By Aakar Patel
Intent has an ally in apathy. Intent seeks to take ground; apathy will kindly adjust. Intent is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s determination to implement its ideology. The party has the power of government and the backing of a significant number of Indians who want the ideology implemented. This number is actually a minority, as every election has shown. But it is armed with intent.
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Apathy is the inability of the rest of us, who are a majority, to resist it. The expectation, even from those who acknowledge the reality and its dangers, is that the problems created by government must be solved by checks and balances — that the Opposition, Parliament and the justice system will manage the problem. But it has not so far, and this New Year we are entering into will show again that it cannot.
To those who are new to this: What does the BJP’s ideology seek? It wants to persecute and harm minority Indians, Muslims and Christians, and that is about it. The ideology has no higher purpose and offers nothing of value other than going after fellow Indians. It exists as hate and expresses itself as hate. This emotion is inexhaustible and can renew itself and always find new ground to fight battles on. The New Year, 2026, will show this as well.
In 2025 we continued down a path we took more than a decade ago. Rajasthan became the eighth state to ban marriage between Hindus and Muslims. This happened in September, three months ago. In September 1935, Germany banned marriage between Jews and Christians. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande), to the horror of the world. India has done this through cleverly named laws that achieve the same thing. The law empowers a bureaucrat to determine whether an adult is entitled to change their faith. The other provisions in the law repeat or tighten the provisions made in similar laws the BJP has introduced over the last few years.
The intent was first shown in the 2018 Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion Act. This law had an innovation. It is aimed at preventing interfaith marriage by criminalising conversion, but it makes an exemption for people to convert to their ‘ancestral religion’. The term was left undefined, but readers will not require to be told what it means.
This law was passed and implemented. No resistance from the courts. Intent noted this and sought to take more ground. Similar laws came to Himachal Pradesh in 2019, Uttar Pradesh in 2020, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat in 2021, Haryana and Karnataka in 2022. Note that the government changed in Karnataka but the law remains. Intent will always win over apathy. Rajasthan became the eighth state and will not be the last.
Alert readers will observe how rapidly the space was occupied in a few years while reversal happened nowhere. The same story is repeated on the issue of beef. The first laws criminalising possession of beef came only in 2015 (by BJP governments in Maharashtra and Haryana). These laws and the discourse surrounding them produced a new category of violence: beef lynching. In my decades as a journalist, I had not heard of such a thing as a beef lynching before this, but the act is now so commonplace as to be normal. There are endless murders all around us and apathy has adjusted to them, making space for intent.
Gujarat, the laboratory which has now become a factory, passed a law in 2017 that made cattle slaughter punishable by life in prison. This is an economic offence, but no white-collar crime attracts life. Those who steal billions can be rehabilitated, as we are seeing happen before us.
A few weeks ago, Uttar Pradesh said it wanted the case against those accused of the first infamous lynching, that of Akhlaq in September 2015, to be withdrawn, because justice is offensive. The judge bravely refused this and the decade-old trial will continue, but we have to turn to individual acts of courage in a land ruled generally by apathy. The total exclusion of 200 million Indian Muslims from power at the Centre is today as normal as it might be in a nation where discrimination is legal. Indians shrug their shoulders.
Intent will violently disrupt the annual festival of Christians and the rest of us will look on. Disapproval is not the same as action, and intent takes violent action while apathy will pull out its cellphone and record.
A law criminalising the divorce of only one religion came in 2019, and for all the rest it remains a civil offence. A law excluding only one religion from the Citizenship Amendment Act also came in 2019. A law which prevents Indians of one religion from buying and renting property in Gujarat — where even foreigners can — was tightened in 2019. We are told that India was at the forefront of fighting apartheid in South Africa, but today we are comfortable with it being practised in our land. If we were not comfortable, if we were outraged, then we would do something about it. Kashmiri carpet seller lynching and Bangladeshi vendor lynching have joined beef lynching and we have been inert.
Intent will not relent because intent seeks to achieve something; apathy wants only to not be disturbed.
This New Year will bring, once again, a repetition of both intent and apathy.
