How Hindu nationalists devoured India

The sickening rise of anti-Muslim hatred in India

A protest against the movie 'Palmaavati' in Uttar Pradesh, India.
(Image credit: -/AFP/Getty Images)

Many of the world's liberal democracies are reckoning with majoritarian gripes against minority appeasement. But India's might be the most dramatic case, with a cacophony of Hindu nationalists hell-bent on taking even compliments as insults. Meanwhile, the voices of the country's vulnerable Muslim minority, which has a genuine cause for complaint given the fresh indignities it suffers daily, barely register on the national consciousness.

For the last two weeks, groups associated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have been protesting Padmaavat, a quasi-historical Bollywood extravaganza that tells the story of Rajput King Rana Singh, whose wife, Padmaavati, becomes the obsession of the Muslim emperor Alauddin Khilji after he hears about her legendary beauty.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.