Nupur Sharma’s recent tirade was novel in that it went beyond denigrating Muslims and assailed the revered founder of Islam.
Nupur Sharma’s tirade against the Prophet Muhammad—and the domestic and international furore provoked by it—is a fitting milestone for eight years of Narendra Modi’s reign. What is striking is the speed with which a country that not so long ago made a show of its secularity yielded to religious zealotry. Civility in public life, bruised but not extinct in 2014, became one of the earliest casualties of Modi’s ascent to high office.
Since 2015, and particularly over the past three years, speech that was once deemed unacceptable on the margins has deluged the mainstream. We have all been spectators to …
Kapil is a journalist, book critic and author. His first book, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (2019), was published to critical and commercial acclaim in India, the UK and the US. He has written from South Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East—including Syria, Pakistan and Palestine—and his work appears, among other publications, in The New York Times, The Critic, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, The Economist, TIME, CNN, The Guardian and Le Monde diplomatique. He is a frequent contributor to The Spectator and an international affairs panellist on Monocle24 radio.
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