INDIAN social media — or at least the parts of it that are most visible in the current crisis — is a curious mixture of hate and threats of sexual violence with a healthy portion of rabid nationalism and disinformation, peppered with emojis perhaps intended to make up for the absolutely stunning lack of humour, style and taste.

Take, for example, one of the most popular ‘jokes’ doing the rounds; here we have an Indian social media user posting: “Any Kashmiri girl feeling threatened can come to my house at night. You will be safe and well hosted. A divided India will lose, a United India will win & thrive.” Now, if you’re ridiculously well-meaning and/ or naïve you may mistake this as patriotic altruism, but a quick look at the replies, including that of the original poster, would disabuse you of any such notions because he adds that ‘hijabis’ are his priority and that the girl who takes up this offer may not be alive in the morning.

So, this is a rape and murder threat dressed up as edgy humour and it’s unsurprising to anyone who has dipped in this particular cesspool that the replies are filled with laughing, crying and laughing-till-crying emojis. Many of the appreciative replies are in fact from women, who apparently find the rape of the ‘enemy’ amusing. And, since we are told that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the tweet in question has been duplicated by others countless times.

This sort of behaviour isn’t limited to anonymous social media users. In a Twitter exchange with a British-Pakistani lady, prominent India analyst Abhijeet Iyer Mirza took about five seconds to descend into sexualised taunts of the vilest nature, using the sort of language even guttersnipes would find too low for them. As I can’t reproduce his tweets here, you can go look them up if you think I’m being too harsh. Once again, he was received with applause, not opprobrium, from the majority of his online compatriots.

This is a rape and murder threat dressed up as edgy humour.

Then there are those who are deeply impressed by Israel’s atrocities and wish wholeheartedly to be able to replicate them. This isn’t a post-Pahalgam phenomenon: right-wing Indians on the internet have been the most vocal supporters of Israel ever since it commenced the genocide and have been posting pictures of dead and injured Palestinian children with relish while also fantasising about doing the same to ‘local Gaza’s’ — code for Muslim-majority areas in India, and of course to Pakistan.

Some of the genocidal fantasies are more localised and rooted in actual recent Indian history but may seem a little opaque at first. Take, for example, the flood of Indian posts with pictures of cauliflowers and captions reading “the only cure is cauliflower farming”.

What exactly does this mean? You may recall that in 1989, the Ram Janambhoomi movement was in full swing, with processions from all over India converging on the site of the Babri Masjid with consecrated bricks to lay the foundations of a temple to the Hindu god Ram. Three years later, the Babri Masjid was demolished by the same radicals and, last year, Indian Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the new and massive Ram mandir.

Spearheaded by extremist groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, many of the 1989 marches deliberately went through Muslim areas. In Bhagalpur, this planned provocation ended in a series of massacres in which over 900 Muslims were killed, amounting to some 93 per cent of the total casualties. As per Indian media reports at the time, the bodies of at least 100 of these were buried in a mass grave over which cauliflowers were planted to hide the atrocity. The Bhagalpur Riots Inquiry Commission found local administration guilty of “in­­competence and in­­difference”, and sin-

gled out superintendent K.S. Trivedi as “wholly responsible for the riots that oc­­curred”. Trivedi was transferred but then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi revoked that decision under pressure from the BJP and VHP. You know, the same people basically running India these days.

If you somehow haven’t connected the dots yet, the posting of cauliflowers is in fact a not-so-coded call to massacre Muslims. This is the second time in the last few months this murderous meme has made the rounds. When the movie Chhaava was released, cherry-picking events from the life of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj to inflame anti-Muslim sentiments in true modern Bollywood style, riots took place in Nagpur with the VHP and Bajrang Dal intent upon demolishing the tomb of Mughal ruler Aurangzeb. Here we saw the cauliflower being repeatedly used as well, and with a lot less ambiguity than now.

One account even posted that this time the killers should “have a target … like a minimum of 2-3” Muslims to kill. The tweet to which this was a reply has over 15,000 likes. And that, ladies and gentlemen is how the groundwork for genocide is laid.

The writer is a journalist.

X: @zarrarkhuhro emphasized text Published in Dawn, May 5th, 2025