RI ROBIN 🔶

In a recent #DurgaPuja programme in #India, pro-Hindutva organisers staged a #Muslim man as the demon Asura and had a group of Hindu women publicly “slay” him—an explicit restaging of Goddess Durga killing Mahishasura.   The video circulated widely across social media. The message is unmistakable: Muslims are the demon to be slain by Hindus.   In Hindu-majority India, anti-Muslim hatred has become so deeply entrenched that even a major Hindu religious festival is shamelessly weaponised to demonise an entire community. When bigotry hijacks faith and prejudice masquerades as religious devotion, it exposes the scary depths to which #Hindutva-driven communal hatred has dragged the Indian society.   When public spectacles repeatedly cast Muslims as villains, enemies, and legitimate targets for symbolic violence, it is no longer “art.” It is the normalisation of anti-Muslim prejudice and the deliberate cultivation of collective contempt.   Worse, Hindutva organisers package this as entertainment or sacred symbolism in Hindu-majority society. They condition audiences to see Muslims as subhuman, as a detestable other whose destruction can be cheerfully accepted.   Hatred of an entire people is dressed up as devotion; prejudice is sold as piety; the theatrical killing of a Muslim stand-in becomes festive spectacle.   No religious festival has the right to manufacture fear, legitimise hostility, or push the poisonous lie that Indian Muslims are enemies of Hindus or of India who deserve only hatred. That claim is pure Hindutva propaganda—false, corrosive, and increasingly mainstream.   Unfortunately, in Modi’s India, his Hindutva foot soldiers are in shameless actions to deepen communal hostility, and push an already marginalised community further to the fringes of society. This grotesque portrayal of Goddess Durga slaying a Muslim is a calculated act of Hindutva-driven dehumanisation, weaponising religious symbolism to demonise Muslims, normalise anti-Muslim bigotry, legitimise social exclusion, and condition the public to view the persecution of Muslims as acceptable, even righteous.   This grotesque portrayal of Goddess Durga slaying a Muslim is a pernicious Hindutva exercise designed to normalise prejudice, legitimise exclusion, and make the persecution of Muslims increasingly acceptable in the eyes of the public.   #USCIRF