@Sasanka_of_Gauda were you behind this lol

The killing of a Hindu tailor by two Muslim men in Rajasthan, India has sparked chilling calls for revenge against the country’s already marginalized Muslim population.

The gruesome death of Kanhaiya Lal on June 28 has fueled the sectarian tensions that have long been encouraged by Hindu nationalist supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Lal’s Muslim assailants recorded themselves slitting his throat, AP reported, quoting police. They then posted a second video in which they accused him of insulting the Prophet Muhammad and threatened to kill Modi, too. Lal appeared to have been targeted because he seemed to express support of derogatory remarks made about the Prophet by former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma in May, which sparked international condemnation as well as a demand from India’s Supreme Court that she apologize.

The reaction was immediate. Government officials temporarily shut down the internet and banned public gatherings to contain the ensuing religious unrest; the duo were arrested on terrorism charges. Muslim politicians and Islamic preachers swiftly condemned the killing. Indian home minister Amit Shah tweeted that federal police would thoroughly investigate “the involvement of any organization and international links.”

But in the days since, ‘Hindu Lives Matter’ has emerged as a rallying cry, particularly on social media, where the slogan took the form of a hashtag and was tweeted thousands of times. South Indian actress Pranitha Subhash posted a photo of herself on Instagram with the phrase. Political experts call that dangerous, risking the amplification of a heinous but isolated crime into an assertion of systemic violence against Hindus, who make up some 80% of India’s 1.2 billion people

“Just because two members of that community commit this type of crime you cannot paint the entire community with the same brush,” says Dhirendra Jha, a political journ*list in India and author of Shadow Armies: Fringe Organizations and Foot Soldiers of Hindutva. “This is not good for Indian democracy.”

Prior to Modi’s election in 2014, elected governments had taken greater care to emphasize India’s religious diversity—with Hindus, Muslims, Christians and other groups—as a virtue of its secular democracy. But rhetoric, policies and violence targeting Muslims, who account for some 14% of the population, have escalated dramatically under Modi. Between May 2015 and December 2018, Human Rights Watch reported attacks on at least 44 people—36 of them Muslims—and many of them led by so-called cow protection groups that often have ties to right-wing Hindu groups. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government has bulldozed Muslim homes and businesses, propagated the “love jihad” conspiracy theory that Muslim men are trying to convert Hindu women to Islam, and chipped away at the political autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir.

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