Aakar Patel | Amid ‘Apathy’ Of The Vast Majority, ‘Intent’ Will Always Hold Upper Hand

Intention has an ally in indifference. Intention tries to take place; indifference will gently adjust. The intention is the determination to implement the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The party has government authority and the support of a significant number of Indians who want the ideology to be implemented. This number is actually a minority, as every election shows. But it is armed with intent.

Complacency is the inability of the rest of us, the majority, to resist it. Even those who accept the truth and danger expect that the problems created by the government should be solved with balance and brake mechanisms. The opposition, parliament and justice system will solve the problem. But it hasn’t happened so far, and this new year we’re entering will show once again that it can’t happen.

For those new to this: What does the BJP’s ideology aim for? He wants to oppress and harm the minority Indians, Muslims and Christians and that’s it. The ideology has no higher purpose and offers nothing of value other than the pursuit of fellow Native Americans. It exists as hatred and expresses itself as hatred. This feeling is inexhaustible and can renew itself and always find new ground to fight on. The new year 2026 will also show this.

In 2025, we continued the path we followed more than ten years ago. Rajasthan has become the eighth state to ban marriage between Hindus and Muslims. This happened three months ago in September. In September 1935, Germany banned marriage between Jews and Christians. These relationships were labeled “racial pollution” (Rassenschande), to the horror of the world. India has done this with cleverly named laws aimed at achieving the same thing. The law gives a bureaucrat the power to decide whether an adult has the right to change his or her faith. Other provisions in the law echo or tighten provisions in similar laws introduced by the BJP in the last few years.

This aim was first demonstrated in the Uttarakhand Freedom of Religion Act, 2018. This law had something new. It is aimed to prevent interfaith marriage by criminalizing religious conversion, but an exemption is provided for people to convert to the “religion of their ancestors”. The term is left undefined, but readers will not need to be told what this means.

This law was enacted and implemented. There is no resistance from the courts. Intent noticed this and tried to get more involved. Similar laws came to Himachal Pradesh in 2019, to Uttar Pradesh in 2020, to Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat in 2021, and to Haryana and Karnataka in 2022. Note that in Karnataka the government has changed but the law remains. Intent will always trump apathy. Rajasthan has become the eighth state and will not be the last.

Careful readers will observe how quickly the field was occupied within a few years, while there was no return anywhere. The same story is repeated when it comes to beef. The first laws criminalizing the possession of beef came only in 2015 (by the BJP governments in Maharashtra and Haryana). These laws and the discourse surrounding them created a new category of violence: beef lynching. In my decades of working as a journalist, I had never heard of beef lynching before this, but the act has now become so commonplace as to be normal. There are endless murders around us, and apathy adapts to them, making room for intent. The laboratory, which has now become a factory, Gujarat passed a law in 2017 making cattle slaughter punishable with life imprisonment. This is an economic crime, but no white-collar crime interferes with life. Those who steal billions can be rehabilitated, as we have seen before.

A few weeks ago, Uttar Pradesh had announced that it wanted the case filed against those accused of the first infamous lynching incident in Akhlaq in September 2015 to be withdrawn as an obstruction of justice. The judge boldly rejected this, and the ten-year-old trial will continue, but in a country where general apathy prevails, we must turn to individual acts of courage. The complete exclusion of 200 million Indian Muslims from power at the Center today is as normal as it can be in a country where discrimination is legal. Indians shrug their shoulders.

The intention is to violently disrupt the annual Christian festival and the rest of us will stand by. Disapproval is not the same as action, and apathy pulls out the cell phone and records while the intent carries out the violent act.

In 2019, a law was passed that criminalizes divorce by only one religion, and for the rest, it remains a civil offense. In 2019, there was also a law that excluded only one religion from the Citizenship Amendment Act. The law preventing Indians of a single religion from buying and renting property in Gujarat, which even foreigners can do, was tightened in 2019. It has been said that India was at the forefront of fighting apartheid in South Africa, but today we are happy that this is being implemented on our own soil. If we were uncomfortable, if we were angry, then we would do something about it. The lynchings of Kashmiri carpet sellers and the lynchings of Bangladeshi sellers joined the cattle lynchings, and we stood still.

Intention will not give up because intention is trying to achieve something; Indifference just wants not to be disturbed.

This new year will once again bring a repetition of both intent and indifference.

The writer is the president of Amnesty International India. Twitter: @aakar_patel