A moving target
Journalist and author Kunal Purohit opens his conversation on the Nous Podcast with a blunt reframe of the goat controversies convulsing Mumbai housing societies ahead of Bakr-Eid: "it was never about the cow." In Mira Road, Hindutva-aligned residents and organizations demanded that if Muslims could bring goats into their societies for ritual sacrifice, Hindus should be allowed to bring in pigs — and did so on camera, chanting Hanuman Chalisa and "Jai Shri Ram" as police escorted the animal through the complex, before the society's goats were removed entirely and relocated by trolley. Purohit, author of "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars," argues the target is interchangeable by design: months earlier it was "love jihad" in Maharashtra, prompting a new state law; before that it was Christmas gatherings attacked outside churches in seven or eight states; then Ramzan practices like sehri and iftar. "Hindutva needs a constant target to stay relevant," he says — today's controversy will fade once a new one is manufactured.
Why festivals specifically
Purohit argues festivals are targeted precisely because they are the moments when a minority community's presence becomes most visible — a shared, public celebration that Hindutva organizations can attack to signal, unmistakably, whose country this is. He traces the same pattern to Ganesh Utsav, Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti processions turned into shows of force, mosques draped in tarpaulin along procession routes, and provocative songs blasted outside them — a dynamic that has, in his account, recently spread to Holi as well, complete with children choreographed to sexually suggestive lyrics targeting Muslims. The deeper objective, he argues, is dismantling syncretic local traditions — villages across Maharashtra where both communities historically joined each other's Eid, Holi and Diwali celebrations. He cites Ghatkoper, a Mumbai neighbourhood where a goat-keeping practice dating to 1997 was abruptly shut down this year by BJP leader Kirit Somaiya and allies, deliberately severing a three-decade-old local coexistence. "As long as coexistence continues," Purohit says, "your propaganda won't sell" — someone who grew up alongside Muslim neighbours and friends won't easily believe they're suddenly a threat, so eroding that lived proximity becomes a precondition for the broader narrative to take hold.
Maharashtra's reward system
Purohit locates the current wave's political origins in the 2022 collapse of the Uddav Thackeray-led coalition government, after which the BJP, newly anxious about its dominance in Maharashtra, began mobilizing previously unknown or unregistered Hindutva outfits through village-level rallies warning that Hindus were under threat from Muslim "land jihad" and "love jihad." He argues the resulting 2024 landslide taught the party a durable lesson: polarization is rewarded by voters. He points to Nitesh Rane, who as an MLA openly called Muslims "green snakes," threatened to enter mosques, and warned police that a "Hindutva government" backed him — before being made a cabinet minister after the 2024 election. Purohit rejects the framing that such figures are merely granted impunity: "it's not impunity, it's reward" — a model he says has since spread to West Bengal, where Suvendu Adhikari pivoted from the Trinamool Congress to an anti-Muslim campaign explicitly invoking Israel's war on Gaza as a model ("100 crore Hindus" should together teach a lesson) and pushing conspiracy theories that government medicine is secretly sterilizing Hindu families — rhetoric he says has been rewarded with Adhikari's rise, not sanctioned.
The slow drip
Asked why such open bigotry doesn't provoke broader social revulsion, Purohit describes a "slow dripping tap" of propaganda dating back to unofficial WhatsApp forwards and IT-cell Facebook posts before 2014 — content now openly echoed by the Prime Minister, Home Minister, chief ministers and news anchors. What changed, he argues, is that Muslims stopped being seen as fellow humans and came to be pre-categorized as threats: to your daughter, your home, your family — a frame he says trains people to feel discomfort taking an Uber from a Muslim driver or receiving food delivery from one. The cumulative effect, he argues, is a citizenry that no longer recoils at events that would once have been unthinkable — like a man filmed carrying a pig into a housing society to intimidate Muslim residents, or a Muslim man beaten on camera in Uttarakhand for praying on a field, told by his attacker "I am a Brahmin, how can you pray on my land." A decade ago, Purohit says, such incidents would have provoked outrage across Hindu society; today, questions shift instead to why the sacrifice was allowed at all.
Beyond the poor: erasing visibility everywhere
Purohit connects the pattern to a broader campaign of shrinking Muslim visibility across every sphere of public life, not just festivals. He cites the "TCS jihad" controversy — where allegations against Muslim employees at Tata Consultancy Services carried an underlying message that even educated professionals in corporate India "will still do this," reinforcing informal hiring discrimination Muslim professionals already report. He draws parallel lines to a since-shelved "UPSC jihad" narrative questioning why Muslim candidates were succeeding in civil service exams, and a Jammu and Kashmir medical college controversy where Hindutva organizations pushed to shut down an institution over its high proportion of Muslim students. "No matter the sphere," he says, "the idea is to reduce Muslim representation and visibility as much as possible" — festivals simply offer the most visible, emotionally charged opportunity to do so.
Manufacturing incidents when none exist
Purohit describes how ordinary, secular disputes are retroactively given communal framing to sustain constant mobilization — because, he argues, Hindutva organizations must keep their cadre in "a constant state of mobilization" or risk losing public attention to more pressing concerns like inflation and unemployment. He recounts a Mira Bhayandar case where a routine landlord-tenant rent dispute between a Hindu shopkeeper and Muslim tenant was reframed by Bajrang Dal and VHP activists — who arrived with cameras — as a Muslim "land jihad" seizure, with the Hindu shopkeeper recorded thanking the organizations for "recovering" his shop. He also cites a Muzaffarnagar case where a Muslim food blogger, filming a non-vegetarian restaurant review, briefly captured a nearby temple's flag in frame; despite the blogger's apology explaining he found the tricolour moving, he was charged under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Section 170 for disturbing peace and jailed — a response Purohit says would be unthinkable had a Hindu blogger filmed the same shot.
Where it goes from here
Purohit predicts economic distress will accelerate the pattern, as rhetoric already surfacing in recent state elections — outsiders "taking your land, your jobs, your resources" — increasingly redirects public frustration over inflation and unemployment toward Muslims specifically, with West Bengal's rhetoric branding Bengali Muslims as Bangladeshi or Rohingya infiltrators, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah's new committee on "changing demographics," as early instances of a durable trend. He argues genuinely religious Hindus who know their tradition contains no license for this behaviour need to say so publicly and repeatedly, rather than leaving isolated voices to carry that argument alone — while cautioning that the "poison has been mixed too finely" to be undone without broader social mobilization to match it.
Normalization as propaganda's endpoint
Purohit closes by describing what he calls propaganda's "culmination": the point where individual deaths — like that of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015, which once drew national protest and political visits — no longer register as headlines at all, numbed by sheer frequency, much as viewers have grown desensitized scrolling past images from Gaza. He credits the broader Muslim community with notable restraint over the past twelve years, largely avoiding violent protest even amid sustained provocation, and argues the priority now is developing calmer, more measured public articulation — voices that can speak past both media figures incentivized toward inflammatory soundbites and toward genuine civil-society dialogue capable of reclaiming space that Hindutva organizations, which thrive on confrontation rather than conversation, have otherwise captured entirely.
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