Skye Arundhati Thomas

In May 2022 temperatures in Northern India hit 49°C. The Indian Meteorological Department declared it a ‘heat wave’ and in a heat wave, public infrastructure begins to fail: pavements buckle, railway tracks warp, and electrical grids are strained by increased use of air conditioning. Fires start in dry fields. Industrial plants require more water for their cooling systems, straining already reduced supplies. Crops are ravaged. A heat wave is also a national health emergency. At a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C – that is, the equivalent of 35°C and 100 per cent humidity – the human body can no longer cool itself by sweating. You overheat and die within hours. Throughout May, regions across India saw consistent wet-bulb temperatures between 25 and 33°C.

Just before midnight on 22 December 1949, sixteen months after the Indian nation-state was formed, three Hindu fundamentalists sneaked into the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. The men – an ascetic and his disciples – smuggled in a statue of the god Ram and placed it under the central dome of the mosque. They were members of the Hindu Mahasabha, the group that had assassinated Mahatma Gandhi the year before. The next morning, their allies stormed the mosque. They said the god had manifested himself at the site they believed to be his birthplace in a ‘divine exercise’.

The mobile phone footage shows 19-year-old Muskan Khan riding a scooter into the yellow-walled compound of her college campus in Mandhya, a city in Karnataka in south-west India, on 8 February. She parks it, steps off. Around her, a jumpy, agitated crowd of young men dressed in matching saffron-coloured scarves are caught in the throes of a tirade: ‘Jai Shri Ram,’ they chant, spinning the cloth above their heads, as though punctuating the chorus of a pop song. Khan has to walk past the boys to enter the college building. They charge at her, taunt her, demand she take off her hijab. She punches the air, her body tilting, face crinkled in a frown, and declares: ‘Allahu akbar.’

The documents seemed to reveal a plan to assassinate Narendra Modi; discussed buying arms and setting up guerrilla training camps; and named Dalit and Muslim student leaders as comrades with ties to the Congress party. It was sensational, with all the trappings of a classic conspiracy: a group of armed activists with links to the opposition, plotting to topple the government. The police called the evidence they had gathered ‘conclusive’; the BJP’s propaganda machine branded the accused as Naxalites. One of them, Sudha Bharadwaj, a trade union activist and lawyer, passed her defence team a handwritten note. ‘It is totally concocted,’ she wrote, ‘fabricated to criminalise me and other human rights lawyers, activists, organisations.’