Every morning in today’s India begins with two parallel news cycles. One, broadcast on television screens, is carefully curated: Panel debates on Pakistan, Hindu pride, and endless theatre about a “new India”. The other, untelevised but deeply real, is the daily routine of Muslims being lynched, harassed, jailed, and demonised. Between the two, the message is chilling: Muslim suffering is either erased or turned into a spectacle, consumed like evening entertainment for the majority, while Muslims themselves are forced to live as if they are perpetual criminals, always accused, and never heard.
Take the killing of a seven-year-old Muslim boy in Azamgarh this September. His body, stuffed into a bag, was discovered with chilling indifference by neighbours who were later arrested. For a fleeting moment, local reports carried the story, but it quickly disappeared from prime-time television, replaced by fiery debates on “love jihad”, border tensions, or the India-Pakistan cricket match. A Muslim child’s death did not fit the script of national outrage. Instead, it became part of the silent archive of normalised violence. Sociologist Stanley Cohen once wrote about “states of denial”: Societies in which atrocities are not hidden but absorbed so routinely that they no longer shock. That is India today: Muslim killings happen in daylight, but the majority sees them as background noise.
At the same time, hate is not just silence; it is a performance. When Muslims in Kanpur raised placards saying “I love Muhammad”, the police responded not with protection but with FIRs against 1,300 Muslims and mass arrests. The act of love itself was criminalised. Yet when Hindutva mobs gather in Maharashtra or Madhya Pradesh, chanting open calls for genocide, television crews either glorify them or quietly look away. Violence against Muslims has become a kind of theatre, a script where Muslims are always on trial, and Hindutva forces play the role of guardians of civilisation.
This selective visibility is deliberate. The rise of “jihadi-mukt bazaars” in Indore, where Muslim traders were expelled overnight, is an economic lynching. Entire families lost their livelihoods, children were pulled out of school, and women were left to beg neighbours for food. Yet national media framed it as a “law and order adjustment”, barely noting the human cost. Hindutva groups celebrated on social media, turning the dispossession of Muslims into viral entertainment. What should have been a national scandal was packaged as routine “local tension”.
Excerpted: ‘Are We Muslims or Mujrims? How hate became India’s daily entertainment’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com
