The Machine Behind India's Communal Riots

A Water Balloon in West Delhi

The Nous documentary essay opens with a small, almost banal incident: on Holi in March 2026, a water balloon thrown from a terrace in a West Delhi jhuggi-jhopdi colony hits a Muslim woman below. By the next morning a 26-year-old man, Tarun Kumar, is dead. Within days, fourteen people from the Muslim community are arrested, portions of an accused's home are demolished without a court order, seventy shops have their fronts bulldozed, and Muslim families who had lived in the colony for fifty years begin quietly packing up. The episode — narrated rather than hosted as a conversation, and the narrator is never named on screen — lays out five conflicting eyewitness versions of what happened that night, from the victim's family, the accused family, police, Hindu right-wing organisations and civil rights groups. Its point, stated directly, is that the truth of that single dispute barely matters to what happens next: the machine, as the narration puts it, doesn't need clarity to operate.

A Century-Old Template

The film's central argument is that Hindu-Muslim antagonism, far from being an ancient civilisational fact, is a modern political construction. It traces the shift to the late 1800s, when British census-taking tied political representation to religious headcounts for the first time, making Muslim population size newly visible — and newly threatening — to an emerging Hindu elite. It credits one figure in particular with giving that anxiety its clearest ideological form: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who argued from a British prison in 1922 that a true Indian must hold India as both fatherland and holy land, a definition that made Muslims and Christians permanent outsiders. The essay cites historians noting that the destruction narrative Savarkar built on is a selective reading of a genuinely mixed medieval history, but argues the narrative's power was never about accuracy — only about how deeply it could be felt.

That ideology, the film argues, needed an organisation to carry it, and found one in the RSS, founded in 1925 and built into a mass movement over three decades by its second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, whose writings it quotes as citing Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews approvingly as "a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn."

How a Riot Gets Manufactured

Drawing on the late political scientist Paul Brass's decades of research into communal violence in northern India, the film lays out what it calls an "institutional riot system": informants who alert political operatives to a sensitive incident, propagandists who reframe it, "fire tenders" who keep grievances warm between riots, and "conversion specialists" who turn an ordinary local dispute into a civilisational flashpoint. It argues this machinery has only gotten faster in the WhatsApp era, with a communal frame now able to reach audiences a hundred times larger than any correction that follows.

The essay then walks through what it calls the state's role once that frame takes hold: bulldozers arriving at an accused's home within days, with no conviction and, until a 2024 Supreme Court ruling required notice and a hearing, often no court order at all. It links this directly to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's televised demolition drives, which it says have since been replicated as an explicit post-criminal punishment tool across BJP-governed states. It is careful to note that jhuggi-jhopdi colonies do sit on legally precarious land — but argues that selective, timed enforcement against Muslim structures specifically, arriving within 96 hours of a political demand for exactly that action, reveals the demolitions as message rather than law.

Real Grievance, Redirected

The film resists painting every resident who buys into the communal frame as a cynic. It argues the underlying friction in dense, resource-poor settlements is genuine, and that what it calls "the machine" doesn't invent conflict so much as it processes and redirects existing anger — offering residents, particularly Dalit residents competing with Muslim neighbours for the same scarce jobs and water taps, a story in which their precarity is not a symptom of political economy but the latest chapter of a wounded civilisation reclaiming what was taken. Scholars, the essay notes, call this dynamic "subaltern Hindutva": grievance that could have been directed upward, against caste hierarchy, redirected outward instead.

A Constitution Left Formally Intact

Perhaps the essay's sharpest point is that none of this requires rewriting India's constitution. It argues the deliberately unresolved tensions the framers built into the document — between religious personal law and eventual uniform civil code, for instance — are being resolved by force in one direction through reinterpretation rather than amendment, while the Citizenship Amendment Act, in its telling, is the first law in the republic's history to write religious discrimination directly into citizenship criteria, in explicit tension with Articles 14 and 15.

The film draws an explicit, carefully qualified parallel to the run-up to the Holocaust, stressing that India in 2026 is not Germany in 1938 and that courts and civil society still function — while arguing the structural logic of a scapegoated minority framed as a civilisational threat, advanced through bureaucratic mechanisms alongside extralegal violence, is genuinely comparable. It links this to Prime Minister Modi's February 2026 visit to Israel — his second, and the first time an Indian prime minister addressed the Knesset — and to the International Criminal Court's findings on Gaza, using the juxtaposition to argue that ethnic-religious nationalism, wherever it has been tried, has produced ruin rather than the glory it promises.

The Cost of Waiting

The essay ends by returning to Hustasal colony, describing the exodus of its Muslim families not as coercion but as a rational reading of a state that has demonstrated it will not protect them. Its closing argument is addressed as much to viewers as to the machine itself: understanding how the pattern works, it says, is not a reason to wait before acting — it is the reason to understand.