Murder, he wrote.

Islamabad: IN his seminal work, The End of India, which was published a year before his death, Khushwant Singh recalled the carnage of Partition with these words: "I thought the nation was coming to an end."

Decades later, Khushwant was forced to watch the same kind of carnage unfold, by design, in Narendra Modi's Gujarat during the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. Like a latter-day Cassandra, he warned that "with a triumphant Modi as their mentor, they will repeat the Gujarat experiment all over India, unless we stop them." And as with Cassandra, no one listened and so, years later, we see the Gujarat model repeated in Delhi itself.

And why not, given that it has and always does work so very well? Take the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the ensuing riots, which catapulted the BJP into the limelight and, perhaps more importantly, forced the political 'mainstream' to fight on the BJP's ideological turf ... a battle they could never hope to win. And then come the Gujarat riots, which cemented Modi as a warrior for Hindu supremacy, a mythical king reborn who would avenge centuries of humiliation and save the Hindus from extermination in their own land. To an outside observer, that belief seems ludicrous. How can the overwhelming majority, one that controls all levers of state power, be threatened by a largely powerless and under-represented minority?

But it is this snake oil, poisonous to the very touch, that sells and sells well. The credit goes to the RSS, which has worked diligently and with great patience, sowing the seeds of a toxic Hindutva that has now grown into a festering forest, its roots choking all other life and its canopies blotting out the sun itself. It is under this shade that a slow-motion genocide flowers. Hate, fear and murder are good for the vote bank, it seems.

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And, as in Gujarat, it is aided and abetted by the very police force that should be preventing it. In countless videos we see the police escorting mobs of Hindutva extremists who proudly boast of the police's support. In another we see uniformed police officers smashing CCTV cameras to allow the mobs full rein without fear of identification.

Here then is the Gujarat model for the modern era.

In another video we see several young men, all Muslim, badly beaten and bloody, lying on the ground as triumphant policemen stand over them forcing them to sing the Indian national anthem. "Do you still want azadi?" asks one of the policemen as he...