Ten years after a mob dragged Mohammad Akhlaq from his home in Bisara village, Dadri, and beat him to death over a rumour about beef in his refrigerator, journalist Dayashankar Mishra has published a book that asks why India stopped talking about mob lynching while the lynchings themselves never stopped. Speaking with host Bushra Khanam Fahad on the Nous Podcast, Mishra, a nearly two-decade veteran of newsrooms including NDTV, Zee News and Network18, described a years-long reporting journey across villages and small towns that produced "Akhlaq," a book no major Indian publisher agreed to print. Mishra self-published it after his previous book, on Rahul Gandhi, is widely believed to have cost him his job at Network18.
Before Akhlaq, There Was Mohsin Sheikh
The book's first corrective to public memory is chronological. Popular narrative treats Akhlaq's September 2015 killing as the opening act of lynching in the Narendra Modi era. Mishra's reporting establishes an earlier case: Mohsin Sheikh, a computer engineer in Pune, was surrounded and stoned to death by a mob barely a week after Modi's swearing-in as prime minister in May 2014. Sheikh had just left a mosque and was walking to collect his lunch tin when he was killed, apparently in retaliation for an unrelated hate-filled social media post he had no connection to. His father later died of a heart attack while still pursuing justice for his son's killing, and, more than a decade on, Mishra says the family has still not received it. Akhlaq's killing, by contrast, happened not on a street but inside his own home, roughly fifteen months later — a distinction Mishra considers important because it marks an escalation: from public space to private threshold.
A Wider Definition of Lynching
Much of the book is devoted to arguing that India has never properly defined mob lynching, and that the absence of a definition is itself political. For Mishra, lynching is not limited to a crowd beating a lone person to death. It includes a bulldozer arriving at night to demolish a home without due process; a person pushed out of a job on account of identity; and what he calls lynching "of the mind" — bias so embedded that it becomes lethal without a mob or a weapon at all. He offers the example of doctors, discussed later in the book, who decide a patient's most relevant identity is that they are Muslim. Mishra compares the spread of communal hatred to frost settling on a village night — invisible at first, arriving in degrees, never announced. Mob lynching, in his framing, is not the beginning of that process but its final, visible stage, arrived at only after hatred has climbed several flights of an unseen staircase.
Hate Speech as Fuel, Reward as Incentive
Asked directly what fuels mob lynching, Mishra was unambiguous: hate speech. It rarely originates with the crowd that finally acts; it travels, often via WhatsApp forwards and clips of political speeches, until it lands on whichever member of the targeted community is nearest and visible. Mohsin Sheikh, he noted, had no idea any hate speech had circulated that day — he was simply the identifiable Muslim man encountered by a crowd that hate speech had already primed. Mishra's book documents what he describes as a competitive market in hate speech among ruling-party politicians: a minor local leader's inflammatory remark going unpunished is one thing, but when a councillor gets a legislative ticket or a ministerial post within months of a hateful speech, the incentive structure becomes obvious to every other aspiring politician. He pointed to chief ministers across Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and Rajasthan competing in rhetoric, and cited West Bengal opposition figure Suvendu Adhikari's remark invoking Gaza-style treatment for a minority community, days before contesting for chief minister, as symptomatic of a wider pattern. Mishra's most provocative formulation is that mob lynching functions chiefly as a tool of majority appeasement — a way of reassuring a Hindu electorate, regardless of unresolved economic anxieties like unemployment, that the state has identified and is punishing a "permanent enemy."
The Friends Who Killed Nurul Shikalgar
Among the book's most detailed case studies is the killing of Nurul Shikalgar in Pusesawali, a village in Satara district, Maharashtra — notable, Mishra said, because Shikalgar had for years served as president of the village's Ganesh Mandal, the committee that organises the Hindu festival, a role he said would be almost unthinkable in his own home state of Uttar Pradesh. On 10 September 2023, following rallies and rising hate speech linked to the Hindu organisation associated with Sambhaji Bhide, communal tension flared in the area. Shikalgar tried to defuse it, urging visiting members of a religious gathering to leave for their own safety and telling an approaching crowd that its members were his own people — among them Rahul, Chinmay and Pankaj, friends since childhood. Those same friends were later named as his killers. His widow, Ayesha, who was pregnant at the time, described to Mishra the depth of that friendship before the killing: Chinmay had offered his own new car for Shikalgar's wedding procession when Shikalgar's had not arrived in time; the men had once opened a shop at 2am to satisfy one of Ayesha's pregnancy cravings. After Shikalgar was killed, none of those friends could be found for hours. Twenty-seven people were named as accused; the case remains in court, and none of the three men have spoken to Mishra about what happened that night.
A Doctor Decides Who Breathes
A second case, from Udgir in Maharashtra, unsettled Mishra enough, he said, that it delayed the book's completion by months. In April 2021, at the peak of India's second Covid-19 wave, a man named Daimi Azimuddin Gaisuddin and his wife — who was on 14 litres of oxygen, a critical volume at the time — were both being treated by a doctor named Shashikant. That doctor himself later tested positive. During a call in which the treating doctor reported to a senior doctor, also named Shashikant, that no beds or oxygen cylinders were available, the senior doctor allegedly told him not to let anyone else in and to let the Muslim patient die, using a slur and accusing his junior of favouring Muslims — a conversation Mishra says is documented and recorded. Mishra frames the Udgir case as a different order of lynching altogether: no mob, no bulldozer, no visible violence — only a professional entrusted with saving lives, deciding a patient's Muslim identity outweighed the oath to treat her.
A Child in the Mob, Twenty-Six Years Later
The book also revisits the 1999 killing of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his sons Philip and Timothy, burned alive as they slept near a church in Odisha, by a mob led by a man named Dara Singh. Staines had spent years working with leprosy patients in Odisha — a disease still widely, and wrongly, associated in parts of India with past-life sin — and had learned local languages beyond his native English. Only three men were ultimately convicted: Dara Singh, Mahendra Hembram, and Chanchu Hansda, who was roughly twelve years old at the time of the killing. Hembram was later released on grounds of good conduct, and Mishra reports that a process for Dara Singh's release is now under way on similar grounds. Mishra tracked down Hansda, now an adult, and — communicating through a translator, since Hansda is Adivasi and does not speak Hindi fluently — recorded a long conversation in which Hansda described being drawn as a child into Dara Singh's orbit, taught that killing anyone deemed "against Hindus" was both duty and a path to status. After his release, Hansda converted to Christianity, a decision Mishra frames as an act of atonement, and expressed lasting remorse for what he had done as a child. Mishra uses the case to argue that Hindutva organisations are, in his words, placing weapons in the hands of children — a claim he extends to viral videos of minors performing communal chants and slurs online, well before those children can be expected to ask harder questions about education or employment.
A Judiciary That Also Fears the Consequences
Mishra devoted a substantial part of the conversation to the judiciary's retreat on lynching. In 2018, the Supreme Court issued guidelines on mob lynching that made a state government's failure to act punishable as contempt of court — a provision meant to compel states to prosecute lynching cases seriously. According to Mishra, when a subsequent petition sought to invoke contempt proceedings against a state for non-compliance, the Supreme Court dismissed it, warning that pursuing such action would cause disorder — a ruling Mishra said only one major English-language newspaper, The Hindu, criticised in print, while the rest of the press stayed silent. He drew a parallel to the continued incarceration of activist Umar Khalid, who Mishra said has now appeared before roughly five or six Chief Justices of India without securing bail, at one point reportedly being told by the court not to return with a bail application for a year — an instruction Mishra called unprecedented from an institution meant to be the last resort for the powerless. He argued that when a well-read, articulate figure like Khalid challenges majoritarian politics on its own factual and constitutional terms, institutions grow uneasy in a way they do not with less visible defendants.
Cinema, the Vanishing Dialogue, and a Silent Opposition
Mishra situated India's current moment within a longer comparative history, noting that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded in 1925, twenty-two years before independence — a gap, he said, that RSS leaders spent building institutional footholds in the police and army rather than joining the freedom movement, a claim he attributed to contemporaries including Vinoba Bhave and Rajendra Prasad. He drew a parallel with the Ku Klux Klan's use of segregation ordinances and blackface minstrelsy after the abolition of slavery in the United States to entrench a social hierarchy that formal equality had not erased. In Indian cinema, he argued, a similar pattern plays out through decades of films in which villains are disproportionately coded as Muslim, citing the film "A Wednesday," for which actor Naseeruddin Shah later expressed regret at not questioning the script, while real cases of espionage and honey-trap arrests — in agencies including DRDO and RAW — have implicated upper-caste Hindu surnames at comparable rates, without equivalent scrutiny in film criticism. Mishra also lamented what he sees as the collapse of substantive disagreement in Indian public life, contrasting the more searching political interviews of an earlier television era, associated with journalists like Karan Thapar and the late Vinod Dua, with a present climate in which disagreement with sympathetic anchors is met with hostility, and newsroom language increasingly mirrors the Prime Minister's own rhetorical style. Turning to opposition politics, Mishra — who wrote an earlier, admiring book about Rahul Gandhi — argued that Gandhi and other opposition leaders raise questions about Dalits, Adivasis and students but avoid a sustained, explicit campaign specifically on Muslim persecution and lynching, apparently for fear of electoral cost, even though twelve years of comparative silence have not delivered them power either.
Why the Book Is Named for Akhlaq
Mishra closed by explaining why, among many possible victims discussed in the book, its title is Akhlaq. In November 2025, he said, the Uttar Pradesh government filed a petition in the local trial court seeking to withdraw all charges against those accused in Akhlaq's 2015 killing; the judge at the time rejected the petition, though Mishra noted it could still be revived as Uttar Pradesh's next state election approaches. He described the attempt as something close to a formal declaration by the state that the country does not belong equally to Akhlaq — a step he said no other case in the book has seen a government take so openly. Mishra's central argument, restated at the end of the conversation, is that mob lynching should never be understood as spontaneous crowd violence but as organised, premeditated crime, and he called on the government to have India's National Crime Records Bureau formally define and record lynching as a distinct category, arguing that without documentation, victims risk being erased twice — first by the mob, then by the absence of a record. "Mob lynching is not mob rage. It is a sophisticated political tool," Mishra said, describing the book's central claim in the interview. The book is self-published and sold through Amazon, Flipkart and directly via WhatsApp orders, after what Mishra said was a uniform refusal by commercial publishers to print it.
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