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Islamophobia in India is no longer confined to isolated acts of prejudice. It has evolved into a political project in which anti-Muslim rhetoric, discriminatory policies and public hostility increasingly reinforce one another. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, Muslims, the country’s largest religious minority, have been systematically portrayed as demographic threats, infiltrators and obstacles to India’s national identity. This normalization of hate has transformed prejudice into a form of governance.<\/p>\n
The consequences are visible across the country. Following the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, Muslims faced a wave of intimidation, social boycotts and physical assaults. Among the victims were Kashmiri Muslim traders, including a shawl vendor who was attacked solely because of his Muslim and Kashmiri identity. Such incidents illustrate how political narratives translate into violence against ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n
Independent researchers recorded a 74 percent increase in hate speech targeting minorities between 2023 and 2024, with politicians and religious figures associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party responsible for many of these incidents. During the 2024 election campaign, Modi himself described Muslim migrants as “infiltrators,” language that legitimized suspicion and hostility toward Muslims far beyond electoral politics.<\/p>\n
The discrimination extends beyond rhetoric. In 2026, authorities reportedly required mosques and madrasas in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir to submit detailed information about imams, worshippers and their families, prompting religious leaders to condemn the measures as discriminatory profiling. Meanwhile, Reuters has documented how rising communal hostility has pushed many Muslims into segregated neighbourhoods, reinforcing social and economic exclusion.<\/p>\n
When political leaders repeatedly frame an entire religious community as a security threat, violence becomes predictable rather than exceptional. The growing marginalization of India’s 200 million Muslims is therefore not simply the result of societal intolerance, it reflects a broader political environment in which Islamophobia has been normalized, institutionalized and increasingly embedded within the functioning of the state.<\/p>\n
What distinguishes the current moment in India from ordinary social prejudice is the deliberateness of the political architecture behind it. Islamophobia has not merely been tolerated by the BJP government, it has been cultivated as an electoral strategy. Research on India’s 2024 election documented an explosion of coordinated online campaigns characterizing Muslims as outsiders and parasites, campaigns that were not spontaneous expressions of popular feeling but organized operations with clear political beneficiaries. When hate speech becomes a campaign tool, its consequences cannot be separated from those who deploy it.<\/p>\n
The UN Special Rapporteurs warned in 2024 that Islamophobia globally had risen to alarming levels, with harassment, intimidation, violence and incitement based on religion reaching a scale that demands urgent governmental response. In India, the government is not part of the response. In too many documented instances, it is part of the problem. A state whose prime minister uses the word infiltrators to describe Muslim citizens, whose allied politicians generate the majority of documented hate speech events, and whose security apparatus profiles mosques rather than protecting them, cannot credibly present itself as a neutral arbiter of communal relations.<\/p>\n
For Kashmiris, the consequences are layered in a way that is difficult to fully convey. They face military occupation, mass detention and the systematic suppression of political expression within their homeland. When they leave Kashmir to earn a living, they carry those identities into an India where both their faith and their origin have been made into reasons for violence. The shawl vendor beaten in a northern town is not a separate story from the activist imprisoned in Srinagar. They are two chapters of the same account: the story of a people whose identity has been designated, by deliberate political choice, as a problem to be managed rather than a community to be protected.<\/p>\n
India calls itself the world’s largest democracy. That description requires that its 200 million Muslim citizens, and the people of Kashmir in particular, be treated as citizens with rights rather than suspects with identities. The gap between that requirement and the documented reality is no longer a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of record.<\/p>\n
Hatred manufactured for political purposes does not stay contained. It spreads, it escalates, and eventually it demands a reckoning from those who built it.<\/p>\n
The author is a graduate in International Relations from the International Islamic University, Islamabad and is currently serving as a researcher at the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Islamabad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Islamophobia in India is no longer confined to isolated acts of prejudice. It has evolved into a political project in which anti-Muslim rhetoric, discriminatory policies and public hostility increasingly reinforce one another. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, Muslims, the country’s largest religious minority, have been systematically portrayed as demographic threats, infiltrators and obstacles to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":199917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t