The Killing of a Child and the Expulsion of Muslim Traders: What Is Happening in India?

Every morning in today’s India begins with two parallel news cycles.
The first plays out on television screens — carefully staged, slickly produced: debates on Pakistan, pride in Hindu heritage, and endless spectacles celebrating the idea of a “New India.”
The second cycle, unseen on screens but far more real, unfolds on the streets: Muslims are lynched, harassed, jailed, and stripped of their humanity.

Between these two realities runs a single, chilling message: the suffering of Muslims must either be erased from existence or turned into a public spectacle — entertainment for the evening news. Meanwhile, India’s Muslims are forced to live as perpetual suspects, silenced, criminalized, and unheard.

The Death of a Child — and the Indifference of a Nation

Take, for instance, the murder of a seven-year-old Muslim boy in Azamgarh last September. His small body was found stuffed inside a bag — discovered by neighbors who showed no visible emotion, before being arrested later themselves.

For a brief moment, local papers reported the tragedy. Then, as quickly as it appeared, the story vanished from prime-time news, replaced by the usual frenzy over “love jihad,” border tensions, or a cricket match between India and Pakistan.

The death of a Muslim child did not fit the nationalist script. It became just another entry in the expanding archive of normalized violence. Sociologist Stanley Cohen once wrote of “states of denial” — societies that do not hide atrocities but absorb them so completely that they cease to shock.

This is India today: Muslim lives extinguished in broad daylight, while the majority treats the horror as background noise.

From Silence to Spectacle

Hatred in India is no longer silent — it has become performative.
When Muslims in Kanpur held placards reading “I love Muhammad,” police did not protect them. Instead, they filed criminal charges against 1,300 Muslims and launched mass arrests.

In today’s India, even love is criminalized — at least when Muslims express it.
Yet when Hindu nationalist mobs gather in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh, calling openly for genocide, television cameras either amplify their message or look away in embarrassment.

Violence against Muslims has become a stage performance: the Muslim is the perpetual defendant, while Hindutva forces play the “guardians of civilization.”

This selective visibility is no accident — it is deliberate.

Economic and Social Erasure

Consider the rise of “Jihad-Free Markets” in Indore, where Muslim traders were expelled overnight. Entire families lost their livelihoods; children dropped out of school; women were forced to beg for food.
And yet, national media described the incident as a mere “administrative measure,” ignoring the human catastrophe behind the headline.

On social media, Hindutva groups celebrated the expulsions, turning the dispossession of Muslims into a form of public entertainment. What should have been a national scandal was instead packaged as “a routine local tension.”

The Politics of Hatred

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath personifies this culture of spectacle. From his official platform, he routinely delivers venomous speeches, branding Muslims as “infiltrators” and “terror sympathizers.”

These are not fringe voices — they are the ruling elite.
Opposition parties, rather than confronting this hate, often mimic it with diluted versions of Hindutva rhetoric, competing to prove who is “more Indian.”

It is now clear that Muslims in India are no longer political actors — only props in a political theatre where others define their existence.

The Existential Weight of Being Muslim in India

To be Muslim in India today is to live under constant suspicion:
You are watched in the mosque, profiled in the marketplace, and questioned in the classroom. Even the Friday prayer feels like a risk. The adhan — the call to prayer — once the heartbeat of the community, is now branded a provocation.

The Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi once asked, “Where are those who once took pride in India?” The question still echoes: if this is India’s glory, why must it humiliate its Muslims daily to prove it?

The “Good Muslim” vs. the “Bad Muslim”

Ugandan-born scholar Mahmood Mamdani offers a framework to understand this phenomenon.
In his seminal work Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, he explains how states divide Muslims into two categories: the “acceptable” Muslim who submits quietly, and the “dangerous” Muslim who resists or demands dignity.

In India, this division has become a weapon.
The Muslim who hides his faith is tolerated; the Muslim who expresses it — who declares his love for the Prophet, demands equality, or refuses erasure — is immediately branded a criminal.

Mamdani reminds us: the issue is not religion, but power — who gets to define legitimacy, and who is condemned to live under suspicion.

When Hatred Becomes Entertainment

This is why videos of lynchings circulate on WhatsApp like jokes.
Why anchors grin as they peddle conspiracy theories about a “Muslim population explosion.”
Why mobs laugh after burning Muslim shops.

Hatred has evolved from politics into mass entertainment.
When cruelty becomes comedy, when humiliation becomes prime-time drama, the line between democracy and fascism dissolves.

History warns us: societies that turn minority suffering into entertainment are never safe from collapse.
The silence of German liberals during Nazi marches, the indifference of white Americans during the lynchings of Black people, the cheers of Israeli crowds during the bombing of Gaza — all remind us that when hatred becomes spectacle, it eventually consumes the entire society.

India is not an exception.

The Final Question

So we return to the haunting question:
Are we Muslims or criminals? Why must we live on trial each day while the killers walk free?
Why is the death of our children silenced, even as the state celebrates an “era of prosperity”?

The answer does not lie with Muslims alone, but with India’s majority.
Will they continue to watch hatred as if it were their favorite television series — or will they finally switch off the screen?

Because the day hatred becomes the only national entertainment, the names written on Muslim graves will not be the only casualties. They will also be etched onto the death certificate of the Indian Republic itself.

And when history looks back, it will not ask whether you were Hindu or Muslim, right-wing or liberal. It will ask only:
Why did a society that once boasted of its civilization choose to turn cruelty into comedy — and silence into consent?

For if you clap today when a Muslim is branded a criminal, you may wake tomorrow to find that the nation you cheered for has become your prison.
And in that silence, the only sound left will be the laughter of hatred.

 

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