Pathfinder
Chief Minister (5k+ posts)
The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi
India, the world's largest democracy, has also become the world's largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror.
ON RARE OCCASIONS, the Indian government—which prides itself on visions of universal digital literacy, online services, and biometrical identity schemes—still conducts certain official communications by radiogram. An operator sitting at a radio transmitter taps out a message, and then a receiver spits out the transmission in another part of the country, generating an instant legal document. And so it was that on December 31, 2015, the superintendent of the jail in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, received a copy of a radiogram from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, marked “urgent.”
The message concerned a particular inmate named Vivek Premi, a local jeweler’s son who had recently spent his 22nd birthday behind bars. In the summer of 2015, Premi had accosted a 42-year-old Muslim laborer named Mohammed Reyaz in the nearby town of Shamli. Because Reyaz was handling a calf, Premi accused him of plotting to deliver the animal to local butchers. This counted as a grave allegation: Killing cows is sacrilege to many Hindus and is illegal in Uttar Pradesh. To make matters even worse for Reyaz, Premi was a local leader in the Bajrang Dal, a radical Hindu youth militia that has long waged a vigilante crusade against cow slaughter.
Together with a crew of his fellow militants, Premi bound Reyaz’s hands behind his back and paraded him through the most crowded market street in Shamli. A large mob formed, smartphones at the ready, as Premi beat the man into semiconsciousness and flogged him with a belt for more than an hour. “Cow killer! Cow killer! Cow killer!” Premi shouted like a man possessed. Before long, the mob overflowed the banks of the physical marketplace, as videos of Premi’s public torture of Reyaz went viral on WhatsApp and YouTube.
Shamli and Muzaffarnagar, which sit in a sugarcane-growing and light industrial region about two and a half hours north of New Delhi, rarely command national attention in India. But when they do, it is often for their communal violence. In 2013 the two districts erupted in sectarian riots between Hindus and Muslims that killed around 50 people and displaced 50,000.
Fearing that Premi was about to rekindle more of the same, the government of Uttar Pradesh—which was then controlled by a democratic socialist party—moved to act. District authorities arrested Premi and invoked a law called the National Security Act, which allows state governments to preemptively detain people who pose a threat to the public order. (Premi was also charged with rioting, intentionally causing harm, and making insults with an intention to breach peace; Reyaz, who was arrested far more swiftly, was charged with cattle smuggling and animal cruelty.) For months, Premi sat in jail.
But now, with a radiogram from Delhi, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s central government was stepping in. As it happens, the street fighters of the Bajrang Dal share a parent organization with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Both militia and political front were spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary volunteer organization that advances the cause of Hindutva—an ideology that aims to refashion India into a state for Hindus.
The radiogram declared that the Home Ministry was “pleased to revoke” the state government’s decision to detain Premi, and that the young vigilante “may be released forthwith from the jail unless he is required to be kept in jail for any other case.”
And so, on the evening of January 15, 2016, a second spectacle played out with Premi at its center, when a crowd began gathering outside the jail in Muzaffarnagar. More than a hundred men milled around in the dusk, hunching into heavy sweaters to ward off the chill. A sickly-sweet odor from the local sugar refineries hung in the air. The men clutched plastic bags of marigold garlands and chatted excitedly amongst themselves. Others fiddled with smartphones. Their ranks included an ultra-right-wing official from the BJP, along with officers from several radical Hindu groups. Despite the cold, their quiet conversations crackled with energy. At 6:15, when the steel gates slid open, they burst into cheers.
A young man in a crumpled white tunic strode out. During his six and a half months in jail, Premi’s beard had filled out, and now his mustache curled up at the tips, making his round, boyish face appear older.
Barely able to suppress their joy, his acolytes rushed to greet him. One of them draped a saffron shawl around Premi’s shoulders and anointed his forehead with a tilak, the red mark that devout Hindus wear. “Dekho, dekho koun aayaa! Hinduon ka sher aaya!” the men chanted. “Look, look who is here! It is the lion of the Hindus!” They hoisted him up on their shoulders, showering him with flower petals as they bore him off into the night.
Premi was equal parts bewildered and excited; at first he thought the crowd was someone’s wedding procession. That night, when he had settled in at home, he asked his family for a phone so he could check who had messaged him while he was in jail. Sitting in his bedroom in Shamli, Premi pushed his SIM card into the small socket of a Lenovo A6000+. When the phone screen came alive, he tapped the Facebook button to log in.
The young vigilante was not particularly fond of social media. He used Facebook only occasionally, to chat with his cousins on Messenger, and otherwise preferred action in the street. But as soon as Premi accessed his account, thousands of messages started downloading, along with thousands of notifications and requests. He wanted to read the messages, but there were too many. Before he could do anything, the phone froze. He had to switch it off completely.
Later, he found the same crush of mentions and messages on WhatsApp and Twitter, a platform he had barely ever touched. It took him a few days to scroll through it all and to process the scope and character of his new fame. His thrashing of Reyaz had been national news in India, and on social media, Premi found, most people seemed to have defended him. And now the Modi government’s decision to free him had brought him back to the national spotlight. Overnight, Premi realized, he had become a household name among the Hindu middle classes of Uttar Pradesh, and many of them shared his convictions: that Hindus were under threat, that Muslims were unrelenting in their conspiracies to turn India into an Islamic state. His new fans seemed hungry for more.
“That was my introduction to the power of social media,” Premi says. Despite his initial skepticism toward a medium that was less physical than he preferred, he resolved to seize the momentum. Shortly after his release, Premi took to Twitter. “I am back again,” he wrote. “Let me see whose mother’s son dares to slaughter cows.” By the next year, he had been elevated to the state-level leadership of the Bajrang Dal.
Mohammed Reyaz, now 47, sits with his wife. Reyaz suffers from long-term health problems related to his beating at the hands of Vivek Premi.
PHOTOGRAPH: SUPRANAV DASH
FOR SIX YEARS, from 2012 until 2018, I worked as a staff writer for The Hindu, India’s second largest English-language newspaper. At first I was based in New Delhi, the city where I had spent half of my life. But shortly after Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in May 2014, I decided to take a transfer to western Uttar Pradesh—because I wanted to understand what was really happening beyond the capital’s borders.
Polls had favored Modi’s chances in the election for some time. But for many Indians—and perhaps especially those in the liberal, anglophone press—his victory was shocking nonetheless. For one thing, there was the sheer, unexpected scale of the rout: Modi’s coalition won such a commanding majority that the Congress Party, which had ruled India with few interruptions since independence, was driven into near insignificance. But more than that, it was the underlying truth that was so difficult to absorb. For years, Modi’s reputation had been defined by his history as a far-right Hindu nationalist. His career had exhibited a striking coherence, from his childhood wearing the khaki uniform of the RSS youth corps to his years as a full-time organizer for the paramilitary and his work helping to launch the BJP on a tide of communal resentment. Most of all, Modi had been defined by his early tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, when, under his administration, at least 790 Muslims were massacred by Hindu vigilantes in a three-day killing spree, followed by months of unrest. About 250 Hindus also died in the bloodshed.
But somehow, during his more recent years in Gujarat, Modi had managed to rebrand himself as a sunny, pro-business techno-utopian, an abstemious leader with an intuitive grasp of 21st-century infrastructure and social media. An unnerving segment of the Indian and international elite seemed to buy this image. But the even more disturbing implication of Modi’s election was that tens of millions of Indians had voted enthusiastically for his original brand: for the virulently Islamophobic, authoritarian rhetoric that his party spewed through lesser officials and, sub rosa, on vast WhatsApp lists. In Delhi, it was hard to come face to face with this vast swath of India. But to do so, I didn’t have to go particularly far.
With a population of some 220 million people, Uttar Pradesh, which borders Delhi, is India’s most populous state. Beyond its sheer size, it is an important bellwether in the country’s fractious democracy. The state is both the core of India’s “Hindu heartland” and also home to an estimated 43 million Muslims, the largest such total in the country. And the northwestern corner of the state, where I was headed, was a particularly active fault line of sectarian violence and paranoia.
In the summer of Modi’s election, for instance, one particular story from the region had become a blockbuster in the Hindi-language press: In the town of Meerut, a group of Muslim men had allegedly kidnapped a young Hindu woman, brought her to a madrassa, gang-raped her, and forced her to convert to Islam. It was all, the analysis went, an audacious act of “love jihad”—a supposedly widespread conspiracy among Muslims to Islamize India through sex and dating. In the wake of the story, one of the BJP’s most incendiary lawmakers in Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu priest named Yogi Adityanath, made the threat of “love jihad” a centerpiece of his messaging.
Meerut happened to be the town where I was moving, so when I arrived, I went looking for the young woman. I found her and learned that she had retracted her report to the police about the gang rape, explaining that her family had pressured her to concoct the account. In fact, she was a teacher at the madrassa and had fallen in love with a young Muslim man who had never pressured her to convert to Islam, she said. In a touching conclusion to the story, they ended up getting married, and I reported on the ceremony. But much of the Hindi-language press showed little interest in correcting the record.
Instead the media was caught up in a febrile narrative about Muslims that was just beginning to build momentum. Premi’s attack on Reyaz that June was an early indicator of its inevitably violent conclusions.
On the world stage, meanwhile, Modi continued to levitate above a set of increasingly macabre contradictions. In late September 2015 the prime minister embarked on a round of mutually adulatory meetings with Silicon Valley CEOs to promote his Digital India campaign, a plan to bring high-speed internet and digital services to all Indians. Shortly after he landed in the US, Modi’s government quietly shut down the internet across Jammu and Kashmir, the only state in India with a majority-Muslim population, for three days (a test run, perhaps, for longer shutdowns to come).
Then, on September 27, in an open-air town hall meeting with Modi in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg praised the prime minister for his savvy use of platforms like Facebook. “It’s fitting that the leader of the world’s largest democracy is also setting the example for all world leaders for how they should connect with their citizens,” Zuckerberg said. Modi, whose party’s social media apparatus had been pioneering the use of incendiary fake news, smiled back.
The first widely reported lynching in Modi’s India happened the very next day. Just after nightfall in the northwestern Uttar Pradesh village of Bishahra, a small crowd descended on the home of a 52-year-old iron worker named Mohammad Akhlaq, whose neighbor had accused him of stealing and butchering a calf. Someone used the public address system of a Hindu temple to summon an even larger mob from the countryside. By the time police arrived, Akhlaq was dead, having been beaten, bludgeoned with bricks, and stabbed, and his son was critically wounded. When I arrived in Bishahra soon afterward, several of the villagers I met wondered why Akhlaq’s death was causing such a stir; after all, a calf had allegedly died too.
Akhlaq’s was the first of eight lynchings that I would cover over the next three years, as my job increasingly came to involve tracking an epidemic of communal violence in full bloom. According to a database of hate crimes compiled by the Indian organization FactChecker, there were 254 reported attacks against 1 minorities between 2009 and 2018; 90 percent of them occurred after Modi came to power in 2014. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 44 people were killed in “cow-related violence” across 12 Indian states between May 2015 and December 2018. Thirty-six of them were Muslims. Since 2015, the term lynching, a word with 18th-century American roots, has become part of the Indian vernacular.
The Bajrang Dal was involved in a large number of these attacks—either administering the blows directly, coordinating them through its private social media channels, or simply inspiring them by example and propaganda. Following Premi’s brutal assault on Reyaz, dozens of the group’s young extremists had been filmed attacking Muslims, enacting the same kinds of scenes that made Premi a viral sensation. Premi’s subsequent release from jail helped set the template for Hindu vigilantism in another way as well: It reinforced the expectation that violence in the service of Hindutva would not be punished.
In an analysis of 14 vigilante killings by “cow protection” groups like the Bajrang Dal between 2015 and 2018, Human Rights Watch found that police “initially stalled investigations, ignored procedures, or even played a complicit role in the killings and cover-up of crimes.” In April 2017, I crossed into the neighboring state of Rajasthan after a Muslim dairy farmer named Pehlu Khan was attacked and killed there, allegedly by a group of Bajrang Dal vigilantes; the suspects were acquitted, despite the existence of videos showing the attack itself, a dying declaration by the victim naming his attackers, and a confession by one of the accused. (The videos were deemed inadmissible in court on a technicality.)
The flip side of that impunity is that those who bring facts to light often suffer greater consequences. In early September 2017, a journalist named Gauri Lankesh, who had reported critically on Hindu nationalists for years, was shot and killed just outside her house. Over the next couple of weeks, a wave of journalists received death threats, myself included. So I decided to take a break from reporting in India and eventually moved to the United States.
When I settled in New York, though, I kept thinking about Premi. During my time in Uttar Pradesh, I had spoken with him over the phone once or twice for stories. And I was aware that his upward trajectory in the Bajrang Dal had become extraordinary. In 2017 he became chief of the militia’s student wing in western Uttar Pradesh. And in Shamli, his unit of cadres was seen as state-of-the-art, patrolling both the streets and the internet, doling out beatings in one sphere while conducing surveillance and spreading Islamophobic propaganda in the other. According to the fairly regimented schedule of advancement in the militant group, Premi was in line to become either the head or deputy head of the Bajrang Dal in the state. It seemed that many of the most powerful forces in today’s India—the adulation of the Hindu middle classes, the broad scope of social media, and the tacit support of the BJP—were at his back. I wanted to understand how he had been so successful and how the Bajrang Dal really worked.
When I decided to request a face-to-face interview, I wasn’t sure how he would respond, since my name reveals unambiguously that I am a Muslim. But he agreed to speak with me, so I traveled back to India in January of 2019.
JUST BEFORE THE third anniversary of his release from jail, I met Premi on a street corner in Shamli. “How have you been?” I asked, trying to pretend there was no cause for awkwardness. He was an imposing figure. A dark tilak shone prominently on his forehead, and his right earlobe flaunted a small silver ring. He wore an ironed white kurta with a sleeveless red jacket and black shoes with white soles; in keeping with conservative Hindu tradition, a tuft of long, knotted hair dangled from the back of his head. And hovering around him was a clutch of fawning young men.
Premi had called a meeting at a local Bajrang Dal office a short distance away, and he invited me to come along. One of the hovering young men started Premi’s motorcycle for him—a 2008 Royal Enfield Bullet Classic, with the word Hinduraj, meaning “Hindu rule,” etched above the license plate. Another follower looked on adoringly: “Every time he roams across town on the Bullet with the sunglasses on and a tilak on his forehead,” the youth said, “cow slaughterers run away.”
The Bajrang Dal office sat, like a permanent threat, in the middle of a dense Muslim neighborhood. After dismounting his bike, Premi paused to look up and down each side of the street the way a prison guard might scan a cellblock. The owner of a nearby candy store saluted him with a face that seemed to betray awful fear; other shopkeepers and patrons stared back blankly. “There is nothing they can do,” he said as we went up the stairs to his office. “I have fixed many of them.” By “fixed,” he meant “beaten.”
Many Bajrang Dal offices occupy former dharamshalas, or Hindu guesthouses for religious pilgrims. Leaders of the militia have taken them over, arguing that the buildings must remain in service of Hinduism. This one was about 80 years old, with patchy cement betraying its age. Inside the office, six members of the Shamli unit of Bajrang Dal sat on floral-print sheets spread out on the ground, glued to their phones. As Premi walked in, his aides looked up to greet him with invocations of “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Hail Lord Rama”—the war cry of Hindutva activists.
Settling down on a cushion in the center of the room, Premi briefly addressed the public thrashing that had made him famous, saying that he had no regrets. (“I had to show that if a butcher slaughters a cow, we will deal with him,” he later explained.) But cow slaughter, Premi went on, was no longer a high priority for the Bajrang Dal in Uttar Pradesh—because the new BJP government was taking care of it.
In 2017, Modi’s party had gained control of Uttar Pradesh and appointed Yogi Adityanath—the radical Hindu priest who had campaigned on the threat of “love jihad”—as the state’s new chief minister. Adityanath had declared war on the buffalo meat export industry, which is largely run by Muslims and often accused of being involved in cow slaughter. Many slaughterhouses had since been shut down.
So instead, Premi’s cadres in the Shamli unit of the Bajrang Dal were now focused mainly on the fight against love jihad. In practice, this amounted to a bizarre, Stasi-like effort to micromanage the dating scene in a town of 100,000—and to stamp out religious miscegenation at first flush. They ran an extensive surveillance operation, they said, using Facebook and a network of on-the-ground informants.
The social media arm of the dragnet was run by a lanky, bearded teenager named Himanshu Sharma, who sat cross-legged, a cushion resting between his back and the wall. On Facebook, Sharma said, he and his team had infiltrated hundreds of groups and friended thousands of people, trawling for Muslim men who flirted with Hindu women in Shamli. “We monitor everything, including which user ID is making what kind of comments on Facebook,” Sharma said. “They are not subtle in expressing their emotions, and that makes our job easier.” Sometimes, he said, he and his team use fake accounts with female names to draw men out. While he spoke, his smartphone buzzed constantly with notifications.
As Sharma was talking, Premi too was preoccupied with his phone, which serves as his main conduit to the group’s local network of spies. These informants, Premi said, alert the Bajrang Dal whenever they suspect that a Hindu woman is in the company of a Muslim man. Security guards, gatekeepers, waiters, café owners, housekeepers at hotels: “All of them are part of our team,” Premi said. “The effectiveness of this system is that they remain anonymous among the common people, but they are our eyes.”
India, the world's largest democracy, has also become the world's largest experiment in social-media-fueled terror.
ON RARE OCCASIONS, the Indian government—which prides itself on visions of universal digital literacy, online services, and biometrical identity schemes—still conducts certain official communications by radiogram. An operator sitting at a radio transmitter taps out a message, and then a receiver spits out the transmission in another part of the country, generating an instant legal document. And so it was that on December 31, 2015, the superintendent of the jail in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, received a copy of a radiogram from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, marked “urgent.”
The message concerned a particular inmate named Vivek Premi, a local jeweler’s son who had recently spent his 22nd birthday behind bars. In the summer of 2015, Premi had accosted a 42-year-old Muslim laborer named Mohammed Reyaz in the nearby town of Shamli. Because Reyaz was handling a calf, Premi accused him of plotting to deliver the animal to local butchers. This counted as a grave allegation: Killing cows is sacrilege to many Hindus and is illegal in Uttar Pradesh. To make matters even worse for Reyaz, Premi was a local leader in the Bajrang Dal, a radical Hindu youth militia that has long waged a vigilante crusade against cow slaughter.
Together with a crew of his fellow militants, Premi bound Reyaz’s hands behind his back and paraded him through the most crowded market street in Shamli. A large mob formed, smartphones at the ready, as Premi beat the man into semiconsciousness and flogged him with a belt for more than an hour. “Cow killer! Cow killer! Cow killer!” Premi shouted like a man possessed. Before long, the mob overflowed the banks of the physical marketplace, as videos of Premi’s public torture of Reyaz went viral on WhatsApp and YouTube.
Shamli and Muzaffarnagar, which sit in a sugarcane-growing and light industrial region about two and a half hours north of New Delhi, rarely command national attention in India. But when they do, it is often for their communal violence. In 2013 the two districts erupted in sectarian riots between Hindus and Muslims that killed around 50 people and displaced 50,000.
Fearing that Premi was about to rekindle more of the same, the government of Uttar Pradesh—which was then controlled by a democratic socialist party—moved to act. District authorities arrested Premi and invoked a law called the National Security Act, which allows state governments to preemptively detain people who pose a threat to the public order. (Premi was also charged with rioting, intentionally causing harm, and making insults with an intention to breach peace; Reyaz, who was arrested far more swiftly, was charged with cattle smuggling and animal cruelty.) For months, Premi sat in jail.
But now, with a radiogram from Delhi, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s central government was stepping in. As it happens, the street fighters of the Bajrang Dal share a parent organization with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Both militia and political front were spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing paramilitary volunteer organization that advances the cause of Hindutva—an ideology that aims to refashion India into a state for Hindus.
The radiogram declared that the Home Ministry was “pleased to revoke” the state government’s decision to detain Premi, and that the young vigilante “may be released forthwith from the jail unless he is required to be kept in jail for any other case.”
And so, on the evening of January 15, 2016, a second spectacle played out with Premi at its center, when a crowd began gathering outside the jail in Muzaffarnagar. More than a hundred men milled around in the dusk, hunching into heavy sweaters to ward off the chill. A sickly-sweet odor from the local sugar refineries hung in the air. The men clutched plastic bags of marigold garlands and chatted excitedly amongst themselves. Others fiddled with smartphones. Their ranks included an ultra-right-wing official from the BJP, along with officers from several radical Hindu groups. Despite the cold, their quiet conversations crackled with energy. At 6:15, when the steel gates slid open, they burst into cheers.
A young man in a crumpled white tunic strode out. During his six and a half months in jail, Premi’s beard had filled out, and now his mustache curled up at the tips, making his round, boyish face appear older.
Barely able to suppress their joy, his acolytes rushed to greet him. One of them draped a saffron shawl around Premi’s shoulders and anointed his forehead with a tilak, the red mark that devout Hindus wear. “Dekho, dekho koun aayaa! Hinduon ka sher aaya!” the men chanted. “Look, look who is here! It is the lion of the Hindus!” They hoisted him up on their shoulders, showering him with flower petals as they bore him off into the night.
Premi was equal parts bewildered and excited; at first he thought the crowd was someone’s wedding procession. That night, when he had settled in at home, he asked his family for a phone so he could check who had messaged him while he was in jail. Sitting in his bedroom in Shamli, Premi pushed his SIM card into the small socket of a Lenovo A6000+. When the phone screen came alive, he tapped the Facebook button to log in.
The young vigilante was not particularly fond of social media. He used Facebook only occasionally, to chat with his cousins on Messenger, and otherwise preferred action in the street. But as soon as Premi accessed his account, thousands of messages started downloading, along with thousands of notifications and requests. He wanted to read the messages, but there were too many. Before he could do anything, the phone froze. He had to switch it off completely.
Later, he found the same crush of mentions and messages on WhatsApp and Twitter, a platform he had barely ever touched. It took him a few days to scroll through it all and to process the scope and character of his new fame. His thrashing of Reyaz had been national news in India, and on social media, Premi found, most people seemed to have defended him. And now the Modi government’s decision to free him had brought him back to the national spotlight. Overnight, Premi realized, he had become a household name among the Hindu middle classes of Uttar Pradesh, and many of them shared his convictions: that Hindus were under threat, that Muslims were unrelenting in their conspiracies to turn India into an Islamic state. His new fans seemed hungry for more.
“That was my introduction to the power of social media,” Premi says. Despite his initial skepticism toward a medium that was less physical than he preferred, he resolved to seize the momentum. Shortly after his release, Premi took to Twitter. “I am back again,” he wrote. “Let me see whose mother’s son dares to slaughter cows.” By the next year, he had been elevated to the state-level leadership of the Bajrang Dal.
Mohammed Reyaz, now 47, sits with his wife. Reyaz suffers from long-term health problems related to his beating at the hands of Vivek Premi.
PHOTOGRAPH: SUPRANAV DASH
FOR SIX YEARS, from 2012 until 2018, I worked as a staff writer for The Hindu, India’s second largest English-language newspaper. At first I was based in New Delhi, the city where I had spent half of my life. But shortly after Narendra Modi was elected prime minister in May 2014, I decided to take a transfer to western Uttar Pradesh—because I wanted to understand what was really happening beyond the capital’s borders.
Polls had favored Modi’s chances in the election for some time. But for many Indians—and perhaps especially those in the liberal, anglophone press—his victory was shocking nonetheless. For one thing, there was the sheer, unexpected scale of the rout: Modi’s coalition won such a commanding majority that the Congress Party, which had ruled India with few interruptions since independence, was driven into near insignificance. But more than that, it was the underlying truth that was so difficult to absorb. For years, Modi’s reputation had been defined by his history as a far-right Hindu nationalist. His career had exhibited a striking coherence, from his childhood wearing the khaki uniform of the RSS youth corps to his years as a full-time organizer for the paramilitary and his work helping to launch the BJP on a tide of communal resentment. Most of all, Modi had been defined by his early tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat in 2002, when, under his administration, at least 790 Muslims were massacred by Hindu vigilantes in a three-day killing spree, followed by months of unrest. About 250 Hindus also died in the bloodshed.
But somehow, during his more recent years in Gujarat, Modi had managed to rebrand himself as a sunny, pro-business techno-utopian, an abstemious leader with an intuitive grasp of 21st-century infrastructure and social media. An unnerving segment of the Indian and international elite seemed to buy this image. But the even more disturbing implication of Modi’s election was that tens of millions of Indians had voted enthusiastically for his original brand: for the virulently Islamophobic, authoritarian rhetoric that his party spewed through lesser officials and, sub rosa, on vast WhatsApp lists. In Delhi, it was hard to come face to face with this vast swath of India. But to do so, I didn’t have to go particularly far.
With a population of some 220 million people, Uttar Pradesh, which borders Delhi, is India’s most populous state. Beyond its sheer size, it is an important bellwether in the country’s fractious democracy. The state is both the core of India’s “Hindu heartland” and also home to an estimated 43 million Muslims, the largest such total in the country. And the northwestern corner of the state, where I was headed, was a particularly active fault line of sectarian violence and paranoia.
In the summer of Modi’s election, for instance, one particular story from the region had become a blockbuster in the Hindi-language press: In the town of Meerut, a group of Muslim men had allegedly kidnapped a young Hindu woman, brought her to a madrassa, gang-raped her, and forced her to convert to Islam. It was all, the analysis went, an audacious act of “love jihad”—a supposedly widespread conspiracy among Muslims to Islamize India through sex and dating. In the wake of the story, one of the BJP’s most incendiary lawmakers in Uttar Pradesh, a Hindu priest named Yogi Adityanath, made the threat of “love jihad” a centerpiece of his messaging.
Meerut happened to be the town where I was moving, so when I arrived, I went looking for the young woman. I found her and learned that she had retracted her report to the police about the gang rape, explaining that her family had pressured her to concoct the account. In fact, she was a teacher at the madrassa and had fallen in love with a young Muslim man who had never pressured her to convert to Islam, she said. In a touching conclusion to the story, they ended up getting married, and I reported on the ceremony. But much of the Hindi-language press showed little interest in correcting the record.
Instead the media was caught up in a febrile narrative about Muslims that was just beginning to build momentum. Premi’s attack on Reyaz that June was an early indicator of its inevitably violent conclusions.
On the world stage, meanwhile, Modi continued to levitate above a set of increasingly macabre contradictions. In late September 2015 the prime minister embarked on a round of mutually adulatory meetings with Silicon Valley CEOs to promote his Digital India campaign, a plan to bring high-speed internet and digital services to all Indians. Shortly after he landed in the US, Modi’s government quietly shut down the internet across Jammu and Kashmir, the only state in India with a majority-Muslim population, for three days (a test run, perhaps, for longer shutdowns to come).
Then, on September 27, in an open-air town hall meeting with Modi in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg praised the prime minister for his savvy use of platforms like Facebook. “It’s fitting that the leader of the world’s largest democracy is also setting the example for all world leaders for how they should connect with their citizens,” Zuckerberg said. Modi, whose party’s social media apparatus had been pioneering the use of incendiary fake news, smiled back.
The first widely reported lynching in Modi’s India happened the very next day. Just after nightfall in the northwestern Uttar Pradesh village of Bishahra, a small crowd descended on the home of a 52-year-old iron worker named Mohammad Akhlaq, whose neighbor had accused him of stealing and butchering a calf. Someone used the public address system of a Hindu temple to summon an even larger mob from the countryside. By the time police arrived, Akhlaq was dead, having been beaten, bludgeoned with bricks, and stabbed, and his son was critically wounded. When I arrived in Bishahra soon afterward, several of the villagers I met wondered why Akhlaq’s death was causing such a stir; after all, a calf had allegedly died too.
Akhlaq’s was the first of eight lynchings that I would cover over the next three years, as my job increasingly came to involve tracking an epidemic of communal violence in full bloom. According to a database of hate crimes compiled by the Indian organization FactChecker, there were 254 reported attacks against 1 minorities between 2009 and 2018; 90 percent of them occurred after Modi came to power in 2014. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 44 people were killed in “cow-related violence” across 12 Indian states between May 2015 and December 2018. Thirty-six of them were Muslims. Since 2015, the term lynching, a word with 18th-century American roots, has become part of the Indian vernacular.
The Bajrang Dal was involved in a large number of these attacks—either administering the blows directly, coordinating them through its private social media channels, or simply inspiring them by example and propaganda. Following Premi’s brutal assault on Reyaz, dozens of the group’s young extremists had been filmed attacking Muslims, enacting the same kinds of scenes that made Premi a viral sensation. Premi’s subsequent release from jail helped set the template for Hindu vigilantism in another way as well: It reinforced the expectation that violence in the service of Hindutva would not be punished.
In an analysis of 14 vigilante killings by “cow protection” groups like the Bajrang Dal between 2015 and 2018, Human Rights Watch found that police “initially stalled investigations, ignored procedures, or even played a complicit role in the killings and cover-up of crimes.” In April 2017, I crossed into the neighboring state of Rajasthan after a Muslim dairy farmer named Pehlu Khan was attacked and killed there, allegedly by a group of Bajrang Dal vigilantes; the suspects were acquitted, despite the existence of videos showing the attack itself, a dying declaration by the victim naming his attackers, and a confession by one of the accused. (The videos were deemed inadmissible in court on a technicality.)
The flip side of that impunity is that those who bring facts to light often suffer greater consequences. In early September 2017, a journalist named Gauri Lankesh, who had reported critically on Hindu nationalists for years, was shot and killed just outside her house. Over the next couple of weeks, a wave of journalists received death threats, myself included. So I decided to take a break from reporting in India and eventually moved to the United States.
When I settled in New York, though, I kept thinking about Premi. During my time in Uttar Pradesh, I had spoken with him over the phone once or twice for stories. And I was aware that his upward trajectory in the Bajrang Dal had become extraordinary. In 2017 he became chief of the militia’s student wing in western Uttar Pradesh. And in Shamli, his unit of cadres was seen as state-of-the-art, patrolling both the streets and the internet, doling out beatings in one sphere while conducing surveillance and spreading Islamophobic propaganda in the other. According to the fairly regimented schedule of advancement in the militant group, Premi was in line to become either the head or deputy head of the Bajrang Dal in the state. It seemed that many of the most powerful forces in today’s India—the adulation of the Hindu middle classes, the broad scope of social media, and the tacit support of the BJP—were at his back. I wanted to understand how he had been so successful and how the Bajrang Dal really worked.
When I decided to request a face-to-face interview, I wasn’t sure how he would respond, since my name reveals unambiguously that I am a Muslim. But he agreed to speak with me, so I traveled back to India in January of 2019.
JUST BEFORE THE third anniversary of his release from jail, I met Premi on a street corner in Shamli. “How have you been?” I asked, trying to pretend there was no cause for awkwardness. He was an imposing figure. A dark tilak shone prominently on his forehead, and his right earlobe flaunted a small silver ring. He wore an ironed white kurta with a sleeveless red jacket and black shoes with white soles; in keeping with conservative Hindu tradition, a tuft of long, knotted hair dangled from the back of his head. And hovering around him was a clutch of fawning young men.
Premi had called a meeting at a local Bajrang Dal office a short distance away, and he invited me to come along. One of the hovering young men started Premi’s motorcycle for him—a 2008 Royal Enfield Bullet Classic, with the word Hinduraj, meaning “Hindu rule,” etched above the license plate. Another follower looked on adoringly: “Every time he roams across town on the Bullet with the sunglasses on and a tilak on his forehead,” the youth said, “cow slaughterers run away.”
The Bajrang Dal office sat, like a permanent threat, in the middle of a dense Muslim neighborhood. After dismounting his bike, Premi paused to look up and down each side of the street the way a prison guard might scan a cellblock. The owner of a nearby candy store saluted him with a face that seemed to betray awful fear; other shopkeepers and patrons stared back blankly. “There is nothing they can do,” he said as we went up the stairs to his office. “I have fixed many of them.” By “fixed,” he meant “beaten.”
Many Bajrang Dal offices occupy former dharamshalas, or Hindu guesthouses for religious pilgrims. Leaders of the militia have taken them over, arguing that the buildings must remain in service of Hinduism. This one was about 80 years old, with patchy cement betraying its age. Inside the office, six members of the Shamli unit of Bajrang Dal sat on floral-print sheets spread out on the ground, glued to their phones. As Premi walked in, his aides looked up to greet him with invocations of “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Hail Lord Rama”—the war cry of Hindutva activists.
Settling down on a cushion in the center of the room, Premi briefly addressed the public thrashing that had made him famous, saying that he had no regrets. (“I had to show that if a butcher slaughters a cow, we will deal with him,” he later explained.) But cow slaughter, Premi went on, was no longer a high priority for the Bajrang Dal in Uttar Pradesh—because the new BJP government was taking care of it.
In 2017, Modi’s party had gained control of Uttar Pradesh and appointed Yogi Adityanath—the radical Hindu priest who had campaigned on the threat of “love jihad”—as the state’s new chief minister. Adityanath had declared war on the buffalo meat export industry, which is largely run by Muslims and often accused of being involved in cow slaughter. Many slaughterhouses had since been shut down.
So instead, Premi’s cadres in the Shamli unit of the Bajrang Dal were now focused mainly on the fight against love jihad. In practice, this amounted to a bizarre, Stasi-like effort to micromanage the dating scene in a town of 100,000—and to stamp out religious miscegenation at first flush. They ran an extensive surveillance operation, they said, using Facebook and a network of on-the-ground informants.
The social media arm of the dragnet was run by a lanky, bearded teenager named Himanshu Sharma, who sat cross-legged, a cushion resting between his back and the wall. On Facebook, Sharma said, he and his team had infiltrated hundreds of groups and friended thousands of people, trawling for Muslim men who flirted with Hindu women in Shamli. “We monitor everything, including which user ID is making what kind of comments on Facebook,” Sharma said. “They are not subtle in expressing their emotions, and that makes our job easier.” Sometimes, he said, he and his team use fake accounts with female names to draw men out. While he spoke, his smartphone buzzed constantly with notifications.
As Sharma was talking, Premi too was preoccupied with his phone, which serves as his main conduit to the group’s local network of spies. These informants, Premi said, alert the Bajrang Dal whenever they suspect that a Hindu woman is in the company of a Muslim man. Security guards, gatekeepers, waiters, café owners, housekeepers at hotels: “All of them are part of our team,” Premi said. “The effectiveness of this system is that they remain anonymous among the common people, but they are our eyes.”
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
