How did India become a country of such hate?

A celebration of violence.

The Indian mainstream media and punditry class have been foaming at the mouth since the the incident on 22 April in Pahalgam, Indian-occupied Kashmir. Across the country, Muslims have found themselves in the crosshairs of a society baying for blood, and calling for revenge against Pakistan. When India began its airstrikes against Pakistan earlier this week, the vitriol didn’t stop. It became louder. More obscene. It was as if an entire country united in the call for more blood and more retaliation. But as Shraddha Joshi writes, the call for genocide and mass violence against Muslims, Kashmiris or Pakistanis is not new. And yet, the level of hate and violence that has enveloped the Indian psyche from across the political spectrum over the past several days, has left her terrified for our collective futures.

In the past 18 months of bearing witness to Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza, one of the questions that has often felt hardest to comprehend is that of the full-throated support for mass violence within Israeli society.

People of conscience around the world have long identified support for Israel’s genocide to be much deeper than Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government.

They recognized that the widespread support for Israel’s policy was tied to the very fabric of the Zionist project–as a driving force for the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people.

This support reaches some of its ugliest forms online.

From TikToks of Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) soldiers laughing while blowing up homes, to viral videos of young Israelis prank-calling their parents with requests to donate to Gaza aid funds, I have found myself asking: what immense scale of indoctrination and willful ignorance does it take for a whole society to not only put its weight behind this annihilation, but to enthusiastically enjoy it?

What does it take to create a society that actively celebrates mass violence?

In the past few weeks, I have sought to grapple, more urgently than before, with this question in relation to my own “motherland”: India.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pahalgam attack–where mainly Indian tourists in Indian-occupied Kashmir were killed– Indian internet users and media were quick to embrace the Israel analogy.

Ordinary citizens rushed to call for the “flattening” of Kashmir and Pakistan–drawing comparisons to Gaza–, while members of the military and law enforcement invoked the “Israel model” as the path forward for India.

With a robust arms trade relationship, shared tactics of occupation, and the implementation of Israeli surveillance technology in Kashmir that is first field-tested on Palestinians, the “Israel model” has long been alive and well in India’s treatment of Kashmiris.

Just hours after the Pahalgam attack, the Indian military launched a wave of mass detentions and home demolitions in what is already the world’s most militarized zone, straight out of the Israeli playbook.

However, beyond these material parallels–which exist in the backdrop of distinct geopolitical realities and histories–, there is an aspect of the Israel analogy that I find most troubling, one not unique to Israel itself: the emergence of a society where indiscriminate violence is celebrated, and where one's sense of nationhood is premised on the destruction of a less-than-human “other.”

To speak of the events unfolding in India today as merely a product of a fascist top-down system and an Israel-inspired war machine is to obscure a key detail: that of the longstanding popular support for the escalated occupation of Kashmir, the everyday targeting and scapegoating of Indian Muslims and minorities, and the newfound mass support for India’s acts of war.

Just following the Pahalgam attack, Hindu supremacist mobs put forth calls to hunt down and attack Kashmiri students across universities in India. Islamophobic conspiracies flooded WhatsApp groups and media, building consent for the collective punishment of an “enemy.”

On Wednesday, India began striking Pakistan, without producing evidence of its neighbor’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack.

Suddenly, Indian meme pages were sharing footage of bombings with captions like “Happy Diwali.”

Family friends in WhatsApp groups and social media were posting Islamophobic visuals demonizing whole groups in celebration of violent military action.

What may have once been so-called casual, “dinner table” Islamophobia, has laid the groundwork for all-out calls for war and destruction.

Looking through Indian coverage of the strikes earlier this week, it takes close reading and combing through multiple sources to realize that most of the locations targeted were mosques and homes, and that several of the 31 civilians killed in India’s strikes were young children.

Hindu supremacy, and the violence needed to maintain it, is not a new feature of the Indian political project: we have seen its explicit and more thinly veiled, liberal iterations since the early ideations of the Indian state.

The national project needs a dominant identity– and a clear “other”– to survive.

However, under Narendra Modi’s fascist government, this reality has been further unmasked. Today, Indians from across the political spectrum–from far-right paramilitary groups to communist parties–are cheering on war and escalated violence.

We are living in an age where individualized information access is at an all-time high; yet, under an authoritarian state where mainstream media is made to align with nationalist narratives and the slightest dissent is cause for incarceration, disinformation and sensationalist content spreads like wildfire. It is this dangerous combination that has ultimately led us to this point: not just a fascist government, but a fascist society that sees some as less human and less deserving of life itself.

None of this is recent, although it may now be more blatant. For years, organizations like Genocide Watch have been cataloguing the rampant hate–proliferated by those and power and those in ordinary echelons of society– that places India in the preceding stages of a genocide.

The multi partisan warmongering we witness in India today– from those who confidently choose to laud the murder of children, to those who veil their support under the facade of so-called “national unity”– only paves the way for further stages of violence, sowing deeper regional instability, and further obscuring the brutal Indian occupation of Kashmir.

For Indian-Americans like me, insulated by privileges of caste and class that have constantly separated our communities from the reaches of Indian state violence, this moment must be a sobering call to action.

It is the people of Kashmir–now facing the exchange of fire between India and Pakistan– that are bearing the brunt of this unchecked violence that Indian society is sanctioning, if not through our active endorsement, then through our silence.

It is those who hold a precarious sense of belonging in India’s Hindu supremacist project that are the most vulnerable when this violence turns inwards (and it already very much has).

Those of us on the “outside” may not be celebrating the culture of violence that has taken root in our country of origin, but our willingness to distance ourselves from it is, too, a form of responsibility and deep complicity.

What does it take to create a society that actively celebrates mass violence?

The answer is unfortunately being written in front of our eyes, with our conveniently-constructed distance and our constant silence.