In independent India, communal riots were the most common form of violence between Hindus and Muslims until the 2000s. The trend peaked in the 1980s with the Ayodhya movement. In 1989, processions in thousands of cities and villages carrying bricks intended for the construction of the Ram temple triggered a wave of riots across the country.

Yet Hindu-Muslim riots remained largely sporadic. Outbreaks of violence were generally followed by a return to a degree of normality.

This was because communal riots were embedded in political competition and served calculations of power, as political scientist Paul Brass demonstrated through his concept of the “institutionalised riot system”. There were variations of this model. In some cases, the actors behind the violence belonged to the ruling Congress party but were affiliated with factions seeking to weaken a rival faction led by a chief minister. Such tactics reflected the extent of factionalism within the Congress, which, as Rajni Kothari argued in his analysis of the “Congress system”, had long contained its own opposition.

Congress members’ use of communal violence to destabilise leaders from their own party, often in the name of maintaining law and order, was still evident in Andhra Pradesh in 1990, many years after Brass first studied the phenomenon.

From the 1980s, however, a new form of instrumental violence gained ground. Communal violence increasingly became a means of polarising society along religious lines, providing two major advantages to the Hindu nationalist movement.

First, it encouraged Hindu voters to support parties presenting themselves as defenders of Hinduism. Violence strengthened a sense of Hindu identity among voters and increased support for Hindu nationalist parties.

The electoral logic behind the riots of the 1980s and 1990s was demonstrated by Steven Wilkinson, who, using a database compiled with Ashutosh Varshney covering riots between 1950 and 1995, found that “both riots and deaths do tend to cluster in the months before elections, and then drop off sharply in the months after an election is held.” The 1989 riots in Bhagalpur, Jaipur, Indore and elsewhere illustrated this pattern.

Second, polarisation based on Hindu-Muslim antagonism enabled Hindu nationalists to rally the majority community against a common Other. This became particularly important in the 1980s and 1990s, when caste tensions within Hindu society were intensifying.

The main source of these tensions was the reservations issue. So-called upper castes took to the streets to protest against affirmative-action measures they considered discriminatory. The pattern first emerged in Gujarat in 1985, when violence between members of the dominant Patel caste and Other Backward Classes communities claimed numerous lives. Hindu nationalists encouraged the identification of Muslims as scapegoats, giving the violence a communal dimension.

The resulting polarisation helped pave the way for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise in Gujarat. A similar process unfolded nationally in the early 1990s after Prime Minister V.P. Singh implemented the Mandal Commission recommendations. The BJP withdrew from the governing coalition, and its leader L.K. Advani launched a Rath Yatra across India designed to overcome caste divisions. The campaign was accompanied by numerous communal clashes.

Because violence served a political purpose, it was generally not intended to continue indefinitely. Prolonged violence could prevent the BJP from fully converting communal polarisation into electoral gains.

This logic was evident after the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, when Narendra Modi dissolved the state assembly and called early elections, seeking to capitalise on public sentiment after months of communal clashes. During the campaign, Modi portrayed Islamists and Muslims as a threat to Hindus.

The BJP won a majority of the seats in constituencies most affected by the violence. It won 42 of 50 seats in the three worst-affected districts — Panchmahals, Dahod and Vadodara — including all 13 assembly seats in Vadodara.

Aseem Prakash found that in the 13 districts affected by communal violence, which accounted for 66% of the electorate, the BJP performed particularly strongly. It received 71% of its votes in those districts and won 91 of 116 seats, a gain of 21 seats. By contrast, the Congress gained ground in districts unaffected by riots, increasing its share of valid votes by 9% and its seat tally by 17 compared with 1998, while the BJP’s vote share fell by 3% and it lost 18 seats.

Polarisation also helped the BJP overcome caste divisions and consolidate support among Hindu voters. A Dalit resident of Ahmedabad told researcher Ward Berenschot: “After the riots, there were elections. At that time, Vankars and Chamars had become Hindus [sic], so they voted for a Hindu. So the Hindu won.”

An exit poll found that 76% of upper-caste voters and 82% of Patels voted for the BJP, while OBC communities also backed the party, with support ranging from 54% to 61% depending on the jati.

From mass violence to systemic violence

The nature of communal violence began to change in the 2000s as the BJP came to power in an increasing number of states.

On the one hand, the party no longer needed to depend as heavily on communal polarisation to win elections because, once in power, it could draw on bureaucratic and financial resources. On the other hand, continued violence risked making the party appear incapable of maintaining law and order. It could also damage its international image, particularly after Modi became a pariah in much of the West following the 2002 Gujarat violence.

Communal violence consequently began taking a different form. Since 2014, it has increasingly targeted individual Muslims in a routine and often daily manner. The objective is no longer simply to provoke communal polarisation but to marginalise or eliminate Muslims from public life. It is therefore more accurate to speak of anti-Muslim violence rather than Hindu-Muslim violence.

The trend is particularly visible in the normalisation of lynching, documented by Zafarul Islam Khan in his book Mob Lynching in India, A Record: 2014–2024. Many cases have centred on the protection of cows. Farmers suspected of transporting cattle for slaughter have been beaten to death. Self-proclaimed cow protectors, or gau rakshaks, have also patrolled highways to inspect trucks they consider suspicious. When such vehicles are driven by Muslims and carry cattle, attacks can turn fatal.

IndiaSpend estimated that there were 34 cow-related incidents in 2017, compared with 25 in 2016, 13 in 2015, three in 2014, and one each in 2013 and 2012. Of the 28 victims recorded up to June 2017, 24 were Muslim. Khan now documents 1,733 lynchings between 2014 and 2024.

Social media has amplified the phenomenon. Targeted attacks are often recorded and circulated as warnings. Their psychological and economic impact on Muslims has been significant. Some farmers have abandoned cattle rearing, while some Muslims have avoided wearing skullcaps, growing beards or speaking Urdu in public. At the same time, Muslims have faced growing residential segregation, both because they seek safety by living together and because they increasingly struggle to find housing in mixed neighbourhoods.

The motives behind anti-Muslim violence have therefore changed. The objective is no longer simply to polarise society but to remove the “Other” from public life and, in its most extreme form, to deny the Other’s humanity. The motivation is increasingly ideological rather than merely instrumental.

Modi has spoken of closing a “1,200-year” chapter of slavery that began with Muslim invasions. His National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, has similarly spoken of the need to “take revenge on history”, referring to the destruction of civilisation and the looting of temples.

This idea of revenge has helped legitimise different forms of violence, including efforts to deprive Muslims of political and economic rights, confine them to segregated neighbourhoods and subject them to physical persecution. The intensity of the violence reflects a deeper process of dehumanisation.

In some cases, even visible signs of Muslim identity have been enough to trigger deadly attacks. In June 2014, Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, a 24-year-old computer engineer, was lynched in Pune while returning from a mosque. Reports said he was targeted because he was wearing a skullcap and had a beard.

Similar incidents have become recurrent. In Uttar Pradesh, three Muslim clerics travelling by train to Delhi to visit Jama Masjid and the Nizamuddin shrine were attacked by fellow passengers who said their skullcaps and scarves had offended them.

Anti-Muslim violence has also involved torture. In some cases, victims have been killed with knives or firearms; in others, attackers have subjected them to prolonged assaults that were recorded and circulated on social media. Such cases include those involving Pehlu Khan, Tabrez Ansari and Rakbar Khan.

Rakbar, a dairy farmer from Mewat, and his friend Aslam were returning with two dairy cows from Alwar district when five armed men identifying themselves as cow protectors attacked them. Aslam survived and later recalled hearing the attackers instruct one another to break Rakbar’s legs, hit him on the head and break his hands.

Retired police officer N.C. Asthana compared this attitude with that of the Nazis. He argued that the objective was not simply to eliminate a section of the population but to subjugate it and reduce its members to the status of a “defeated people” and “subhumans”, invoking the Nazi concept of Untermensch.

This logic extends to children and women. An 11-year-old Muslim boy accused of stealing a mobile phone was stripped naked and had four fingers cut off.

Muslim women have also become targets of both symbolic and physical violence. In one prominent case, more than 80 Muslim women — including journalists, artists and activists — had their names and photographs posted on a GitHub-hosted application called “Sulli Deals”, where they were presented for online auction. One woman said users were bidding small amounts, rating women according to their bodies, describing sexual acts and threatening rape.

Rape has also been used as a form of violence against Muslim women and girls. Hindu nationalist figures have publicly called for sexual violence against Muslim women. In 2019, Sunita Singh Gaur, then president of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha in Ramkola, Uttar Pradesh, called on Hindu men to gang-rape Muslim women.

Such rhetoric has been accompanied by attacks in which rape was presented as punishment for alleged offences against Hinduism. In 2016, in Haryana’s Mewat region, a 20-year-old woman and her 14-year-old cousin were raped by four men who accused them of eating beef. The attackers also beat the girls’ aunt and uncle to death.

Children have not been spared. In 2018, an eight-year-old Muslim girl was raped in Jammu and Kashmir.

The anti-Muslim violence seen in India today is paradoxical. It claims fewer victims than the major pogroms and riots that occurred before 2014, yet it has acquired an ethnocidal dimension that was largely absent from earlier forms of communal violence.

Until the early 2000s, communal violence in independent India was largely part of political competition and therefore remained within certain limits. It was episodic, instrumental and collective. Since 2014, it has increasingly followed a different logic: revenge directed at Muslims as a community, regardless of gender or age, with the objective of forcing them out of spaces increasingly claimed as exclusively Hindu.

Lynchings and riots can both serve this purpose. The 2020 Delhi riots, for example, were not primarily intended to polarise voters before an election but to punish Muslims following the BJP’s defeat in the Delhi assembly elections.

Anti-Muslim violence has therefore become increasingly routinised, individualised and ethnocidal. This pattern was initially promoted by Hindu nationalist groups. The question now is whether it is spreading more broadly through Indian society, as the growing use of the term “mob lynching” suggests. If it is, India could approach a point of no return similar to developments seen in some neighbouring countries.

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This article was originally published in The Wire. It is republished here under special arrangement and with stylistic changes.