caste groups under the saffron banner of the BJP, became visible.
Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in Western Uttar Pradesh, about 80 miles north of New Delhi, are dominated by miles of sugarcane fields, which form the core of the area’s economy. I met Gul Bahar, a 20-year-old college student from Lisarh, a relatively prosperous village of 8,000 people around 35 miles from Muzaffarnagar town, which is the center of the eponymous district. Muslims once made up about a third of its population. But in late August 2013, intense sectarian violence broke out in several area villages. The troubles began after two Hindu Jats killed a Muslim youth who allegedly harassed the sister of one of the men. They were in turn killed by a group of Muslims who were arrested for the murder, but rumors spread that they were released without charge.
Hindu Jats already saw the ruling socialist Samajwadi Party as partial to Muslims; Jats in the district traditionally voted for a regional party allied with the Congress Party. The BJP saw an opening. They held rallies and made incendiary speeches, arousing passions further.
About two weeks later, Hindu Jats held a panchayat, an assembly of villagers, to “save the honor of daughters and daughters-in-law.” Thousands attended. In videos of the meeting, young Jat men carrying scythes, rods, and swords shouted anti-Muslim slurs. Politicians from the BJP led the gathering, making provocative speeches. Hukum Singh, a BJP leader, roared: “The purpose of this panchayat is Hindu unity.” On their way to the assembly, Hindus stabbed two Muslims; on their way back, Muslims retaliated and killed thirteen Hindus, according to police officials. As word of the attacks spread, mobs of Hindu Jats began attacking Muslim homes in surrounding villages.
Bahar was home with his extended family when he heard the terrifying roar outside his house. A crowd armed with knives, scythes, country-made pistols, and swords flooded his street. Some carried jerry cans filled with gasoline. “They began setting our homes on fire,” Bahar recalled. “They attacked whomever they saw.” Bahar and his family escaped through the sugarcane fields surrounding their village and walked through the night. His family took shelter in the largely Muslim village of Kandhla. His grandfather, Mohammad Sukkan, a retired farmer in his early seventies, refused to leave.
As Bahar and his family settled into a refugee camp, they waited for news of Sukkan. “Thirteen people from our village were killed,” Bahar told me. “Only two bodies were found.” Eventually, police discovered Sukkan’s body in a canal, fifteen miles from Lisarh. Bahar showed me the photograph of his slain grandfather that the police gave the family. The body was covered in a white sheet; the head, severed from the neck by a sharp object, lay by the torso.
More than 40,000 people, mostly Muslims, were displaced from their homes. Sixty-two people were killed. After a few weeks, Bahar and a few others visited Lisarh. “They had burnt our houses,” he recalled. “Our stuff lay scattered in the alleys. I couldn’t bear to look at it.” In the spring, they moved with a few other families to a patch of agricultural land in Kandhla, a mile from their refugee camp. A few months later, government assistance provided to families victimized by the violence allowed them to buy a patch of land and rebuild a house of bare bricks. “Our village is eight kilometers from here but we can’t return home,” he said.
The violence drew a stark boundary through the region. Amit Shah, the Modi strategist, nominated several BJP politicians facing charges for inciting violence for the national elections. On the campaign trail, Shah described the polls as “an election for honor, for seeking revenge for the insult, and for teaching a lesson to those who committed injustice.”
At another public meeting in Muzaffarnagar, Shah returned to a subject Modi had spoken of earlier: that the Congress Party promoted slaughterhouses and the export of meat through tax breaks—a process he described as a Pink Revolution, referencing a speech Modi had given in Bihar lamenting the spread of large abattoirs across India. “When animals are killed, the color of their flesh is pink,” Modi said. “If you want to rear cows, the Congress government won’t give you any subsidy, but it offers subsidies to those who slaughter cows, to those who slaughter animals.” Although India’s meat exporters and traders include Hindus and Christians, many of those associated with the industry are Muslim. “Beggars have turned millionaires by running butcher houses,” Shah said, according to a report in Scroll. India’s national election commission censured Shah for his derogatory remarks and banned him from campaigning for a while. But after the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, Modi, deploying a cricket metaphor, described Shah as “the man of the match.”
The violence in Muzaffarnagar and the incendiary rhetoric during the campaign polarized the state on religious lines, uniting Hindu voters across the barriers of caste to vote for Modi and the BJP. One afternoon, as I drove through the crowded bazaars of Muzaffarnagar, posters of the Hollywood action movie Expendables 3 competed for attention with the faces of Hindu and Muslim politicians. A potholed road led off the town square to Khaderwala, a lower middle class neighborhood a few miles away, where many of Muzaffarnagar’s Dalits live.
Ram Kumar is among the wave of Dalit voters who helped Modi and Shah win the “match.” The 31-year-old tailor lives with his family in a three-room house on a narrow street in Khaderwala. Kumar and his neighbors always voted for the Bahujan Samaj Party, led by Kumari Mayawati, who became the first Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995. Mayawati, who was 39 and unmarried when first elected Chief Minister in 1995, embodied a sense of dignity and power for India’s lowest castes, who suffered centuries of oppression. People referred to her as Behenji, an honorific for elder sister. A shrewd political operator, Mayawati was elected to lead India’s most populous state four times. But in the recent campaign dominated by Modi, she chose mostly non-Dalit candidates, hoping to reach out to non-Dalit voters. “Behenji forgot us, neglected us, and assumed that we will always vote for her,” Kumar said.
His turn from Dalit activism to Hindu nationalism was also prompted by the religious violence and tensions in Muzaffarnagar. After the riots, Muzaffarnagar was under military curfew for almost two weeks. Kumar walked me to the main street, which I had taken to reach his neighborhood. He pointed to an utility pole a few blocks away. “The Muslims live beyond that,” he said. He turned around and pointed toward a stretch of bigger houses. “There you have Jats, Brahmins, and other upper castes.” The Dalits lived in the middle. In the riots, Kumar said, the Dalits and upper-caste Hindus fell on one side of an unmarked boundary and the Muslims on the other side. “Nobody crossed from the Hindu area into the Muslim area for about a month,” he told me. The Dalits found little support from Mayawati during that volatile season. “It was the people from the BJP who stood by us here.” The Indian constitution reserves 17 of the 80 seats of the Lok Sabha for the Dalits; Modi’s candidates won them all.
The highway from Lucknow to Ayodhya, where Lal Krishna Advani wanted to build a grand Rama temple, cuts through empty fields and sparsely populated villages. On the banks of the ancient Sarayu River flanking the town, a group of old Brahmins sought refuge from the heat under a tree and played cards. Pilgrims ran down flights of stairs and bathed with their clothes on. The old temples—their domes a combination of Hindu and Muslim influences—looked run down, their façades peeling, in need of a coat of paint. It was a rather quaint scene for a place that had come to symbolize the strivings of Hindu nationalist politics, in whose name Advani furiously tore apart the country’s civic life and irrevocably broke the consensus of Nehruvian secularism as the religion of India.
For a few hours every day, pilgrims are allowed to visit and pray at the makeshift temple that marks Rama’s birthplace on the foundation of the mosque Advani worked to demolish. Armed police and paramilitary troops stood guard along the road to the site, which is officially known as Babri Mosque-Ram Birthplace. A row of shops sold everything from Hindu scriptures, copies of Arthashastra, plastic idols of Hindu gods, and DVDs showing the demolition of the mosque.
After being frisked at several checkpoints, I passed through a metal detector and entered a tunnel, just a few feet wide, covered by an aluminum
