The Festival as Battlefield: How a Goat in Mira Road Explains Hindutva's Playbook

A Goat, a Pig, and a Message

In a housing society in Mira Road, on the edges of Mumbai, Hindutva activists recently staged what the journalist and author Kunal Purohit calls a piece of theatre. Objecting to Muslim residents keeping goats ahead of Bakra Eid for ritual sacrifice, they arrived carrying a pig, arguing that if Muslims could bring goats into the society, Hindus should be allowed to bring pigs. Police were called; the goats were eventually removed and driven away in a trolley from a society that had allowed the practice, undisturbed, for decades. Speaking to Nous Network host Bushra Khanam, Purohit — author of "H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars" — argued that the episode has little to do with goats at all. "It was never about the cow," he said. "It was always about Muslims and their festival."

That, Purohit argues, is the real subject of a pattern that has repeated itself across Maharashtra, West Bengal and Assam over the past year: Hindutva organisations manufacturing a fresh grievance around whichever Muslim festival is nearest on the calendar, because the ideology needs a constant supply of new targets to remain politically relevant. Only months earlier, in Maharashtra, "love jihad" was the dominant theme — a panic large enough that the state government legislated against it through the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act. Once that law was in place, Purohit says, attention simply moved to the next available target: ritual sacrifice.

A Pattern That Predates the Goat

Purohit places the Bakra Eid controversy inside a longer sequence. Months earlier, he says, Hindutva groups disrupted Christmas gatherings outside churches in seven or eight states, assaulting and intimidating worshippers. Before that, it was Ramzan — the same practices Muslims observe every year, suhoor and iftar, suddenly recast as provocations. "This is the third such occasion," he said, arguing that festivals are targeted precisely because they are the moments when a community is most visible, gathered together, openly celebrating who it is. Erasing that visibility, he argues, is the point: violence and hate speech already establish contempt for Muslims day to day, but festivals are where a community's representation in public space can be attacked and diminished most effectively.

Maharashtra's Reward System

Purohit is emphatic that what Maharashtra's ruling alliance offers such rhetoric is not mere impunity but active reward. After the 2019 collapse of a BJP-led government in the state and the loss of power to a Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress coalition, he says BJP leaders and previously unknown, unregistered Hindutva outfits began touring villages together with a consistent message: Hindus in Maharashtra were under threat from Muslim "land jihad" and "love jihad," and needed protection. When the BJP-led alliance swept the 2024 state election, the minister most associated with that rhetoric — Nitesh Rane, whom Purohit describes as someone who "spews venom" against Muslims — was given a cabinet berth. In Ghatkopar, Purohit notes, BJP leader Kirit Somaiya and allies recently forced the removal of goats from a Muslim community's decades-old sacrificial tradition — one residents say dates to 1997 — turning a routine local custom into a fresh accusation of lawlessness.

The same model, he argues, has surfaced in West Bengal and Assam. He points to Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP leader and former Trinamool Congress figure now leading anti-Muslim campaigning in Bengal, who has invoked Israel's actions in Gaza as a model for how, in his words, India's Hindus should respond, and who has spread claims that government medicine is secretly used to suppress Hindu birth rates.

How the Poison Was Mixed

Asked why such claims find a receptive audience, Purohit traces a slow, deliberate escalation rather than a sudden shift. Before 2014, he says, this material circulated quietly — WhatsApp forwards and stray Facebook posts claiming Muslims behaved a certain way. What began as anonymous rumour, he argues, has since become open rhetoric from the country's top political offices, amplified further through popular culture — the subject of his book, which examines how pop music, poetry and social media are used to normalise communal hostility. The cumulative effect, in his account, is a citizenry conditioned to feel discomfort at the most mundane interactions: a Muslim Uber driver, a Muslim food-delivery worker. He cites a case from Uttarakhand during Ramzan in which a man was assaulted and abused for offering namaz on a farmer's field, filmed by his attackers as they beat him.

Purohit also points to the backlash against a viral "love jihad" claim involving a major IT company, arguing that its real message was aimed at educated, corporate Muslims: that no matter how qualified, they remain suspect, discouraging their hiring. He draws a parallel with earlier campaigns branding Muslim success in competitive exams as "UPSC jihad," and with the closure of a medical college in Jammu and Kashmir after Hindutva groups objected to its Muslim student numbers. "The idea is: wherever the sphere, reduce Muslim representation and visibility as much as you can," he said.

Erasing Coexistence

For Purohit, the deepest damage lies not in headline incidents but in the quiet dismantling of what he calls syncretic, hyperlocal traditions — villages and neighbourhoods where Hindus and Muslims have long celebrated each other's festivals side by side. "Propaganda cannot succeed while people actually live beside each other," he argues: neighbours who grew up, studied and were raised together are hard to recast overnight as threats. Breaking those local bonds, one festival dispute at a time, is therefore essential to making the wider propaganda credible — which is why, he says, even a routine landlord-tenant dispute in Mira Bhayandar was recast by Bajrang Dal and the VHP as a Muslim "land jihad" seizure of Hindu property, rather than the mundane commercial disagreement it actually was.

The West Bengal Hypocrisy

Purohit points to West Bengal as an especially telling case of the double standard he describes. Cow slaughter has never been illegal there, but new rules introduced after the BJP's rise permit slaughter or sale of cows once they pass fourteen years of age — once they stop giving milk or become infirm — while younger cows are treated as sacred. He calls this its own kind of hypocrisy, comparable to caring for ageing parents only until they stop being useful. Muslim community groups in the state, he notes, went so far as to voluntarily pledge not to purchase cows for slaughter this year and to publicly support declaring the cow India's national animal — conciliatory gestures that, in his account, did nothing to slow the broader campaign, because, as he reiterates, "it was never about the cow."

Normalisation as the Real Victory

Purohit's most troubling observation concerns desensitisation. The 2015 lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq provoked national protests and political outrage; comparable killings today, he says, barely register as news at all — a numbness he compares to how audiences eventually stopped reacting to images from Gaza. "That is propaganda's victory," he argues: when society no longer questions why a Muslim man was killed, only whether he ought to have been "provoking" anyone by practising his own faith in public. Asked what should change, Purohit calls for practising Hindus to publicly say plainly that this hatred is not part of their faith, for Muslim communities to build "sensible" spokespeople capable of dialogue rather than combative television regulars chasing ratings, and for civil society to actively rebuild the interfaith dialogue spaces that confrontation-seeking organisations have been allowed to occupy uncontested. Absent that, he warns, economic distress and unemployment will increasingly be redirected toward the same target — a rhetoric of outsiders "taking your resources" that recent state election campaigns have already previewed.

Asked whether Muslim communities themselves need help developing a language and strategy for responding to such moments without inviting further legal trouble, Purohit agrees firmly, noting that Muslim community's overall restraint over the past twelve years — with remarkably few instances of protest turning violent — has largely gone unacknowledged. He argues that civil society has a specific, practical role here: cultivating articulate, sensible community voices capable of speaking to the wider public without escalation, rather than leaving the loudest, most combative figures as the community's default representatives on television. The goal, in his framing, is not merely defensive messaging but reclaiming a space for dialogue between communities that Hindutva organisations, uninterested in dialogue and invested instead in confrontation, have been allowed to take over by default.