The Art of Victimhood

By elevating terrorism to the level of the main problem, Modi government fostered siege mentality among India’s majority. An extract

Long after the attacks in the early 2000s—and their near cessation in major cities—reliable opinion polls show that an Islamist threat was increasingly more keenly felt and that the fear of attacks remained omnipresent. In 2017, nearly ten years after the Mumbai bombings, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 76 percent of Indians still considered terrorism the main problem facing India, just behind crime (84 percent). Even more surprisingly, ISIS topped the list of threats facing the country for 66 percent of respondents—a record—even though the organization had never struck in the country.

In the context of the wave of attacks in the first decades of the 2000s, Hindu nationalists tried to appear as defenders of their endangered community and conflated Islamism and Islam. In 2006, a veteran member of the movement, Subramanian Swamy, published a book titled Hindus under Siege: The Way Out. He wrote,

We Hindus are under siege today and we do not know it!! That is what is truly alarming. Hindu society could be dismembered today without much protest since we have been lulled into complacency or have lost the capacity to think collectively as Hindus... For example, recently, we had a near disaster in Ayodhya: Pakistan-trained foreign terrorists slipped into India and traveled to Ayodhya to blow up the Ram. Their attempt was foiled by courageous policemen. But did the representative government of 870 million Hindus of India react in a meaningful way—that is, did it retaliate to deter such attacks in the future?... No wonder terrorists have continued to target and disrupt India, and Hindus are their focus.

Terrorism was not the only threat weighing on Hindus, according to Swamy: demographic trends were another, which also pertained to Christians due to their proselytizing activities. He maintained that ‘Hindus are facing a terrible pincer; Islamic fast population growth and illegal migration, in conjunction with Christian money-induced conversion activities.’ He viewed northeast India as a particular