On 18 December, as a violent mob in Bangladesh's capital committed an act of epistemic injustice by torching two prominent media houses and destroying hard drives that contained an entire career's worth of data, just a few kilometres away, another mob lynched a Hindu man to death over allegations of blasphemy. The horror of this crime has travelled fast across Indian social media, and rightly so. A mob that is indifferent to human life, hungry for blood, contemptuous of law and order, deserves unambiguous condemnation. Clips circulating online suggest the man was in police custody; somewhere in the hours between being taken in and being killed, the mob gained access to him and murdered him.
His name was Dipu Chandra Das. He was a 25-year-old factory worker -- someone who, by all ordinary measures, did the right things: worked hard, showed up for his family, took part in civic life in whatever ways he could. Like his killers, he was promised rights by the Constitution of his country: due process, the right to practise his faith, the right to vote, the right to gather, and so on. But Dipu never had access to the same licence as the men who killed him. They could murder him on a mere allegation, while he could not afford even an ounce of that anger when religious gatherings declared his faith false, or his gods illegitimate, or his belonging conditional.
The week Dipu was killed, a burial in Chhattisgarh, India, became its own flashpoint. In Badetevda village, local villagers and Hindutva groups objected to a Christian family burying their patriarch according to Christian rites. The mob torched churches and a Christian home, and stone pelting left around 20 police personnel injured.
Under pressure, authorities exhumed the body for a post-mortem after villagers demanded the burial conform to "tribal customs". Yet even with police presence, the unrest did not subside. The bereaved family alleged police inaction and the involvement of Hindutva groups. The United Christian Forum, in a press release, described the incident as part of a wider pattern, one in a series of cases where Christians have been targeted over burials.
There is a grim symmetry here. In Dipu's case, a mob somehow managed to reach him even though he was in police custody just hours before his death. In the case of Chamra Ram Salam, the man whose body was dug up, was subjected to humiliation even in death. Body being exhumed for further cross-examination is not unheard of; it's a common practice. But the circumstances under which the system permits such an action cannot be ignored. In both cases, the system buckled before the mob.
None of this is new. When Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched in 2015 in Dadri, just kilometres from New Delhi, local law enforcement sent the meat found in his fridge for forensic testing -- to determine whether it was beef -- as though a particular result could retroactively make a lynching reasonable. This became a precedent and was repeated again and again in cases that followed, as Muslim men were lynched across India.
A day before Dipu's death, in Kerala, India, a migrant worker was lynched on accusations of theft and "suspicion of being Bangladeshi". His name was Ramnarayan Bhayar, a native of Bilaspur district in Chhattisgarh. Days earlier, on 5 December, Mohammad Athar Hussain, a 35-year-old Muslim hawker, was lynched in Bihar. And even after he was dead, the indignity followed like a ritual: the police began examining a viral video allegedly accusing him of theft, which is unsurprisingly yet another posthumous trial by rumour and yet another attempt to pin moral guilt onto a corpse.
Dipu's killing has drawn a wave of condemnation, scrutiny, and endless discourse in India directed at Bangladesh -- and it even prompted a statement from Bangladesh's interim government denouncing the injustice that transpired on its streets. Presumably, years ago, when reports of lynchings of Muslims began emerging from India, they provoked a similar mix of outrage, curiosity, and commentary in Bangladesh directed at India.
What I fear will follow in Bangladesh is the emulation of the posthumous trials. The dead man will be made to stand accused, where his life and dignity would be picked over for "proof", as though a lynching could be rendered understandable -- worse, defensible -- if allegations of blasphemy are later "established" with evidence. Then, in time, the lynchings will be normalised until names dissolve into numbers. Until they stop making front pages, slip out of headlines, and reappear, if at all, as tiny items buried in the back pages, allotted barely a sliver of space.
Perhaps majorities in both India and Bangladesh tell themselves that mob lynchings are an extreme aberration -- and that, really, minorities don't have it that bad. I can't claim to capture the full texture of minority life in Bangladesh. What I can describe, with some precision, is what it feels like to be a minority in India. And here's the truth: the negotiations, the trade-offs, the constant recalibration of how you speak, where you go, what you disclose, it's harsher than most people imagine.
This is what an average Muslim goes through in India. You grow up in a broadly secular environment -- the experiences you have may or may not fit the definition of secularism that people adhere to on social media and academic circles. You might learn your faith at the local mosque and still attend a Christian missionary-run school for your formal education. Your days are spent oscillating between theology and empirical science (evolution, photosynthesis, the whole grammar of modernity) without seeing a contradiction in it. You come home, watch Karan Arjun (1995), grow up with Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan as cultural giants, and find yourself humming the song "Jai Maa Kali" from the movie because it's catchy and it's part of the air you breathe.
And then one day, you move schools, where on the very first day, your Hindu classmate tells you that you cannot sit on the same bench as him during lunch because you eat meat. So, you compromise and just don't sit there. You guys are a bunch of kids; you are simply following what you are taught. Your Hindu batchmate is not the antagonist; you even respect each other's religion in the clumsy, earnest way kids do. You shrug it off. Life moves on.
Except the country doesn't.
Somewhere between that lunch-bench moment and adulthood, a party comes to power that tells the majority faith a story: that it has suffered centuries of humiliation under "foreign rule", and that history demands retribution. Things are achieved incrementally -- one discourse after another, one new law, one new "debate", each calibrated as either a dog whistle or a straight insult, each designed to make you feel slightly less equal than you were the day before.
At first, it looks like sporadic violence. Some mob lynching happens that generates enough shock that the government is compelled to issue a condemnation so hollow you can hear the echo. The liberal, elite media tells you to keep quiet: don't wash dirty linen in public, what will the West think? They are less concerned with your safety than with the nation's reputation -- and with their own ability to manoeuvre when foreigners ask uncomfortable questions. Meanwhile, the system does what the mob wants it to do: it sends the meat to the lab, as though the right forensic outcome could rewrite morality and make murder "complicated".
Then the ecosystem expands, conspiracy theories are imported or nurtured domestically, which are turned into policy moods. "Love jihad" becomes a way to criminalise interfaith unions. Also, other fronts open up: restrictions on the adhaan over loudspeakers, the policing of hijab in schools, meat shops pressured to shut during festivals like Navratri, campaigns against halal certification, cities and towns renamed because their Muslim-sounding histories are suddenly treated as stains to be scrubbed. And as you absorb these "small" humiliations, you begin to notice the architecture of surveillance and neglect around you: why are there so many cameras in the neighbourhood where drains are perpetually clogged, where the municipality never shows up, where trash piles up like a permanent landmark?
A few years later, some new laws arrive draped in the language of humanitarianism that sought to provide citizenship to historically persecuted minorities in your country's neighbourhood, but who is eligible for it is itself a dog whistle. The law indirectly states that minorities within Muslims, such as Ahmadiyyas or Rohingyas, are not eligible. Then comes the NRC logic, where the burden shifts onto you to prove you belong in the country you were born in, where your family has lived for generations. All this time, the majority keeps insisting on your face, "kagaz dikhao" (show your papers).
Then comes a major pandemic, which has brought the entire world to a standstill, but the architecture of demonisation continues. For several months, the television media have cast your community as a "superspreader", that your community is committing "covid jihad," and that your community intentionally spits on food. Meanwhile, cow vigilantes keep working their beat, and vigilante groups tear down mazars and dargahs -- which have historically been perceived as religious-agnostic sites, a space of shared devotion -- because anything Muslim-coded is now treated as illegitimate. At the same time, the leader of the country gives a speech on Independence Day about demographic change, infiltrators and whatnot.
And when you're older -- when you're trying to build a life, get married, rent an apartment -- you're simply not allotted a home easily because of your name, your faith. So you stay in the ghetto, or move to the city's outskirts, where you can exist without constantly asking permission to exist.
Sometimes the humiliation is dressed up as "reform". A law about polygamy is floated, and you respond with the obvious facts: polygamy exists across faiths in India; it is practised among certain tribes; it correlates with economic vulnerability; it is not the exclusive marker it's being made out to be. But you quickly realise you're speaking into a void, because facts were never the point. The point is the message. The dog whistle. Then another law is introduced, that you cannot buy property in certain areas from a Hindu owner unless it is approved by the state. And in the middle of all this -- when the air is poisonous both metaphorically and literally, when you're breathing in 700+ AQI -- another dog whistle is tossed out: tandoors will be banned. People around you take it as a jest, but you know very well what the message here is.
So yes, mob lynching is the extreme manifestation. But the more corrosive truth is everything else: the legal, procedural, incremental squeezing of a community is carried out under the very Constitution that is meant to treat everyone equally. If there is such a thing as "South Asianism", it is this quasi-apartheid order that becomes so routine it starts passing for normal.
This asymmetry is South Asia's defining characteristic. It is indeed a vast region of languages, cultures, and religions -- yet sectarianism remains a binding force, before Partition, through Partition, and long after. The majority breaks the law and calls it fervour. The majority demands restraint and calls it responsibility. The majority feigns shock and calls it innocence. And the minority is left to remain, a mute participant, again and again, in a script written for them.