A day after Dussehra, a Durga immersion procession was winding through the narrow, busy streets of Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich city. Music played loudly from the DJ system, a common feature of many religious and social processions today. Reports and eyewitnesses say that this irked local Muslims gathered near a mosque enough to attack the rally. Stones rained down on the Hindu procession from the mosque. The Durga idol got damaged.
This enraged the Hindus. One of them, Ram Gopal Mishra, aged just 22, uprooted a green flag flying at Abdul Hamid’s home and replaced it with a saffron one. What followed was one of the most macabre Islamist murders of recent times in India.
Mishra’s body was found with seven bullets in it, said the post-mortem report. He had injuries on his face, neck and arm. His body had 40 entry and two exit wounds. The report mentions 29 entry wounds on his upper chest extending to the neck, two entry wounds on the right upper arm, three entry wounds on the left upper arm and six entry wounds on the face. There were two exit wounds in the back of the neck.
The brutality in Bahraich has rocked into dawning shock the sleeping psyche of a nation that has largely failed to notice a pattern etched bright red and clear in the past few months. Hindu festivals have been under continuous and relentless attack by Islamists. The instances are too frequent and too templatised to be dismissed as sporadic or unrelated.
There have been at least 10 reported attacks on Ram Mandir Shobha Yatras on 22 January, the day of the Ayodhya temple’s pran pratistha. Hindu rallies were attacked with stones and weapons in locations ranging from Sambhaji Nagar in Maharashtra to Vadodara in Gujarat, Kushinagar and Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh to Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur in Bihar, and Shivamogga and Belagavi in Karnataka to Giridih in Jharkhand.
In Kolkata, unsurprisingly, Marxist students took the baton from the jihadis. The CPI(M)’s student wing, SFI, stopped a screening of the temple ceremony organised by Hindu youth at Jadavpur University. There have been 27 recorded attacks against Hindus on Ram Navami between 2016 and 2024. This year, rallies were attacked in Medinipur and Murshidabad in West Bengal, Bengaluru in Karnataka, and Bokaro in Jharkhand.
Hanuman Jayanti celebrations witnessed 27 recorded attacks between 2015 and 2023 across Odisha, Jharkhand, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh. Twelve attacks were recorded on Kanwar Yatra in 2018, 2022, and 2024, most of which occurred in Uttar Pradesh, with one each in Rajasthan and Jharkhand.
Just this year, Islamists raided Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations 15 times, mainly in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, UP, and Madhya Pradesh, with one incident in Chittagong, Bangladesh in which hot water and stones were hurled from a mosque at Hindu revellers.
Bangladesh, of course, led the attacks on Durga Puja, with 30 recorded incidents from Dhaka to Barishal, Cumilla to Khulna. Pandals were set on fire, idols were smashed, and Hindus were killed or maimed.
The Indian side of Bengal saw at least two such attacks, giving us a glimpse of what lies in store if the demographic takeover continues unabated. There were nine incidents of violence over Durga Puja celebrations in the rest of India, spanning Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Tripura, and Jharkhand.
There have been 14 attacks on Deepavali between 2005 and 2023, ranging from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat, Kashmir to Kerala. Holi has experienced the highest number of attacks, with 35 incidents recorded between 2014 and 2024. Surprisingly, Telangana saw a number of violent incidents during the festival of colours.
Even smaller festivals like Nag Panchami and Parshuram Jayanti were not spared. These saw five and three attacks respectively in recent years.
Interestingly, there have been at least 15 recorded incidents of prominent Muslims being threatened, abused, and bullied by Islamists for respecting or following Hindu traditions. These included actors Shah Rukh Khan, Farhan Akhtar, Soha Ali Khan, Hina Khan and Marina Hussain, cricketers Zaheer Khan, Mohammed Shami and Irfan Pathan, and anchor Rubika Liaquat. Rape and death threats were made, fatwas issued from Deoband and other seminaries.
This sustained and systematic violence against Hindu festivals and celebrations has multiple goals.
One, to intimidate the majority into being more submissive and less expressive about its traditions, its spirit of celebration. Two, to assert the outcome of changing demography and send a message about the aspired Sharia-compliant times to come. Three, to mark ‘Muslim areas’. This, coupled with rampant land grab and absurd territory claims (apparently the new Parliament is on Waqf land) to pre-empt the proposed amendment of the suicidal Waqf Act by the Narendra Modi government, is a ploy to create little Gazas which could be later declared free of the nation’s laws and the Constitution.
Festivals are one of the most crucial elements which have preserved the joy, spirit, and traditions of this ancient civilisation. These waves of collective happiness and devotion have pushed back against torrents of anti-Hindu tyranny and invasions.
To break this civilisation’s resistance from being wiped off and converted into a caliphate, Islamists and Marxists feel it is essential to break the glorious, uplifting continuity of Bharat’s numerous festivals.
Which is why the Hindu society must muster a fiercer resistance, the nation’s laws will have to be weaponised against violent cultural takeovers, and Hindutva politics must provide a sturdier bulwark against the threat of deracination and the death of dharmic celebrations. It is an existential need, with zero moral ambiguity at this point.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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