The vernal promise of the new year was overshadowed by a corrosive surge of sectarian animus, as India’s social fabric endured a sustained spate of targeted hostility that traversed regions and communities alike.
According to the documentation published by Siasat.com, January 2026 alone recorded no fewer than forty-two instances of hate speech and physical predation, averaging nearly ten episodes a week across a geographical sweep stretching from Assam to Karnataka, thereby signalling not an aberration but an escalating cadence of intolerance.
The documentation further suggested that this intensifying climate of hostility was not confined to sporadic grassroots eruptions, but was compounded by inflammatory rhetoric emanating from certain state functionaries, whose public pronouncements, critics argue, appeared to depart from constitutional neutrality and instead amplify exclusionary fervour.
Attacks on Muslims
In the historic quarters of Hyderabad, tensions mounted following a communal skirmish in Puranapul Darwaza that was reportedly triggered by claims of idol desecration, and the situation grew more febrile when the Telangana High Court permitted a contentious congregation in Balapur, an event that subsequently led to police proceedings against several individuals, including a cleric accused of disseminating inflammatory anti-Muslim tropes.
Parallel anxieties surfaced in Gujarat’s industrial districts, where activists alleged a systemic disenfranchisement of minority voters and claimed that hundreds of names had been clandestinely removed from electoral rolls under the pretext of being deceased.
Northern states witnessed equally volatile developments during the “Virat Hindu Conference” in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where speakers in Raebareli reportedly issued bellicose calls for retaliation, while in Dehradun, a teenage Kashmiri boy was subjected to a violent assault that observers described as symptomatic of deepening stigmatisation.
The turbulence extended to religious heritage, as the century-old shrine of Syed Baba Bulleshah in Mussoorie suffered vandalism at the hands of a mob, and in Deoria, authorities deployed bulldozers to demolish another sacred structure.
Attacks on Christians
In Odisha, a Christian pastor was allegedly humiliated and assaulted in a public spectacle that drew widespread condemnation, as reports indicated that he was paraded with a garland of footwear and subjected to degrading treatment, an incident that underscored the visceral hostility confronting segments of the Christian community.
Attacks on Dalits
In Telangana, the suicide of a Dalit house surgeon, reportedly precipitated by caste-based ostracism and rejection, cast a sombre light on the entrenched hierarchies that continue to circumscribe social mobility, and the episode was widely viewed as a stark indictment of persistent structural discrimination.
Yet amid this pervasive gloom, an episode in Kotdwar offered a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of estrangement, as Deepak Kumar—popularly referred to as “Mohammed Deepak”—intervened to shield an elderly Muslim shopkeeper from a hostile crowd, and although he subsequently faced economic ostracisation, the wave of solidarity that followed suggested that even as sectarian rancour intensifies, impulses of pluralistic fraternity endure.
Attacks on Bengali-speaking Muslims
The geopolitical landscape of Assam has been increasingly defined by a draconian campaign of repatriation spearheaded by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. His vituperative rhetoric, characterised by the pejorative branding of Bengali-speaking Muslims as “Miyas”, has catalysed a climate of systemic predation, and by advocating the economic asphyxiation and summary expulsion of those deemed “foreigners”, Sarma has ignited a xenophobic contagion that transcends regional borders.
This malignant ethos has manifested in reports of extrajudicial brutality from Karnataka to Bihar, where itinerant labourers are allegedly subjected to sanguinary interrogations and coerced into religious obeisance under the specious pretext of national security.