“I was very afraid,” Ashraf said. “My kids were crying.”

Since May 29, there had been unrest in Purola. The local chapter of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several other right wing Hindu nationalist groups, had staged a rally in which they demanded that local Muslims leave town before a major Hindu council meeting scheduled for June 15. On June 5, Ashraf’s clothing shop, like the shops of other Muslim traders, was covered with posters that warned “all Love Jihadis” should leave Purola or face dire consequences. They were signed by a Hindu supremacist group called the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land.

The rally in Purola was the culmination of anti-Muslim anger and agitation that had been building for a month. Earlier in May, two men, one Muslim and one Hindu, were reportedly seen leaving town with a teenage Hindu girl. Local Hindu leaders aided by the local media described it as a case of “love jihad,” a reference to the conspiracy theory popular among India’s Hindu nationalist right wing that Muslim men are seeking to marry and convert Hindu women to Islam. Public outrage began to boil over. The men were soon arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, but her uncle later stated that she had gone willingly with the men and that the charges were a fabrication.

It mattered little. Hindu organizations rallied to protest what they claimed was a spreading of love jihad in the region, whipping up the frenzy that had kept Ashraf’s family up at night, fearing for their safety.

What is happening in Uttarakhand offers a glimpse into the consequences of the systematic hate campaigns directed at Muslims in the nine years since Narendra Modi became prime minister. Hindu nationalists believe that the Hindu-first ideology of the government means they have the support necessary to make the dream of transforming India into a Hindu rather than secular nation a reality. Muslims make up about 14% of the Indian population, with another 5% of the Indian population represented by other religious minorities including Christians. In a majoritarian Hindu India, all of these minorities, well over 250 million people, would live as second-class citizens. But it is Muslims who have the most to fear.

Not long after the events in Purola, Modi would go on a highly publicized state visit to the United States. “Two great nations, two great friends and two great powers,” toasted President Joe Biden at the state dinner. The only discordant note was struck at a press conference — a rarity for Modi who has never answered a direct question at a press conference in India since he became prime minister in 2014. But in Washington, standing alongside Biden, Modi agreed to answer one question from a U.S. journalist. The Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui was picked. “What steps are you and your government willing to take,” she asked Modi, “to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?”

In his answer, Modi insisted that democracy was in the DNA of India, just as it was in the U.S. For daring to ask the question, Siddiqui was trolled for days, the victim of the sort of internet pile-on that has become a familiar tactic of the governing BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters. In the end, a White House spokesperson, John Kirby, denounced the harassment as “antithetical to the principles of democracy.”

Modi has received warm, enthusiastic welcomes everywhere from Sydney and Paris to Washington. In every country he visits, Modi talks up India as a beacon of democracy, plurality and religious tolerance. But as India prepares for elections in 2024, and Modi expects to return to office for a third consecutive five-year term, the country is teetering between its constitutional commitment to secular democracy and the BJP’s ideological commitment to its vision of India as a Hindu nation.   
In a sharply worded critique of Modi’s state visit to the U.S., author Arundhati Roy, writing in The New York Times, noted that the State Department and the White House “would have known plenty about the man for whom they were rolling out the red carpet.” They might, she wrote, “also have known that at the same time they were feting Mr. Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in northern India.”

Roy was referring to the right wing Hindu rallies in Uttarakhand. On May 29, a thousand people marched across Purola, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — a phrase once used as a greeting between observant Hindus that has in the recent past become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists. During the rally, the storefronts of Muslim-run shops were defaced and property was damaged. The police, walking alongside the mob, did nothing to stop the destruction. Several local BJP leaders and office-bearers participated in the march. A police official later told us that the rally had been permitted by the local administration and the town’s markets were officially shut down to allow for the demonstrations.

As the marchers advanced through the town’s narrow lanes, Ashraf said they intentionally passed by his home. His family, one of the oldest and most well-established Muslim families in Purola, has run a clothing shop in Purola for generations. Ashraf was born in the town and his father moved to Purola more than 40 years ago. 

“They came to my gate and hurled abuse,” he said. “Drive away the love jihadis,” the crowd screamed. “Drive away the Muslims.” 

Among the slogans was a particularly chilling one: “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye.” They wanted an Uttarakhand free of Muslims, they said in Hindi. A call, effectively, for ethnic cleansing. 

Ashraf’s three young children watched the demonstration from their window. “My 9-year-old,” he told us, “asked, ‘Papa, have you done something wrong?’”

Forty Muslim families fled Purola, a little under 10% of its population of 2,500 people. Ashraf’s was one of two families who decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where will I go?”

The campaign in Purola spread quickly to other parts of the state. On June 3, a large rally took place in Barkot, another small mountain town in Uttarakhand, about an hour’s drive from Purola. Thousands marched through the town’s streets and neighborhoods as a loudspeaker played Hindu nationalist songs. “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega” — Every House Will Fly the Hindu Flag, Lord Ram’s Kingdom Is Coming. 

Muslim shopkeepers in the town’s market, like the Hindu shopkeepers, had pulled their shutters down for the day, anticipating trouble at the rally. As the mob passed by the shops, they marked each Muslim-run shop with a large black X. The town’s Muslim residents estimate that at least 43 shops were singled out with black crosses. Videos taken at the rally, shared with us, showed the mob attacking the marked-up Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd. The police stood by and watched. 

One Muslim shopkeeper, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described arriving at his shop the next day and seeing the large black cross. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.”

We spoke to dozens of people who identify with and are members of Hindu nationalist parties, ranging from Modi’s BJP to fringe, far-right militant groups such as the Bajrang Dal, analogous in some ways to the Proud Boys. Again and again, we were told that just as “Muslims have Mecca and Christians have the Vatican,” Hindus need their own holy land. Uttarakhand, home to a number of important sites of pilgrimage, is, in this narrative, the natural home for such a project —if only, the state could rid itself of Muslims, or at the very least monitor and restrict their movement and forbid future settlement. Nearly 1.5 million Muslims currently live in Uttarakhand, about 14% of the state’s entire population, which exactly reflects the proportion nationally. 

Hindu nationalists told us how they are working to create and propagate this purely Hindu holy land. Their tactics include public rallies with open hate speech, village-level meetings and door-to-door campaigns. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are essential parts of their modus operandi. These were tools, they said, to “awaken” and “unite” Hindus. 

Their attempts to portray Muslims as outsiders in Uttarakhand dovetails with a larger national narrative that Hindus alone are the original and rightful inhabitants of India. The BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, argues that India is indisputably a “Hindu rashtra,” a Hindu nation, nevermind what the Indian constitution might say.

With a population of 11.5 million, Uttarakhand stretches across the green Himalayan foothills. It is a prime tourist destination known for its imposing mountains, cascading white rivers and stone-lined creeks. It is home to four key Hindu pilgrimage sites — the sources of two holy rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna; and Kedarnath and Badrinath, two temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu respectively. Together, these four sites, high up in rugged mountain terrain, form a religious travel circuit known as the Chota Char Dham. According to state government figures, over 4 million pilgrims visited these sites in 2022 alone. Downhill, Haridwar, a town on the banks of the Ganges, is of such spiritual significance that Hinduism’s many seers, sages and priests make it their home. For Hindus in north India, Uttarakhand is the center of 4,000 years of tradition.

The state of Uttarakhand is also one of India’s newest — formed in November 2000, carved out of Uttar Pradesh, a huge, densely populated north Indian state. Its creation was the result of a long socio-political movement demanding a separate hill state with greater autonomy and rights for its many Indigenous peoples, who form just under 3% of the state’s population and are divided into five major tribal groups. These groups are protected by the Indian constitution, and their culture and beliefs are distinct from mainstream Hindu practice. But over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to better represent its Indigenous population to one molded and marketed primarily as “Dev Bhoomi,” a sacred land for Hindus. 

Since becoming prime minister, Modi has made at least six trips to the state’s key pilgrimage sites, each time amidst much hype and publicity. In May 2019, in the final stages of the month-long general election, Modi spent a day being photographed meditating in a remote mountain cave, less than a mile from the Kedarnath shrine. Images were beamed around the country of Modi wrapped in a saffron shawl, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged atop a single wooden bed. The symbolism was not lost on Hindus — the mountains and caves of Uttarakhand are believed to be the abode of the powerful, ascetic Shiva, who is often depicted in deep meditation on a mountain peak. 

Like other Muslims in Purola, Zahid Malik, who is a BJP official, was also forced to leave his home. We met him in the plains, in the town of Vikasnagar, to where he had fled. He said Hindus had threatened to set his clothing shop on fire. “If I, the BJP’s district head, face this,” he told us, “imagine what was happening to Muslims without my connections. For Hindus, all of us are jihadis.” 

Malik emphasized that Muslims have lived for generations in the region and participated in the creation of Uttarakhand. “We have been here since before the state was made,” Malik told us. “We have protested. I myself have carried flags and my people have gone on hunger strikes demanding the creation of this state, and today we are being kicked out from here like you shoo away flies from milk.”

For Malik, the irony is that it is members of his own party who want people like him out of Uttarakhand. 

Ajendra Ajay is a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, an influential post in a state dominated by the pilgrimage economy. “In the mountain regions, locals are migrating out," he told us, "but the population of a certain community is increasing.” He means Muslims, though he offered no numbers to back his claims. Nationally, while the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of other groups, including Hindus, it is also dropping fast. But the supposed threat of Muslims trying to effect demographic change in India through population growth is a standard Hindu nationalist trope. 

“Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land, its special religious and cultural character, should be maintained," Ajay said. His solution to maintaining interreligious harmony is to draw stricter boundaries around "our religious sites" and to enforce "some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus into these areas."

On our way to Purola, the thin road snaking around sharp mountain bends, we stopped at another hill town by the Yamuna river. Naugaon is a settlement of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom are rice and potato farmers. The town’s center has a small strip of shops that sell clothes, sweets and medicines. In another era, it might have been possible to imagine a tiny, remote spot like this being disconnected from the divisive politics of the cities. But social media and smartphones mean Naugaon is no longer immune. While technology has bridged some divides, it has exacerbated others.

News of the public rallies in Purola in which Hindu supremacists demanded that Muslims either leave or be driven out spread quickly. In Naugaon, a new WhatsApp group was created. The group’s name, translated from Hindi, was “Hinduism is our identity.” By the end of June, it had 849 members. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in the Naugaon market, was among the participants. “People are becoming more radicalized,” he said approvingly, as he scrolled through posts on the group.

People we met in Naugaon told us there had already been a campaign in 2018 to drive Muslims away from this tiny rural outpost. “We chased them out of town,” they told us.

Sumit Rawat, a farmer in Nuagaon, described what happened. According to him, a young Hindu girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker and was rescued by passersby who heard her cries for help. (We were not able to independently corroborate Rawat’s claims.) He told us that Hindus marched in protest at the attempted abduction. Their numbers were so great, said Rawat, that the rally stretched a mile down the market street. With little reporting of these incidents in the national press, people in cities are largely unaware of the rage that seethes in India's rural towns and villages. "We want Muslims here to have no rights," Rawat told us. "How can we trust any of them?"

In Dehradun, the Uttarakhand capital, we met Darshan Bharti, a self-styled Hindu “saint” and founder of the "Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan," or the Movement to Protect God’s Land. He was dressed in saffron robes and a string of prayer beads. The room in which we sat had swords hung on the orange walls. His organization was behind the posters pasted on shops in Purola owned by Muslims, ordering them to leave town. 

On June 7, with the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Purola still in the news, Bharti posted a picture on his Facebook page with Kumar, the state's police chief. Even as Bharti spoke of inciting and committing violence, he dropped the names of several politicians and administrators in both the state and national governments with whom he claimed to be on friendly terms. In the room in which we met, there was a photograph of him with the current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, among a handful of figures believed to wield considerable influence over Modi. 

Bharti also claims to have met Pushkar Singh Dhami, the Uttarakhand chief minister, the highest elected official in the state, on several occasions. He has posted at least two pictures of these meetings on his social media accounts. He described Dhami as his disciple, his man. “All our demands, like dealing with love jihad and land jihad, are being met by the Uttarakhand government,” Bharti said. Land jihad is a right wing conspiracy theory that claims Muslims are illegally encroaching on Hindu land to build Muslim places of worship.  

We met Ujjwal Pandit, a former vice president of the BJP’s youth wing and now a state government functionary, at a government housing complex on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It didn't take long for him to claim that Muslims were part of a conspiracy to take over Uttarakhand through demographic force. In Uttarakhand, he said, guests were welcome but they had to know how to behave.
Pandit claimed, as have BJP leaders at state and national levels, that no Muslims had been forced to leave Purola, that those who left had fled on their own accord. As the red sun set behind us into the Ganges, he said quietly, “This is a holy land of saints. Sinners won’t survive here.”

The post The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land appeared first on Coda Story.

About a mile away, as the wrestlers were being violently restrained by the police, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was opening the country’s new parliament building, estimated to have cost  $120 million, in a controversial ceremony that was boycotted by at least 19 opposition parties. The wrestlers were marching toward the building to draw attention to their cause when they were stopped. They had already been protesting for weeks at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, a site designated for protests. But permission to protest outside the new parliament building, said the police, had been denied. 

For a little over a month, the wrestlers camped out at Jantar Mantar. They have alleged that Brij Bhushan Singh, arguably the single most powerful official in Indian wrestling over the last decade, has been sexually harassing young female wrestlers for years. The protesters include some of Indian wrestling’s biggest names — Sakshi Malik,the bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Vinesh Phogat, a medalist at the World Wrestling Championship in both 2019 and 2022, and Bajrang Punia, the bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Since it became an independent nation in 1947, India has won 30 Olympic medals, seven of them in wrestling. Medal-winning athletes are celebrated with fervor largely because there are so few of them in India.  

Brij Bhushan Singh, the man the wrestlers accuse of systematic sexual abuse, is a six-time member of parliament. He is an influential figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party.. Singh has the reputation of being a strongman who wields considerable political muscle in Uttar Pradesh, a vast northern state that is electorally crucial for keeping the BJP in power. In addition to his parliamentary duties, Singh has been the president of the Wrestling Federation of India since 2011. Though he was asked to temporarily step aside from his role at the Federation after the allegations came to light, he is still listed as its president on its website.

Since April 23, Indian wrestlers, including the sport’s biggest stars, have been living in a makeshift plastic tent and sleeping on mattresses laid out on the pavement. They have called for Singh’s dismissal from the Federation and for his arrest. “We have been sitting here asking for justice,” Vinesh Phogat told me. Their supporters point to the lack of action by the police, including delays in just registering a complaint, as evidence that the BJP is shielding Singh.

He has, the wrestlers say, been harassing young athletes, including at least one minor, for over a decade with impunity. When Sakshi Malik joined a training camp in the city of Lucknow in 2012, she told me, older wrestlers warned her that Singh “was not a good man, that he sexually harassed girls.” She described his predatory behavior as an open secret in the wrestling community. “The parents, the women’s coaches, the men’s coaches, everyone knew this was happening.” But, she added, he was so powerful that “no one had the courage to speak out against him.”

Phogat also told me that Singh would “harass almost every girl.” And that if the young women wrestlers resisted, Singh “would ruin their game” and subject them to “mental torture.” Many young women, Phogat said, “have left wrestling because of him.”

Paramjeet Malik, a former official physiotherapist of the Wrestling Federation of India, said he was aware that Singh harassed women. He told me that in 2014, three young wrestlers had confided in him that they had been sexually harassed by Singh. Malik lived with the athletes at the training camp in Lucknow that year. He told me that, on several occasions, he had noticed a car that he knew belonged to Singh stop at the camp to pick up women wrestlers. “I saw them leaving the camp at night, after eleven, or sometimes at midnight,” he told me. When he asked the girls what was going on, he said, some of them broke down and told him that they were being called to Singh’s residence in the city.

If they refused to go, Malik told me, they were told that Singh “would have their names removed from the camp’s list, that they would be declared unfit, that their careers would be ruined.” Some of these girls, he said, were under 18 and came from low-income backgrounds. Sport, to them and their families, was a way out of poverty. Malik said he made a written complaint to a senior coach at the camp but no action was taken. Malik alleges that when he spoke to the media about Singh’s behavior, he was fired. According to Malik, the coach who fired him admitted that he had been receiving calls from Singh himself. The coach warned Malik that Singh was a powerful man and that Malik’s life could be in danger if he persisted. “That very night,” Malik told me, “we had to flee the camp.”

The three star wrestlers leading the current protests — Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia — said they believed they had reached a level of recognition that finally empowered them to take on Singh and stop the abuse. The trigger, Malik told me, was when she heard that 10 women had been harassed by Singh after a recent junior world championship. A few of the young women spoke directly to Malik. She said she had to speak up. “Enough was enough,” Malik told me, “we didn’t want coming generations of women to have to face the same thing.” 

On April 21, seven women wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints against Singh at a Delhi police station. Their identities have not been publicly revealed. The women listed specific incidents of harassment between 2012 and 2022 and said they occurred at Singh’s official parliamentary residence in Delhi and during tournaments in India and abroad. The Indian Express newspaper reported that, in at least two complaints, the women described in detail how Singh touched them inappropriately on the pretext of checking their breath.

However, the Delhi police did not immediately register a case against Singh. The police in the Indian capital operate under the authority of India’s Home Ministry — as part of the federal, rather than local, government. India’s current home minister is Amit Shah, and he is effectively second only to Modi in the hierarchy of both the government and the BJP. 

When the police failed to take note of their complaint, the wrestlers filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for a police probe. Only after the court intervened did the Delhi police register two complaints against Singh. One of these complaints was from a minor and filed under India’s stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act — a guilty verdict under the act results in, at minimum, a five-year sentence.

Singh denies all allegations and says he is willing “to be hanged” if found guilty. He has called the wrestlers’ protests “politically motivated.” Over the last month, several leaders from India’s opposition parties have visited the wrestlers’ sit-in to extend solidarity. Singh has since described the athletes as “toys” in the hands of opposition parties.

“Sexual harassment is not a political issue,” Phogat told me. She said it was Singh who was trying to make their complaints about politics in a bid to “save himself.” The wrestlers, Phogat said, have put their careers on the line for their cause. “We have some respect, some standing in the country,” she told me. “Something must have happened for us to be here.”

Phogat pointed to the U.S. gymnast Simone Biles, who testified against the U.S. national gymnastics team’s doctor Larry Nassar — accused of sexual abuse by more than 100 women. “When Simone Biles spoke up against sexual harassment,” Phogat said, “did they call her political?” She described Singh as India’s Larry Nassar. “There are many Larry Nassars here,” she told me, “not just one, but at least we are taking on one now.”

Kavita Krishnan, a feminist activist and writer, says that the BJP is “backing their leader” in a “brazen and shameless” way. “The ruling party has not distanced itself from this man,” she told me. “I cannot remember so blatant a case of political protection.” She said Singh’s “political power” in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Indian parliament, more than any other state, is “the basis of very cynical calculations this government is making about keeping this guy around.”

Krishnan added that in a normal, healthy democracy, the wrestlers’ complaints would have caused huge political embarrassment. One of the primary reasons for the absence of pressure on the BJP, she said, was the lack of serious and sustained mainstream media coverage of the scandal. The BJP exercises its control, she said, not only through government bodies but also through one of its “main propaganda arms” — the media. “The control of the propaganda media over public opinion,” Krishnan said, is what “the government relies on” to shape public conversation. Most mainstream media, she said, are either neglecting the story or suppressing it. “The most influential media with the greatest reach, especially in non-English Indian languages,” Krishnan told me, “are, for the large part, totally batting for the BJP and Brij Bhushan Singh.” Vinesh Phogat told me that “national TV is making Singh the hero and us the villains.”

The wrestlers first held a public protest in Delhi in January 2023. At the time, the government persuaded them to call it off by forming an oversight committee to examine the allegations and by asking Singh to “step aside” from his role at the Wrestling Federation. By late April, though, the wrestlers felt they had no choice but to resume protests after they saw no serious action being taken against Singh. The oversight committee’s report wasn’t made public, and the athletes expressed a lack of faith in its functioning. 

Sakshi Malik told me that she believed the committee had given Singh “a clean chit,” which means effectively clearing him of all charges. The wrestlers claimed that Singh had also resumed overseeing tournaments in his area and was still calling the shots in the Federation, a sign of his political power.

To further show off his political clout, Singh has called for a mass rally on June 5 in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, a place sacred to Hindus. “On the appeal of the nation’s revered saints, a grand rally for public awareness,” reads a poster for the event, complete with an image of a Hindu god. Krishnan described the rally as an attempt by a BJP politician at “invoking Hindu identity” and “Hindu supremacist politics” to imply that he is innocent and deserves the support of all Hindus. Singh has claimed that over one million Hindu seers will attend. “Under the leadership of seers, we will force the government to change the law,” he declared, referring to India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act. 

The wrestlers say that Singh has tried to intimidate the athletes who complained to the police. Malik told me that the minor in particular has been targeted. “Phone calls have been made to her parents,” Malik said. Strange cars have been spotted around her house at night.

Even as Singh has attempted grandstanding and deploying strong-arm tactics, the wrestlers have stood their ground. On May 28, the police detained the wrestlers for the day and arrested at least 700 others across the capital. With the wrestlers and their supporters held at different police stations, the authorities took the opportunity to clear their protest site and said they would no longer allow the month-long sit-in to continue. Delhi police also charged the wrestlers with “rioting” and “obstructing a public servant.” The wrestlers have since announced that they will begin an indefinite hunger strike. 

In the past few weeks, as the protests have intensified, the wrestlers have received support from student unions, women’s groups, labor unions, farmers’ collectives and even the International Olympic Committee. On the evening of May 23, nearly 500 people marched to India Gate, a war memorial in the heart of Delhi, as part of a candlelight protest in support of the wrestlers. Sakshi Malik stood on the edge of a police barricade and lit a candle, as hundreds gathered before her waving Indian flags. “This is a fight for India’s daughters,” she told the crowd. “We have to win this. And we will.”

The post Indian wrestlers say ‘me too’ but the BJP is not listening appeared first on Coda Story.

India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abstaining from voting on half a dozen resolutions at the United Nations General Assembly that called for Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and end the war. In a tightrope balancing act, India has stated that the “sovereignty and territorial integrity" of the countries involved must be respected while simultaneously maintaining close defense and economic ties with Russia. A recent report from a Finnish think tank named India one of five “laundromat” countries that have significantly increased their imports of Russian crude oil, which they go on to sell — in the form of refined oil products — to other countries, including those in Europe that have committed to helping restrict Russia’s revenue stream from fossil fuel sales.

This was the diplomatic backdrop against which a small Ukrainian cultural festival was held in the Indian capital Delhi last week — a tentative step toward the people-to-people contact Dzhaparova described. I met Masha Kondakova, a Ukrainian film director, at a screening of her 2020 documentary, “Inner Wars.” In 2017, Kondakova began to follow three Ukrainian women who served on the battlefield, two as combatants in the Donbas region, fighting against pro-Russian separatists, and one as a doctor in the Ukrainian army. The resulting film is a rare and urgent look at life as a woman on the front lines of war.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to make a film about women soldiers?

I saw a lot of movies about war from the male gaze. I always saw the men as the main characters, and I thought, ‘no, wait a second,’ and I discovered that there are women fighters on the front lines in Ukraine. When I started to work on the movie in 2017, we had limited positions for women in the army.

For example, even if a woman was a sniper or working in a mortar squad, she would be registered as a kitchen worker or someone making clothes. This meant even if women were joining as fighters or combatants, we would not receive the same treatment as male soldiers. If you’re a veteran, the government helps you. It’s not the same if you’re registered as working in the kitchen. By 2018, things changed. The women that I filmed joined the army when there were no positions for them as combatants. So these rare women warriors had to be brave enough to fight at the front line and also brave enough to fight for their rights within the army. These women proved they had a place in the army.

I wanted to give these women their voices, to show their faces, to show that women too are war heroes.

You said things changed for women in the army in Ukraine in 2018. What specific challenges do women soldiers defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion now face?

Women form about 23% of the army in Ukraine. It’s huge. Today we have more than 50,000 women who serve in the army. Around 7,000 are fighters on the front line. There are many more women now who are combatants in the war. This is voluntary. It’s not an obligation, it’s a choice. The army has never been adapted to suit women. But women are resilient. A friend of mine, an actress, learned how to be a first responder and give medical help on the battlefield. Also, there are a lot of women who have learned how to shoot. Until the beginning of 2022, before the invasion, even the uniform was not adapted for a woman’s body. All of that is changing now.  

Are any of the women you filmed in 2017 on the front lines again? Have you been in touch with them?

Yes. One of the women I followed, Elena, was in Bakhmut. She is a senior sergeant in the mortar battery in the Donetsk region. When I spoke to her, she told me about this terrible moment when her 10-year-old son called her at 4 a.m. and said that he was scared. There were explosions in Kharkiv, where he lives. She was defending the country, she told me. But at that moment, she couldn’t protect her son.

You live in Paris now, but you still have family in Kyiv. When were you last able to visit them?

My father and mother are physicians. My sister is a pianist. They never talk too dramatically about the war. My mother and sister temporarily joined me in Paris, but my father didn’t want to leave Ukraine. He is 70 years old. He can’t fight but he said, “I will at least protect my house.” I last went to Ukraine in August. I heard the sirens. It was powerful and kind of scary. I visited places where buildings were destroyed, where it was horrible like in Hostomel and Bucha. But people were still walking around. People were still kissing on the street. Life is stronger than death, that’s what I learned.

On your visit to India, what sort of response have you received about the war in Ukraine?

I met two people who were very supportive, who told me they felt ‘very, very sorry.’ These people were young. I met one tuk-tuk driver who was around 60 years old and spoke Russian. He said, ‘I talked to Vladimir Putin and he said everything will be okay.’ I said, ‘Oh great, for which country?’ There is a war. We are free to take positions, and I respect that. But when he said, ‘Ukraine and Russia are together,’ I had to say, ‘no, it’s been a long time, almost a century.’

I don’t judge anyone. But if somebody believes Ukraine somehow belongs to Russia, please educate yourself. I know Russian propaganda is very strong. I also know that Russia and India have a long relationship. From my point of view, supporting Ukraine doesn’t mean you become an enemy of Russia. But when innocent people are dying in Ukraine, children, women, I don’t understand the tolerance. Ukrainians showed from the very beginning of the invasion that they wanted to remain sovereign. They don’t want to be the slaves of Russian imperialists.

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“My heart started beating faster,” Yusuf Beg, the caretaker, told me, as he described a phone call he had received that morning. For much of the previous month, the city authorities had been asking Beg to raze parts of the shrine. On March 15, he received a letter from the Delhi Public Works Department that claimed the shrine was encroaching on the pavement. He removed some of the construction with his own hands, but it wasn’t enough. “We want the whole pavement cleared,” Beg says the public works department officials told him. On the morning of April 1, Beg received a call to inform him that the bulldozers were on their way.

Sheba Khan, a singer, was among those gathered around the debris where a prayer room once stood. “There are so many illegal constructions in the city,” she told me. Did the authorities really  have to come here? What hazard did this particular shrine represent? “It was such a peaceful place,” she said.

Beg was astonished that the bulldozers had been deployed even when he had attempted to cooperate with the authorities. “Tell me,” Beg said, welling up, “did the footpath come first or this 400-year-old shrine?”

Over the past year, the bulldozer has emerged as a symbol of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oft-invoked “New India.” The bulldozer is most closely associated not with Modi but with the promise of strong and effective governance offered by Yogi Adityanath. A hard-line Hindu monk clad in saffron robes, Adityanath is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. With 236 million people, an independent Uttar Pradesh would be about the fifth most populated country in the world. It would also be one of the poorest.

Adityanath became the chief minister of the northern Indian state in 2017 when the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, came to power in local elections with an unprecedented mandate. He led the BJP to another landslide victory last year. For many, Adityanath is the biggest star in the BJP after Modi himself. Some even argue that Adityanath is the likeliest candidate to succeed Modi as prime minister. When Adityanath campaigns in states where the BJP contests elections, he draws huge crowds.

On the campaign trail for the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2022, Adityanath held the bulldozer up as an exemplar of stern action and swift justice in the face of a slow legal system. In his stump speeches, Adityanath declared that if he were voted back into office, he would use the bulldozer against “criminals,” “mafias” and “rioters.” His government had first used a bulldozer in 2020 to knock down the house of a notorious gangster, who was alleged to have killed eight policemen. The gangster himself was later killed in a “police encounter,” an Indian euphemism for what is effectively an extrajudicial execution. 

The bulldozer was, supposedly, the evidence of Adityanath’s zero-tolerance approach to crime. It struck a chord with the people in Uttar Pradesh, and they hailed him as the “Bulldozer Baba.”  In March 2022, with the election handily won, Adityanath’s ecstatic supporters waved BJP flags as they rolled down the streets across the state in bulldozers.

But the bulldozer is not simply a neutral symbol of a strong state reclaiming land from encroachers or taking on hardened criminals. Adityanath’s election speeches were replete with anti-Muslim rhetoric, with the Muslim community associated with “rioters” and referred to as “Taliban” supporters. As the bulldozer emerged as an unofficial election mascot for BJP-style tough governance, the subtext was clear: The criminals Adityanath wanted to go after would primarily be found outside the middle-class Hindu majority.

Since Adityanath’s reelection as the Uttar Pradesh chief minister in 2022, he has deployed  bulldozers in the aftermath of protests, razing homes of those who have only been accused, not convicted, of rioting. “Mere alleged involvement in criminal activity cannot ever be grounds for demolition of property,” said AP Shah, a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. No due process is being followed, he told me. The bulldozer has become “a symbol of repression and oppression of the poor and marginalized and has ruined entire families.” 

Critics have pointed out that Adityanath has used bulldozers disproportionately to demolish the homes of Muslims, a pattern that has been repeated in BJP-administered states such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The pretext most often used is the clearing of illegal encroachments and construction. Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International’s India board, said that home demolitions are used to “inflict punishment on the community for raising their voices.” Several human rights experts told me this amounts to an abuse of the law. The bulldozer, they say, is being used to silence, and “instill fear” in, Muslim communities following protests or communal violence in an India that has been perceived as stridently sectarian since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. The Uttar Pradesh government denies this reading. Rakesh Tripathi, a BJP spokesman in Uttar Pradesh, told me that the government goes after all criminals and encroachments, not just Muslims.

Angshuman Choudhury, an associate fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, described Adityanath’s use of the bulldozer as a “primordial form of justice delivery.” It was, he said, a “leaf right out of the textbook of populism.” The bulldozer gives the majority a sense of safety, a belief that the government is taking quick action against purported criminals, even if that definition is extended to include anyone the state deems an enemy. “Just give the majority what it wants,” he told me, that is what Adityanath’s use of bulldozers amounted to. “And what the majority wants is quick justice.”

So popular has the bulldozer become in the growing iconography of Hindu nationalism that young men have been lining up to get bulldozers inked onto their skin. Abhinav Kumar, the owner of BlackJack Tattoo Studio in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, told me that several people had come to him asking for bulldozer tattoos during a time when the tattoo was “trending.” This was in the aftermath of Adityanath’s election victory and during periods when there were a series of high-profile demolitions in the news. Bulldozers have also featured on packets of local snacks and in several Hindu nationalist pop songs.

In Modi’s India, the bulldozer is evolving as a new cultural symbol, normalized as part of India’s political and Hindu nationalist lexicon. It is a shorthand for the Modi regime’s carefully crafted muscular identity, its suppression of minorities and its narrative of a formidable, resurgent Hindu India under his leadership. The bulldozer has transcended politics, Choudhury said, to become an “element of pop culture” that the public could consume.

The bulldozer as a calling card of a confident Hindu nationalism has made its way, inevitably, to countries with large Indian diasporas. In an Indian Independence Day parade in Edison, New Jersey in August 2022, a vehicle that resembled a bulldozer was among the floats. Sambit Patra, a BJP national spokesman in India, attended as a guest of honor. The parade was organized by a local organization of diaspora businessmen called the Indian Business Association.

“It was shocking,” Ria Chakrabarty, the policy director for Hindus for Human Rights, a progressive nonprofit in the U.S., told me about the bulldozer’s inclusion in the parade. It was well known, she said, that there was sympathy for Hindu nationalism within the Indian diaspora, “but I don’t think I expected such fervent support.” Chakraborty said Hindus for Human Rights was engaged in “educating U.S. lawmakers” on why the bulldozer “has become a harmful symbol” for Muslims in India. “We view it as a symbol of hate,” she said, adding that “all the toxicity of Indian politics was now seeping into Indian-American politics.” 

Eventually, the organizers of the parade were forced to apologize. In a letter on August 30, the Indian Business Association acknowledged that the bulldozer was a “divisive image” and that its inclusion in the parade had “offended Indian American minority groups, especially Muslims.” Shortly after, on September 2, Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, U.S. senators from New Jersey, released a joint statement describing the bulldozer as “a symbol of intimidation against Muslims and other religious minorities in India.”

Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University, told me that “Muslims are increasingly treated as second-class citizens in India's autocracy.” By “using bulldozers to illegally destroy Muslim homes,” she said, “the BJP sends a clear message to this religious minority: Be afraid.” Outside India, Truschke’s interpretation of Adityanath’s bulldozer justice is widely accepted as accurate. 

In June 2022, three United Nations special rapporteurs wrote to the Indian federal government, expressing “serious concern” about the “forced evictions and arbitrary home demolitions carried out against Muslim communities and other low-income groups in India.” The letter referred to demolitions in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi as having a “distinct ‘punitive’ nature,” and said that they appeared “to have been carried out as collective punishment against the minority Muslim community.” The letter also described the act as a “violation of international human rights standards.” The language is strikingly reminiscent of language the U.N. has used to describe the “punitive demolitions” inflicted by Israeli authorities on Palestinians in the occupied territories. “In short,” a U.N. special rapporteur said back in 2014, “punitive home demolitions are an act of collective punishment that contravenes international law.”

Angshuman Choudhury, at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi, told me that there was an “uncanny similarity between the modus operandi of the Hindu nationalist Modi government and how the Israeli state has been conducting itself in Palestine.” Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, demolitions of Palestinian homes have risen sharply. Last month, the U.N. noted the demolition of nearly double the number of structures in East Jerusalem since Netanyahu returned to power in late December than during the equivalent period the previous year.     

While he notes the different political context in Israel and that state’s use of demolitions as part of a “territorial expansion,” Choudhury argues that just as Israel has used bulldozers as retribution against individual Palestinians, so India uses them to “create a chilling effect and punish Muslims who dare to protest.” 

Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist and professor of South Asian studies at Stanford University, told me that the Hindu nationalist movement “has long been admiring Israel and the Zionist movement that makes Israel into a privileged home for all Jews in the world.” He says he’s heard personally from many Hindu nationalists who “have conveyed that sense of admiration to me and have told me that they thought India should be a home to Hindus only.”

This explains the popular embrace and the cultural celebration — at least in the country’s largely Hindi-speaking heartland — of the bulldozer as a symbol of the BJP’s might and its belligerence. 

Hansen told me that the bulldozer represents “a new phase in the Hindu nationalist project.” The celebration of the bulldozer, he says, is “a form of payback, a revenge fantasy” for perceived injustices suffered by Hindus under the Muslim Mughal empire that controlled much of India for hundreds of years until the British took over in the mid-19th century. Demolitions, he argues, provide “great entertainment and collective satisfaction,” comparing it to the “jeering and cheering crowds at lynchings in the American South, or all those ordinary people who celebrated antisemitic pogroms in Europe.”

Adityanath and the BJP’s claim that the bulldozer is a means to deter criminals and reclaim government land is largely disingenuous. In June 2022, India’s Supreme Court told the Yogi Adityanath government that demolitions “cannot be retaliatory” but the judges still refused to step in and stop the use of bulldozers. To avoid serious judicial scrutiny, the government justifies the demolitions by claiming that the properties being destroyed are illegal constructions. 

Hansen, the Stanford professor, told me that the “BJP more or less exercises its power with complete impunity, that it is beyond the accountability of the law.” The “potency” of the bulldozer as a symbol, he said, lies in the fact that it supposedly upholds the law and is an “enforcement of order.” Bulldozers have traditionally been used in India in the “name of urban development and disciplining the poor.” There is “strong support for such punitive measures against the poor and social and religious minorities among the middle classes,” who enjoy the benefits of more regularized and formal housing. Given the extent of unauthorized building in Indian cities, though, a vast number of buildings are vulnerable to being declared illegal. “Nothing is easier,” Hansen told me, than to “find formal problems with most buildings if the authors so desire,” making the discretionary powers of the state “wide open to abuse and the blatant harassment of certain individuals and communities.”

Much of this abuse was evident when the Adityanath government lashed out at protesters last summer. On the morning of June 12, 2022, Afreen Fatima, a former student at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, saw her family home being torn down. “I watched it live on YouTube,” she told me. As Fatima witnessed the demolition of the home she had lived in for 20 years, her mother prayed on a mat nearby.

With police in riot gear stationed outside, three bulldozers were put to work destroying Fatima’s house. The media, present in droves, broadcast the demolition across the country. Fatima and her father had been vocal critics of the Modi government. “It was an act of vendetta,” Fatima told me about the Adityanath government’s actions. Her father had been picked out as a protest “ringleader” after two BJP members, one a party spokesperson, made offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad on television, leading to days of unrest in India and a sharp diplomatic backlash, especially from the Gulf countries where many Indian migrants work. The demonstrations turned violent in some places, with incidents of stone-pelting and arson. Fatima denied that her father had led the protests, but it made no difference.

Fatima believes the bulldozer sends a message to the Hindus that the BJP government is “showing Muslims their place” and a message to the Muslims to “stay in line.” She told me she believes the bulldozer demolitions have had their desired effect. “The way the Muslim community earlier asserted its presence in public spaces,” she said, “has changed. Now, it’s like let’s just survive one day at a time.”After the demolition, Fatima’s family found it hard to find a place to live. Landlords did not want to rent to them. They were afraid, Fatima said. “Our entire family was criminalized,” she told me, “to the extent that people were scared to talk to us on the phone.”

Despite criticism at home and abroad, the BJP appears to be expanding its punitive use of the bulldozer. In February, a mother and daughter were killed in a village in Uttar Pradesh during an anti-encroachment drive, the widely used term in India for clearing illegal buildings and developments. The family said that officials showed up, bulldozer in tow, and ended up setting fire to the family’s hut. The authorities claimed that the mother and daughter locked themselves in the hut and set fire to it. 

Also in February, the government launched an anti-encroachment drive in the disputed Indian state of Kashmir, a site of territorial conflict with Pakistan and a decades-long insurgency. Kashmir is currently heavily controlled, with little independent reporting permitted and with journalists and critics frequently jailed even as the BJP insists that peace has been established in the Valley. The government reclaimed 50,000 acres of land during the demolition drive before the bulldozers were temporarily called off as people in India’s only Muslim-majority state became increasingly panicked and angered. 

On April 1, in Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood, after the bulldozers moved in and tore down most of the old Muslim shrine, the tombs of the saint and his family lay in the open air, covered only by a thin, lime-green sheet and surrounded by stone debris. The March 15 letter from the public works department specifically mentioned removing the encroachments as soon as possible with the upcoming G-20 summit in mind. World leaders will arrive in India’s capital in September 2023 for a meeting that will mark the end of the country’s year-long G-20 presidency. It is an opportunity, says the BJP, to showcase Indian democracy and development. To that end, a project is ongoing to “beautify” the city of Delhi. 

But on that Saturday afternoon, the street looked more disfigured than it had before the bulldozers arrived.

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