“Tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right,” wrote John Locke in the seventeenth century. His warning was not about brute force alone, but about the moment when laws, institutions, and silence become instruments of domination. India’s present realities bring that insight into sharp focus.

August 2025 unfolded as a month of unrelenting terror and state led tyranny for India’s Muslim community. What began with the brutal lynching of 20-year-old Suleman Pathan in Maharashtra revealed not just the savagery of mob violence but also the intimacy of betrayal: he was tortured and killed by a crowd that included his own Hindu friends, the same people with whom he had once celebrated Ganesh festivities. His death was not an isolated aberration but a chilling symbol of how everyday coexistence has been poisoned by communal hatred, where identity eclipses friendship, neighborliness, and humanity itself.

In Uttar Pradesh, a different but equally calculated attack took place: the vandalism of the 200-year-old tomb of Nawab Abdus Samad. With saffron flags planted atop the historic structure, right-wing mobs claimed it as a Hindu site, echoing the long shadow of the Babri Masjid demolition. The incident underlined a growing Hindutva project, where reclaiming Muslim sites, whether tombs or mosques, becomes a spectacle of political domination and communal polarization.

Elsewhere across India, violence followed familiar scripts. In Hapur, Muslim youths were stopped, asked their names, and beaten nearly to death for their identity. In Gujarat, a Muslim man was not only attacked but later denied medical treatment. In West Bengal and Uttarakhand, victims were humiliated, forced to chant Hindu slogans, or physically degraded. The persistence of cow vigilantism, where accusations of beef consumption or cattle transport justify lynching, further exposed how vigilante violence has been mainstreamed into everyday life.

The assault is not confined to streets and marketplaces. Educational spaces, once thought to be safe havens for young minds, have been infiltrated. In Karnataka, a school’s water tank was deliberately poisoned to frame a Muslim headmaster, dragging even children into the machinery of communal hatred. In Ahmedabad, a personal scuffle between students that turned deadly was opportunistically recast as a communal clash, with right-wing groups vandalizing the school to mobilize anger against Muslims.

At the heart of this violence lies a political ecosystem that normalizes hatred. The RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat openly reaffirmed his organization’s ideological alignment with the ruling BJP, while party leaders used platforms to question the legitimacy of Muslims participating in Hindu festivals or to revive discredited theories of “population jihad.” This rhetoric builds on historical revisionism that seeks to erase Muslim heroes from India’s Independence story while glorifying Hindutva ideologues like Savarkar. In this narrative, Muslims are no longer citizens with deep historical roots but “outsiders,” tolerated only if they subsume their identity into the majority culture.

The state itself is no bystander. These were not isolated incidents of mob violence; they reflected a deeper, systemic transformation in which the state itself amplifies and legitimizes majoritarian aggression. With the passage of India’s harshest anti-conversion law in Uttarakhand, Muslims face legal frameworks that criminalize religious freedom. The continued use of “bulldozer justice”, razing Muslim homes and businesses, has become a form of collective punishment. And in a stark escalation, the government began deporting Rohingya refugees, including UNHCR-registered asylum seekers, in direct violation of international law. Each of these measures transforms discrimination from social prejudice into state policy.

Dissent is silenced with equal vigor. At Aligarh Muslim University, a student leader was charged with criminal offenses simply for raising pro-Palestine slogans during a protest, revealing how even expressions of global solidarity are policed when voiced by Muslims.

International actors have taken notice. Human Rights Watch condemned the Rohingya expulsions, the USCIRF once again recommended India’s designation as a “country of particular concern,” and the UN Human Rights Council expressed alarm over systemic discrimination. Yet, despite mounting global scrutiny, India’s ruling establishment continues to double down, emboldened by the ideological backing of its parent organization, the RSS, and by a political culture where hate is both currency and governance.

Taken together, these events sketch the anatomy of a deeper transformation. What were once sporadic outbreaks of communal violence are now embedded into a multi-layered system of persecution: historical erasure provides ideological justification, hate speech fuels societal animosity, mobs carry out physical assaults with impunity, and the state itself cements exclusion through laws, demolitions, and deportations. India’s Muslims today live under a coordinated siege, socially vilified, politically demonized, and legally marginalized.

This is not simply a crisis of minority rights; it is the unraveling of India’s secular and democratic fabric. The trajectory revealed in August 2025 signals not a passing moment of unrest but an entrenched reality, one where the world’s largest democracy risks transforming into a state-enabled model of religious persecution with profound consequences for its future social cohesion and political credibility.