there is now almost no participation in the pilgrimage by non-Hindus.

The Supreme Court judgment in 2018 stated that women of all ages were free to visit the temple and that any ban on their entry was a form of untouchability that was anti-Constitutional. While the LDF government in power announced that it would implement the judgment, other parties acted in chameleon-like ways. To begin with, RSS and BJP leaders welcomed the judgment as did leaders of the Congress including Sashi Tharoor. Within days, however, the RSS and BJP smelt an opportunity to make a great leap forward in recalcitrant Kerala and soon came out strongly against the SC judgment. The then President of the State BJP, Sreedharan Pillai said at a meeting, ‘Sabarimala is a puzzle…But we have to put forward an agenda, and others are gradually falling for it. It is a golden chance.’ The Sangh Parivar wanted to start an Ayodhya-like agitation over the issue and Yogi Aditynath opined ‘there were many attempts to insult believers at both holy places and asked them to start an Ayodhya type agitation at Kerala’s hill temple to keep their faith.’

Sreedharan Pillai’s statement that ‘others are gradually falling for it’ proved to be only too correct. Not only did the Congress leadership, including Sashi Tharoor who had a change of heart on arrival in Kerala from Delhi, joined protests against the SC judgment vociferously. Leaders of the Muslim and Christian community joined them enthusiastically.

The political motives behind the movement were revealed by Amit Shah who said in Kannur that ‘The BJP will take over the protest of the Ayyappa devotees. We will not mind throwing out the government if the Kerala govt. tries to steamroll the traditions of the Sabarimala temple.’ Extraordinary that the Home Minister of the Govt. of India threatened to remove a State Govt. for abiding by the decision of the Supreme Court! Sreedharan Pillai went even further and said ‘The protest is not against the issue of entry of women into the temple but against the communist government in the state. Communists are trying to destroy the temple; our protest is against the communists.’

It must be said that the Communists, the left, the progressive forces and those on the side of social justice fought back with all their might. A massive Women’s Wall was organized from one end of the State to the other with nearly 5 million women participants. The Kerala Renaissance and its lessons were recalled again and again. The Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, said repeatedly that the Constitution was above all rituals and traditions and that the SC verdict would be upheld by his Government. For this he had to face not only opposition from many quarters but also casteist abuse.

The Sabarimala conflict revealed the harsh patriarchy that still dominated much of Kerala society. Caste divisions were also uncovered. Large numbers of upper caste women who never participated in movements and agitations took to the streets for a cause that ultimately weakened their own status and rights.

The movement was and should be a great learning experience for the people of Kerala. It brought into focus the forces arrayed on both sides of a battle for minds and hearts that will have very far reaching consequences. It has brought into focus the challenge that the unfinished Renaissance of Kerala faces. It has brought into focus the desperation of the vested interests that are determined to win back all that they have lost in battle after battle led by the Left, by the exploited and the socially oppressed. It is significant that Sabarimala did not become an Ayodhya because of the ‘exceptionalism’ of Kerala. At the same time, the strong mobilization that the reactionary forces could inspire, far beyond the strength of just the Sangh Parivar and its supporters, also needs to be understood.

The resistance demonstrated against this mobilization needs to be strengthened. This is certainly the responsibility of the Left forces but it is a responsibility that must be shared by all those who are determined to combat the Manuvadi Hindutva that threatens to destroy Kerala.

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