Anti-Muslim Hatred Is Shaping India’s Elections
With voting under way in state polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party is exploiting social divisions and deep-rooted religious tensions.
Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, speaking in Lucknow in 2021.
Photographer: T. Narayan/BloombergIndia’s state of Uttar Pradesh is known for two things: Its size — with 230 million citizens, the population is larger than Brazil’s — and its poverty, as the second-poorest state; annual income is around half the national average.
But since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, it has also made global headlines for a darker superlative: crimes targeted against Muslims. Those only worsened when, three years later, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party stormed to power in UP, and with it, Yogi Adityanath — a saffron-robed Hindu monk-turned-chief minister with his own private militia. UP is now the incubator for some of Modi’s most pointed policies targeting India’s Muslim minority, who make up 14% of India’s 1.4 billion citizens.