From December 17th to 1 9 t h , 2021, a conference was held in the Indian city of Haridwar. During the gathering, hundreds of prominent right-wing Hindu nationalists took an oath in which they pledged that they were prepared to kill Muslims to achieve their goal of turning India into a “Hindu nation.” The conference followed a spike in hate crimes and anti-Muslim sentiment under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yet the oath itself remains one of the most blatant declarations of violence against Muslims since the bloody interfaith conflicts which took place during the splitting of India and Pakistan in the Partition.

     The conference was organized by Yati Narsinghanand, a Hindu nationalist activist known for promoting and participating in hate speech. He is also an avid admirer of Gandhi’s murderer, Nathuram Godse, having said, “I cannot find words to praise Nathuram Godse-ji.” During the conference, many instances of calls to action against Muslims were brought forward, including approval of the genocide against Muslims.

     Swami Prabodhanand Giri, the president of the right-wing organization Hindu Raksha Sena, said, “Just like Myanmar, the police in this nation, the army, the politicians and every Hindu must join hands, pick up their weapons and carry out this cleanliness drive.” 

     Despite public backlash over the explicit calls for violence against Muslims and the expressed regrets of a few BJP leaders, the government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have remained largely silent. This is especially concerning given the large amount of influence the Prime Minister has been shown to hold over India’s Hindu population. According to the Pew Research Center, Northern India, the region where Haridwar is located, has the second highest approval rating among Hindus of the BJP, totaling at about 68% approval in 2019. Modi’s influence over the general Hindu population in India can also be seen in the Hindu Kumbh Mela festival in 2021 where, after a month of the festival continuing despite high COVID-19 infection rates, the event shut down mere hours after Modi called for its closure.

     This reluctance to speak out regarding growing right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiment has generally come to be expected of the BJP, despite the spike in hate crimes throughout his term. A study reported by Scroll and conducted by the Hate Crime Watch found that between 2009 and 2018, 90% of religion based hate crimes occurred after 2014, when Prime Minister Modi was elected. Furthermore, of the hate crimes where the political affiliation of the attackers were found, 83% were affiliated with right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations. 

     According to The Wire, “The idea behind such provocative acts and statements is to spark sharp debates within local communities, divide them and turn them into anti-minority vote banks for the BJP.” By allowing this firmly pro-Hindu majority sentiment to breed within the streets of India, the BJP gains influence over the people behind it, who are now overwhelmingly likely to vote and support them in the future. The potential effects of this rising anti-Muslim sentiment and the government’s refusal to denounce it are extremely worrying. Among the many different recorded incitements of violence during the convention, one stood out as possibly the most blatant and explicit instance of rallying anti-Muslim violence. Right-wing activist Maa said the following of Muslims: “If even 100 of us become soldiers and we kill 20 lakh (2 million) of these people, then we are victors and we are prepared to go to jail.” Gregory Stanton, head of the Genocide Watch non-profit group in the U.S, recently addressed the statement, saying, “If that isn’t an incitement to genocide, then I don’t know what is.”

     Stanton has also previously predicted the genocide in Rwanda where the Hutu ethnic majority murdered hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority, following a government sealing of the borders to ensure little to no word of the slaughter got out. Stanton was somehow aware of the global repercussions of the genocide. Five years before the ethnic cleansing, he had warned that, within five years, a genocide would occur in Rwanda if nothing was done to prevent it, a reminder ominously similar to his warning to India today.