How Right-Wing Media and Social Platforms Are Waging War on India’s Liberal Voices

Mayukh Ranjan Ghosh is Republic Bangla news channel’s lead anchor, known for his hyper-physical and ultra-vocal antics in the studio that trigger anxiety, hatred and comic relief, among other emotions. On his April 24 evening show, Ghosh asked everyone identifying themselves as secular to leave India immediately. Pumped up like an adrenaline-rushed challenger in the boxing ring, shouting at the top of his voice, breathing bloodthirsty fire with his mouth, eyes, nose and body movements, Ghosh demanded that the word ‘secular’ must be struck out of the Indian Constitution.

“Secularism! Damn! What for?” he thundered. There is no place for secularism in India, he declared. He gestured at tearing secularism apart. India was never secular he claimed; former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi forcefully made India secular by inserting the word in the Constitution during the Emergency. Now, secularism must go. Secular Hindus are enemies of the nation; the enemies within. The war against secularism is no less—if not more—important than the war against terror, he contended.

One cannot expect correct facts from such propaganda programmes. However, for the sake of our readers, here is the right fact: the Supreme Court has upheld the inclusion of ‘secular’ in the Constitution, arguing that the Constitution has always been secular, even if the explicit term had not been used in it before 1976. But a million verbal salvos targeting India’s seculars came from the Hindu nationalist propaganda ecosystem on social media and the mainstream media in the aftermath of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in Kashmir, where suspected Pakistan-backed terrorists selectively killed 25 Hindu male tourists and a Muslim man who refused to let the Hindus die. Instead of showing collective contempt for terror, the aftermath of the tragedy stands witness to an outburst of hatred targeting seculars and liberals.

Social Media’s Hate Engine After Pahalgam

In the wee hours of April 25, pro-Hindutva ‘security analyst’ Rakesh Krishnan Simha posted a photo card on the social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), which read: “Muslims are born in Muslim homes. Christians are born in Christian Homes. Unfortunately, thick-skulled ‘seculars’ are born only in Hindu homes.” In less than twelve hours, it was shared over 1,300 times.

A Hindu nationalist X user going by the name Shivanya wrote, “India can never do an Israel. Israel is surrounded by enemies. India is filled with enemies.” Apart from most of the over 4,000 users who shared the post, many of the comments reflect agreement with her, specifying that India faced a great internal threat from secular Hindus. Many social media users echoed that “secular Hindus should be punished as they are the main culprits.” Varun Bahl, who has over 21,000 ‘followers’ on X, wrote, “The biggest problem in Bharat is the Sickular Hindus. They are out to destroy us.”

The word ‘secular’ had long become ‘sickular’, implying illness, and liberals became ‘libtard’, representing a person of questionable parentage, during the past decade’s Hindu nationalist wave that has swept most parts of India. The Hindu nationalists presumably hold them as the wall shielding India’s minorities, especially Muslims, whom they find responsible for almost every bad thing that has happened to India.

Besides, Hindu nationalists seem to be very much aware that minorities, who form one-fifth of India’s population, and especially Muslims whose share in India’s population is only 14 per cent, cannot prevent Hindu majoritarianism from turning India into a Hindu Rashtra, as they wish; it’s the Hindus preaching secularism, diversity and inclusivity who offer Hindu majoritarians the greatest resistance.

The rising aggression of Hindutva forces against liberal thinking and secular belief and practices reached a significant point in 2023 when Mohan Bhagwat, the helmsman of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the ideological-organisational parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—targeted ‘cultural Marxists’ and the ‘wokes’ as a global threat to their kind of politics. The word ‘woke’ originated in the US, referring to those who call themselves awakened, aware of important issues, including racial and socio-economic discrimination. In his Vijaya Dashami speech in October 2023, Bhagwat held that these people are against all good administration in the world, oppose all things sacred, good moral values and restraints, and reward unchecked autocracy.

“To make their impacts bigger, they take control of the media and academia and ruin a nation’s education system, corrupt its culture and turn politics and social environment into victims of confusion and lies,” he said. The ‘wokes’ and the ‘cultural Marxists’ use falsehood, perversion and exaggerations to spread confusion, hatred and fear and entangle people into conflicts and quarrels to take control of society. “Such forces producing mistrust, confusion and mutual hatred pose a threat to every country,” Bhagwat concluded.

It was a time when the Republicans in the US, including Donald Trump, as well as business tycoons like Elon Musk, were also taking potshots at ‘wokism,’ as was Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Argentina’s Javier Milei. In February 2025, while highlighting how the conservatives were coordinating globally against the ‘global political left’, Meloni summed up what binds Trump, Narendra Modi, Milei and Meloni against the left liberals: “We defend freedom. We love our nations. We want secure borders,” she said. “We preserve businesses and citizens...We defend family and life. We fight against wokeism. We protect our sacred right to our faith and our free speech. And we stand for common sense. So ultimately, our struggle is hard, but the choice is simple.”

While critics argue that they have normalised hate speech in the name of free speech, the war against ‘wokes’, liberals, the left and seculars has intensified since Trump took charge at the White House in March 2025.

Secularism has been under fire in different parts of the world for over a decade now, as the world witnessed a rise of right-wing populists, who use religious conservatism as part of their nationalist politics. In 2018, Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK and author of Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom, said that secularism, like all concepts foundational to the liberal political order internationally, is under threat. “That’s in the same way that human rights, the rule of law, even the idea of liberal democracy itself are under threat from a number of different forces: religious extremism, nationalistic populism, conservatism and so on,” he said. Copson opined that secularism, unlike those opposing forces, isn’t defended much by anyone. “Secularism suffers because it’s both under attack and under-defended.”

Those whom Bhagwat referred to as ‘woke’ and ‘cultural Marxists’ in Western lingo are ‘secular-liberal’ in India’s Hindu nationalist vocabulary. Their outburst regarding secular Hindus following the Pahalgam terror attack aimed to carry one message—terrorism will be finished if the shield that the seculars are providing, all supposed sympathisers and supporters of Pakistan and terrorism, is removed.

Advocate Girish Bharadwaj, whose Facebook page with 1.07 lakh ‘followers’ describes him as a ‘Dharmic Warrior’, ‘a relentless crusader of Hindutva and Nationalism,’ posted what appeared to be a poem. It read: “And every time one/ bleeds, they shout:/ Let’s not make this/ about religion.’/ No./We will make this/ about religion./ He asked the name/ He pulled the trousers/ He pulled the trigger./ And all you pulled/ was your secular curtain/ of shame.” While sharing this in a photocard, Bharadwaj added, “The hands of so-called secular people are also soaked in Hindus’ blood.”

Ritam Enlish, the RSS-backed news portal, highlighted in a post that All India Majlis Ittehad e Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi “admits Islamic terrorists targeted Hindus by confirming their religion.” They dubbed Oawisi’s ‘admission’ as ‘truth slipped out while playing secular’. In contrast, “some ‘secular’ Hindus still deny the reality for (the sake of) Muslim appeasement,” the portal wrote. “When will they stop validating terror sympathisers?”

Noticing the trend, Semanti Ghosh, author and editor of the editorial page, Anandabazar Patrika, India’s largest-circulated Bengali daily, wrote in an op-ed that we wouldn’t have known without the media and social media how deeply the poison of unrighteousness in the name of religion and brainwashing in the name of politics have scarred India’s social psyche.

“After such an incident, leaving everything else aside, the ‘Secu-Maku’, i.e., the secular camp, is being subjected to relentless offensives—as if it all happened due to their fault!” she wrote.

Why Secular Hindus Are the New Enemy

‘Secu-Maku’ is the Hindu nationalist lingo to refer to seculars and Marxists. Why they were instantly targeted in the aftermath of the terror attack at Pahalgam may have one simple explanation: Muslims, already cornered in different parts of India over the gradual deepening and expansion of Hindu nationalist influence, are not in a position to raise critical questions. It is the Hindus championing secularism and opposing the Hindu nationalists’ Hindu Rashtra venture who will ask questions, and some disturbing ones, about the BJP government’s tall claims on the ‘success’ of their aggressive Kashmir policy and the state of national security. Silencing them, therefore, appeared necessary.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist, author and researcher