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A Low-Grade Fever, a Relentless Sadness: Being Muslim in the New India That is Bharat

Rakhshanda Jalil

[This is a lightly edited version of the author’s keynote address delivered at the inauguration of the 14th Goa Arts and Literature Festival on February 12.]

Each time I come to the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, I am struck anew by the manner in which this festival continues to create a space for voices from the margins and explore “ways of belonging”.

The idea of identity, of belonging, has shaped much of my recent work. At the same time, I am also concerned about the dark underbelly of belonging, the forces of othering that are gathering like dark clouds over our country. On this glorious day, in this wonderful setting , it seems strange to talk about fear and I thought long and hard whether I should or not, but then I decided if not at GALF where else can one speak one’s mind, where else can one speak of one’s deepest, darkest fears?

I want to talk about fear, a fear that is very real for very many of us, one that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging. While I will mostly talk about the fear that Muslims in India feel, I know that fear is shared by many – by other minorities in India, by communities who find themselves on the margins and many from the majority community who sense and share this fear, some of whom gather in echo chambers to vent “gham ghalat karna”, as it is referred to in Urdu.

I must confess to a crushing fear, one that weighs my chest with an inexorable weight and makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. Yes, with all my privileges – of education, of class, of having friends in “high places” – I feel scared, more scared than I have ever been in my entire life. I must also confess to an almost persistent depression, like a low-grade fever, over the past few years, that doesn’t quite halt the daily rhythm of life; it just slows you down by its continuous, relentless presence in your life making you feel sad and somehow empty, as though a great deal that one has taken for granted all one’s adult life is like sand slipping through one’s fingers.

I suspect I am not alone in this. I feel this fear and depression among a great many Muslims in urban India. I hear it in their silences. I sense it in their steadfast refusal to get drawn into political debates. I notice it in their stoicism in the face of virulent hate swirling about in school and college WhatsApp groups as well as RWA/housing society group chats. I spot it in the hastily withdrawn social media posts drawing attention to some recent communal outrage or atrocity. I recognise it in their zeal to distance themselves from instances of any sort of violence, be it a Muslim man killing his Hindu girlfriend and chopping her into pieces or a Muslim man killing his non-Muslim partner in a business dispute – where the perpetrator, not the victim, is a Muslim.

If my own fear and despair, and that of others like me, is so palpable and pronounced, what of those Muslims who are doubly marginalised by their poverty and illiteracy? Or vulnerable because they don’t have the safeguards and barriers, however flimsy, that “people like us” have in our gated communities and cushioned lives? What of those who live on the edge of survival because they must perforce go out into the real world every single day to eke out a living? What of the plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters, maids and sundry service providers who don’t give their real, Muslim-sounding names for fear they will not be hired? Or the vegetable vendors who festoon their carts with saffron flags after every call to boycott small Muslim businesses? Or the biryani vendors, kabab sellers, quilt makers, car mechanics who have traditionally plied these trades for generations but now fear for their lives? What of the meat sellers whose makeshift stalls happen to be along the routes taken by the kawariyas during every monsoon? What of the imams and naib imams, often from the poorest of families, who are hired by Waqf boards to serve as custodians of small, isolated mosques often surrounded by hostile neighbours?

I don’t “look” like a Muslim so, to an extent, I am safe. I have written a book with the same title – But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim and I was invited some years ago to discuss it here at GALF. Unless called out to chant “Jai Shree Ram” to profess my Indianness, I am largely safe. But what of my name? How can I camouflage that? Or hide it when asked to provide proof of identity? While my first name can afford some benefit of doubt for it might pass as a Parsi’s, my surname is a dead give-away. When push comes to shove in the New India that is Bharat, not even speaking English will give me an exit pass if a mob baying for Muslim blood were to gherao me. All my so-called privileges can be brought to naught by a crowd of lumpens. The realisation is chilling.

And if I were a man? Imagine, over 75 years after Partition and after reading all the gory stories penned by Saadat Hasan Manto and other chroniclers of communal violence, having your pants pulled down to check whether you are a “katua” or not? But what if I did “look” like a Muslim? What if I chose to offer namaz perfectly peacefully and quietly while sitting on my berth in a train? Worse still, what if I had a beard, wore a topi or a hijab and indeed “looked” like a Muslim?

You might recall the incident that happened on a train to Mumbai when a railway protection officer shot dead three people in August 2023. What if I worked as an imam in a mosque? So what if I had just assured my family that all was well, that I was safe given the police presence all around me? What, then?

What if I, as an Indian, have been conditioned to believe that the tattered fabric of secularism will be held up no matter what? The violence in Gurgaon, also in July-August 2023, proved that these are no longer hypothetical scenarios. This is a lived reality for countless Indian Muslims. It gets an impetus when the chief minister of a state urges his people to “trouble the miyas” and to actively underpay them for services such as plying rickshaws. He goes on to post videos from his party’s official X handle – since deleted – showing Muslims being shot at point blank range

And there are other instances:

Jab mulle kaate jaainge

Ram Ram chillainge

Or:

“Hindustan mein rehna hoga

Jai Shri Ram kehna hoga”

And “Goli maro saalon ko” by someone who is now a Union minister are no longer isolated instances of random, unrelated, personal biases and prejudices. They are dog whistles. They are a clarion call to a large, restive majority that is being brain-washed to believe they are second-class, nay “seventh-class” citizens, in their own land. They are part of a larger narrative, a grand design.

Since we have clearly turned into a nation of “whatabouters”, each of these hate-filled, terror-inducing slogans are instantly and viciously countered with those raised by the PFI [Popular Front of India] or other fringe minority outfits. When rapes, murders, corruptions, scams and scandals are thwarted in Parliament by elected representatives of the people by instances of whatabouts, how can these rising incidents of bigotry and hate not be similarly countered? It’s easier to come back with counter-accusations, to point fingers, to obfuscate, to fling more filth, to parry hate with hate than it is to understand fear, to acknowledge militant, muscular majoritarianism, to call out the elephant in the room.

As we spiral inexorably downwards, as every fresh instance of bigotry is outstripped and outdone by even bigger, bolder, more blatant, more bare-faced occurrences, we don’t seem to pause to think of the consequences. This rampant whataboutery – both at the political and the individual level – is exhausting, predictable and eventually empty. It will derail the India we have known and loved – probably forever.

What we are witnessing today is a creeping normality (also called gradualism, or landscape amnesia), a process by which a major change comes to be accepted as “normal”, even “acceptable” if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. A change that might otherwise be viewed as objectionable if it were to take place in a single step or short period is seen as quite all right – as some of us of a certain age can bear witness to the slow-building horror of the past few decades.

I don’t quite believe that one way of life ended in 2014 and another began in May 2014. No, I believe localised, small, seemingly insignificant events, beginning with the country-wide Rath Yatra of 1990 have kept adding a layer of “normal” till we have reached this stage of the New Normal where blatant bigotry, bare-faced communalism and publicly-aired prejudices are considered perfectly all right.

I will come back to the fear I began with. From this platform today, all I am asking for is an acknowledgement of this fear, a fear that I have about being a Muslim in India today. A fear that is shared – in different ways and in different degrees – not just by Muslims but by other minority groups, by adivasis, by LGBT communities, in fact by large numbers of those who are sneeringly referred to as LIBTARDS.

Many of you may not fully understand this fear, some might dismiss it as part of a victim syndrome, an exaggerated sense of harbouring a grievance, of wanting to wallow in self pity, a tendency to focus on the negatives; a handful among you might even accuse me of fear mongering. To you I say, try any one of these simple experiments: Walk into a Barista and announce your name as Salman or Salma or, for that matter, Umar Khalid or even Sharjeel Imam; wave off a friend or relative at a train station or airport by announcing “Khuda Hafiz”; go about your day as you would ordinarily with one single addition – wear a skull cap – as the Delhi journalist Mayank Austen Soofi did and recorded the chilling consequences; or do as I did on my flight from Delhi to Goa – read a book in Urdu in public. Try it.

However, it would be a sad day if one were to give in to fear or simply feel sorry for oneself. I am not a politician or an activist. I am only a writer. Words are all I have and I want to use them as tools in the only way a writer can: I can bear witness, I can speak up, I can record and chronicle both for the present and for posterity.

To come back to fear, its only antidote, I do believe, is empathy, cultivating the ability to say, I am not you, but I see you, I hear you. Remember these lines from To Kill a Mocking Bird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

[Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian. Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.]

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Kashmir: Belonging, Conditional

Zahid Sultan and Anusreeta Dutta

I am a Kashmiri Muslim. That sentence alone now carries a burden that it did not always carry in this country. It no longer simply names a place or a faith; it marks a condition — one of explanation, suspicion, and permanent audition. Every time I step outside the Valley, I am reminded that my citizenship is not assumed. It is examined. It is tested. It is sometimes demanded in the language of slogans, sometimes in the language of threats, and often in silence that waits for me to falter.

For Kashmiri students, artisans, and those who leave home only to earn a living, this is no longer exceptional. It is routine. You are stopped at stations, questioned about identity documents no one else is asked to show, warned about how you should speak, what you should avoid saying, and increasingly, what you must say. Patriotism is no longer inferred from conduct or civic belonging; it is extracted through performance. Chanting has become a substitute for citizenship. Refusal is treated not as choice, but as provocation.

The demand to chant slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” or “Vande Mataram” is rarely framed as violence by those who impose it. It is presented as something lighter — a gesture, a courtesy, a harmless affirmation. But anyone who has lived at the receiving end knows better. This is not about affection for the nation. It is about power. It is about who gets to decide the terms on which ‘belonging’ is granted. When refusal is followed by threats, beatings, or public humiliation, the real meaning of the demand becomes unmistakable, which is obedience masquerading as patriotism.

“Vande Mataram” occupies a particular place in this discourse. Its defenders insist that it is merely a national song, emptied of context and history. But history does not empty itself so easily. The song emerges from Anand Math, a novel that does not hide its hostility toward Muslims. The Muslim figure in that novel is not a fellow inhabitant of the land but an obstacle to be overcome, an enemy to be defeated. This is not an incidental detail; it is the moral architecture of the text. To ask Muslims to sing this song without acknowledging that inheritance, is to demand amnesia. To insist upon it as proof of loyalty is to ask for something more disturbing — consent for one’s own symbolic erasure.

For a Kashmiri Muslim, this demand does not arrive in abstraction. It arrives in railway compartments, on streets, near hostels, in workplaces. It arrives backed by numbers, by menace, by the confidence that nothing will happen to those who enforce it. The violence that follows refusal is not spontaneous. It is enabled. It rests on the knowledge that the system will look away, that complaints may dissolve, that accountability is unlikely. This confidence is itself political. It tells us that some forms of violence are now socially legible as acts of “national discipline”.

We have heard enough stories, and seen enough individually, to know that this is not paranoia. Students are cornered and told to chant or leave. Artisans are abused while carrying their goods. Workers are warned that employment comes with conditions that extend beyond labour. Each incident may look small in isolation, but together, these form a pattern — one in which Kashmiri Muslims are reminded, repeatedly, that they inhabit public space on sufferance.

What is most corrosive is not only the physical risk, but the moral calculation it forces upon Kashmiris. You begin to ask yourself questions no citizen should have to ask. Is silence safer than refusal? Is compliance temporary protection? Will asserting dignity cost more than it preserves? This is how coercion works: it turns conscience into a liability. It teaches you that integrity is expensive, and that safety is conditional. Over time, this produces not loyalty, but exhaustion.

This is not nationalism as shared political commitment, but as surveillance. It does not ask what you contribute, how you live, or whether you respect the law. It asks whether you can be made to say what you are told to say. Symbols become instruments of discipline, not expressions of belonging. In this arrangement, the Kashmiri Muslim is made to feel not a citizen among others, but a permanent suspect — tolerated when compliant, punished when resistant.

What this kind of regime ultimately destroys is trust — between citizens, in institutions, in the idea that law, not sentiment, governs public life. When mobs feel authorised to test loyalty, and institutions fail to intervene, the constitutional promise quietly retreats. Rights remain on paper, but their availability becomes uneven. You learn, quickly, that some grievances travel further than others.

The psychological cost of this is cumulative. You begin to move differently. You lower your voice. You avoid certain conversations. You rehearse answers. Identity becomes something to manage rather than inhabit. For students, this bleeds into classrooms where certain questions feel dangerous. For workers, it enters the workplace where silence becomes a strategy. For families, it becomes a constant worry — about safety.

And yet, what is often misunderstood is that refusal still happens. Quietly, unevenly, without heroism. Many Kashmiri Muslims continue to refuse these demands not because they seek confrontation, but because something in them resists being rewritten. This refusal is not loud. It does not announce itself. But it carries moral weight precisely because of its cost. It says: I will not celebrate a story that erases me. I will not perform loyalty by denying my own history.

This is where the deeper failure of the current moment lies. A democracy confident in itself does not require ritualised affirmation. It does not fear silence. It does not punish refusal. The insistence on compelled speech signals not unity, but anxiety — about difference, about memory, about narratives that do not align neatly with power. Nationalism that must be enforced through fear has already confessed its weakness.

For Kashmiri Muslims, the question is no longer abstract: what does it mean to belong to a nation that demands gratitude for humiliation? What does loyalty mean when it requires forgetting? These are not ideological provocations. These are questions that arise naturally when citizenship is experienced as conditional, when dignity must be bargained for, and when history is treated as an inconvenience rather than a shared inheritance.

If the nation insists that patriotism can only be expressed in one voice, through one set of symbols, then it is not building solidarity — it is narrowing itself. A political community that cannot accommodate refusal will eventually criminalise memory. And when memory becomes suspect, justice follows.

We refuse such demands because we take the idea of citizenship seriously. Because we believe that belonging cannot be coerced, that loyalty cannot be beaten into someone, and that dignity cannot be conditional. To say this as a Kashmiri Muslim today is to accept risk. But it is also to insist that the nation must be larger than its loudest slogans.

Patriotism does not live in chants extracted under threat. It lives in the ordinary, difficult work of living together without forcing each other into moral submission. Until that truth is reclaimed, every forced slogan will speak less about love for the nation and more about fear of those who refuse to disappear.

[Zahid Sultan is Kashmir-based independent researcher. Anusreeta Dutta is a columnist and climate researcher. Courtesy: Newsclick, an Indian news website founded by Prabir Purkayastha in 2009, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief.]

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Against Hate Script: How Ordinary Citizens Are Reclaiming Public Space

CJP Team

In recent years, public spaces across India — markets, parks, neighbourhoods, gymnasiums — have increasingly become arenas of majoritarian assertion. Names are scrutinised. Shops are marked. Couples are questioned. Boycotts are called. Identity is policed in the open.

But another pattern has emerged alongside these flashpoints: ordinary citizens refusing to comply.

From Kotdwar and Nainital in Uttarakhand to Jaipur in Rajasthan, small acts of resistance are creating ripples that extend far beyond their immediate geography. These moments do not erase communal tension — but they complicate the narrative of inevitability.

Kotdwar: Republic Day, a shop sign, and a national ripple

On January 26, 2026, as reported by The Hindu (February 9, 2026), patriotic music echoed across Kotdwar’s Jhanda Chowk when a confrontation unfolded outside “Baba School Dress and Matching Centre,” a decades-old garment shop run by 71-year-old Wakeel Ahmed.

A group of young men demanded that Ahmed remove the word “Baba” from his signboard, claiming that Kotdwar — associated with Baba Siddhabali — did not permit a Muslim trader to use the term. Mobile phone videos later circulated widely, showing Ahmed visibly shaken.

The incident may have remained another viral moment of coercion had Deepak Kumar, a local gym owner, not intervened. When asked to identify himself, he responded: “My name is Mohammad Deepak.” The addition of “Mohammad” was deliberate — a symbolic rejection of rigid identity boundaries.

What followed, again reported by The Hindu, was swift escalation. An FIR was filed against Deepak, reportedly based on a complaint from members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. His gym memberships collapsed from 150 to 15. A crowd gathered days later outside his premises raising slogans. Police were deployed. His family reportedly received threats.

Yet this is where the story altered course.

As reported by The Indian Express, CPI(M) MP John Brittas publicly purchased a gym membership in solidarity. Fifteen Supreme Court senior advocates followed, each contributing Rs 10,000 as annual membership fees — deliberately structured as subscriptions, not donations, because Deepak refused direct financial aid. More than 20 lawyers pledged pro bono legal assistance.

Public figures such as Kaushik Raj, Raju Parulekar, Ramchandra Guha, Swara Bhaskar and Teesta Setalvad amplified calls for support.

A local confrontation thus transformed into a national solidarity campaign.

The Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), in its January 2026 report Excluded, Targeted & Displaced, contextualised such incidents within a broader pattern of communal narratives, economic boycotts, and displacement in Uttarakhand since 2021. Kotdwar was not an aberration — it was part of a documented trajectory.

And yet, the ripple effect from Deepak’s intervention shows that the story does not end with targeting. It can expand into resistance.

Nainital: “Why are you beating everyone?”

In April 2025, Nainital witnessed unrest following the arrest of a 72-year-old man accused of molestation. According to reporting by The Hindu, although the accused was swiftly detained, protests escalated into vandalism of Muslim-owned shops and attacks on property.

Amid the chaos, Shaila Negi — daughter of a traders’ association office-bearer — confronted a swelling mob. In a viral video, she asks: “Sabko kyun maar rahe ho?” (“Why are you beating everyone?”).

She refused to shut her shop during a bandh called against Muslims.

The backlash, she later told The Hindu, included online rape threats and abuse. But her action inserted dissent into what might otherwise have appeared as unanimous anger.

The importance of her intervention lies not in scale but in rupture — she broke the logic of collective punishment.

Purola: When an 83-year-old lawyer said “no”

The summer of 2023 in Purola saw boycott calls and intimidation after allegations involving two youths of different faith in a love jihad case. Posters marked Muslim homes. Tenants were pressured to vacate. Protests reportedly involved groups including the Bajrang Dal.

As documented in The Hindu’s coverage and referenced in the APCR report, fear spread, and some minority families left. But 83-year-old lawyer Dharam Singh Negi refused to evict his Muslim tenants despite threats and posters pasted outside his own house. His defiance reportedly encouraged other landlords to stand firm. This was not viral. It did not trend nationally. But it stabilised a town at a fragile moment.

Jaipur: Public reversal of moral policing

On February 14, 2026, a public park in Jaipur became the setting for a confrontation that quickly travelled far beyond Rajasthan. Videos widely circulated showed a group of men, reportedly linked to the Bajrang Dal, approaching couples in the park on Valentine’s Day. Dressed in saffron scarves and carrying sticks, the men were seen demanding identification cards and questioning the legitimacy of the couples’ presence. Such scenes have, over the years, become almost ritualistic in parts of India, where fringe groups position themselves as defenders of culture against what they describe as Western influence.

What made this incident different, however, was the reaction it provoked. Instead of dispersing or complying quietly, the couples — joined by bystanders — began demanding identification from the vigilantes themselves. Voices in the video are heard asking under what authority the men were conducting checks. One individual insists on knowing their names and addresses and warns that he would take them to court. The dynamic of intimidation visibly shifted. What had begun as an attempt to assert moral authority turned into a public challenge to that very authority.

The exchange quickly escalated into a tense standoff, but the significance lay in the reversal. Moral policing typically operates through spectacle and psychological pressure — the presence of a group, symbolic attire, raised voices, and the implicit threat of escalation. Its power depends on the assumption that those targeted will feel embarrassed, cornered, or fearful. In Jaipur, that script collapsed. By demanding accountability, the public reframed the encounter as a legal question rather than a cultural one: who has the right to demand identification in a public park?

The viral circulation of the clip amplified this reversal. Social media users described the moment as an “UNO reverse,” but beneath the humour was a serious civic assertion. Instead of the now-familiar images of couples being chased or shamed, the video showed alleged vigilantes on the defensive, being questioned about their authority. The spectacle of humiliation, so often directed at young people celebrating Valentine’s Day, was replaced by a spectacle of resistance.

The Jaipur episode is important not merely as a viral moment but as an indicator of shifting public thresholds. Unlike instances in Kotdwar, Nainital, or Purola — where individuals initially stood almost alone — the Jaipur confrontation reflected collective, spontaneous pushback. It suggested a growing unwillingness among citizens, particularly younger urban residents, to concede public spaces to self-appointed moral enforcers. In doing so, it signalled that while intimidation may remain visible, compliance is no longer automatic.

The Pattern: From isolation to contagion

These incidents, taken together, reveal an emerging civic reflex:

• A gym owner interrupts harassment.
• Senior lawyers institutionalise solidarity.
• A woman challenges collective punishment.
• An elderly lawyer defies eviction pressure.
• Couples publicly question vigilante authority.

They are geographically scattered. They are politically unaffiliated. They are socially risky.

But they share one thing: they disrupt the perception of unanimity.

Communal polarisation often depends on silence. It thrives when intimidation goes uncontested. What these incidents demonstrate is that public dissent — even by one person — fractures that narrative.

The ripple from Deepak Kumar’s Republic Day intervention is especially instructive. His stand did not remain local. It catalysed legal networks, political support, and social media amplification. It reassured others that resistance might not mean isolation.

Jaipur shows what happens when that reassurance spreads.

None of these incidents eliminate structural tensions. None reverse policy shifts or ideological mobilisation. The APCR report makes clear that displacement and targeting remain real concerns in parts of Uttarakhand.

But they demonstrate something equally real: civic resilience.

They show that:

• Names cannot be monopolised.
• Crime cannot justify collective blame.
• Landlords need not obey mobs.
• Vigilantes can be questioned.
• Solidarity can be structured, visible, and contagious.

Hate travels quickly — through slogans, rumours, and viral clips. But courage travels too.

And increasingly, it is not travelling alone.

[Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) is a Human Rights movement dedicated to upholding and defending the freedom and constitutional rights of all Indians. Courtesy: Sabrang India, an online portal dedicated to fighting the cancer of divisive politics. It is edited by Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand.]