AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Reports indicate that India’s far-right movement has increasingly weaponized Hindu religious symbols and rituals as tools of psychological warfare and displays of dominance against Muslims, turning the country’s cultural landscape into a stage for organized hate propaganda.
This year, the Hindu festival of Diwali, traditionally celebrated as a festival of light and spirituality, was exploited on social media by accounts linked to extremist Hindutva groups, who mocked Israel’s bombing of Gaza by comparing fireworks to deadly explosions in the besieged enclave. Posts celebrating “Gaza’s daily Diwali” circulated widely, trivializing the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
Notably, prominent Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma wrote on X, “In India, we have Diwali for one day, but in Gaza, it’s Diwali every day,” a statement that was enthusiastically shared by far-right supporters and rapidly spread online. Analysts say such rhetoric reflects an ideological convergence between Hindutva and Zionism—both of which emphasize supremacy, occupation, and “security” through the exclusion of Muslims.
Experts have warned that many Hindu festivals marked by sound and color have, in recent years, been increasingly associated with harassment of Muslim communities, attacks on their neighborhoods, and even violent street clashes. The same pattern extends to online spaces, where offensive videos and memes targeting Muslims circulate under coordinated hashtags.
The report concludes that this trend represents a dangerous “sanctification of hate,” transforming sacred cultural traditions into instruments of political identity-building rooted in hostility. It also notes that expressions of solidarity by Indian Muslims with the people of Palestine are being cynically weaponized to further marginalize and intimidate them, an alarming sign, observers say, of deep moral decay in India’s public sphere.
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