Hate Speech in Bihar: Incidents, Consequences, and the Question of Accountability, January 2025–May 2026
By Aarav Kandoi
Introduction
This article analyses 126 incidents of hate speech recorded in Bihar between January 2025 and May 2026. It is possible that many more such incidents occurred but could not be identified given the limited scope of this effort. The incidents have been classified here on four bases: the language that was used, who organised them, the month in which they occurred, and the district in which they took place. Viewed together, these incidents reveal a multi-dimensional pattern: repeatedly raising the question of who belongs to this country and who does not; portraying an entire religious community as a threat; abusing minority communities with derogatory terms; attempting to control women’s autonomy; and so on. All of this unfolded in full view of the institutions — the police, the district administration, the state government, the Election Commission, the National and State Human Rights Commissions, the Minorities Commission, and the courts — that were repeatedly notified through formal complaints, yet in most cases no concrete outcome followed. The recorded incidents also reveal the social and political impact of hate speech.
1. What Was Said?
The language and vocabulary used across these 126 incidents can be sorted into four categories.
1.1 Calling Muslims “Infiltrators”
Fifty-five of the 126 incidents — more than four in ten (43.7 per cent) — involved calling Indian Muslims “Bangladeshi,” “Rohingya,” or “infiltrators” (ghuspaithiya). This was the single largest theme of hate speech in Bihar during this period. The underlying claim is that people who have lived here for generations, who vote, pay taxes, and hold the same identity documents as other citizens, are in fact concealed foreigners with no right to remain.
This pattern appeared at every level. In Nalanda, a lone street vendor was named and branded “Bangladeshi”; in Katihar, a utensil seller was labelled an “outsider.” At the other end of the scale, a Union Home Minister told crowds at no fewer than fifteen separate rallies — in Araria, Arwal, Sasaram, Jamui, Sitamarhi, Darbhanga, Madhubani, Patna, Vaishali, Lakhisarai, Khagaria, Rohtas, and Begusarai — that “infiltrators” should be identified and struck off Bihar’s electoral rolls. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh repeated much the same language in Narpatganj, Bisfi, Dhaka, Digha, and Kewti, warning Hindus not to let their locality become a “launching pad for infiltrators.” The Chief Minister of Assam told audiences in Purnia and elsewhere that he had personally cleared “fifty thousand acres” of land from these “illegal infiltrators.” In the same breath, he compared Muslims to Osama bin Laden, Aurangzeb, and Babur — three names repeatedly invoked by Hindu nationalists as symbols of violence and conquest.
The question “Should infiltrators be removed or not?” was repeated, in almost identical words, speech after speech, with the crowd expected to respond in affirmation each time. This call-and-response does not merely let the crowd listen; it actively draws them into the act of exclusion itself. A refrain repeated 55 times in a single year, spoken by senior state and national leaders, was no inadvertent slip of the tongue — it was a deliberate, repeatedly tested strategy for communal polarisation.
1.2 Overt Communal Statements
The second-largest category comprises 39 incidents (30.9 per cent), covering a long list of anti-Muslim rhetoric. In Purnia, a sitting Union Minister told a crowd to buy only from Hindu-owned shops and to eat only “jhatka” meat instead of halal — in effect, calling for an open boycott of Muslim traders. Speakers also repeatedly targeted the Waqf Board.
Some incidents in this category went well beyond taunting, veering into outright dehumanisation. In Darbhanga, a coaching-centre teacher handed his students posters branding Muslims and Sikhs as terrorists and declaring that anyone who invokes the name of Allah in India should be buried. Notably, this occurred not at a rally but among schoolchildren. In Buxar, a speaker called Muslims “offspring of snakes” conspiring against Hindus. A state minister, also from Purnia, went further still: describing alleged Bangladeshi migrants as “demons,” he asked the crowd whether they should be killed — prejudice tipping openly into incitement.
1.3 “Jihad” Conspiracy Theories
Twenty-three incidents (18.3 per cent) involved rhetoric around “jihad,” chiefly propagating conspiracy theories such as “love jihad” and “land jihad.” A leader from Uttarakhand, campaigning in Bihar, added a new term to this lexicon: “spit jihad” (thook jihad). “Love jihad” refers to the claim that Muslim men, as part of an organised conspiracy, lure Hindu girls into changing their religion, while “land jihad” repeats the allegation that Muslims are engaged in a coordinated scheme to seize land and property.
In at least half a dozen locations across the state, including Vaishali, Samastipur, and Rohtas, groups linked to the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal set up tableaux featuring a refrigerator and a mutilated effigy, depicting the supposed fate of Hindu girls who fall victim to “love jihad.” This was not a speech but a physical prop constructing an image of violence on a woman’s body — openly built, paraded, and repeated across several districts over the course of the year. A narrative framed as concern for women’s safety was, in reality, sold through the imagined mutilated corpse of a woman.
1.4 Direct Slurs
The smallest category comprises 9 incidents (7.1 per cent) involving direct slurs: “namak haram” (traitor/ungrateful), used by a Union Minister on at least four separate occasions against Muslim citizens who received government benefits but did not vote for his party. At a demonstration in Gaya, the Islamophobic slur “kathmullah” was invoked. The word “maulvi” was used mockingly rather than respectfully. Religious slurs became so routine in election speeches that, set against the dramatic “infiltrator” rhetoric, they barely registered as news.
2. Who Organised Them?
The largest source of hate speech was no fringe group but the Bharatiya Janata Party itself — the very party in power at both the Centre and in the state. BJP-affiliated elected representatives and functionaries were found responsible for 51 of the 126 incidents, or 40.5 per cent of the total. This list includes the Prime Minister, the Union Home Minister, the Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Assam campaigning in Bihar, and a sitting Union Minister who repeated religious slurs across multiple rallies. The Prime Minister used language falling within the hate-speech category at no fewer than seven rallies, and the Union Home Minister at no fewer than fifteen.
Religious-nationalist organisations, chiefly the Vishva Hindu Parishad and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, organised 26 of the 126 incidents (20.6 per cent). While BJP-linked incidents were mostly confined to speech, VHP and Bajrang Dal incidents often moved beyond speech into direct action. A Christian prayer gathering was attacked, injuring worshippers and damaging church property. In Nawada, on 24 September 2025, a Bajrang Dal leader declared that non-Hindus would not be allowed to enter local religious events, and that anyone who did enter would be made to drink cow urine as a condition of “ghar wapsi” (return to Hinduism), with people stationed to forcibly apply tilak and perform aarti on every visitor.
Twenty-eight incidents (22.2 per cent) involved a mixed set of organisers. Religious leaders who spoke from the stage belonged to smaller outfits such as the Hindu Putra Sangh and Hindu Shiv Bhavani Sena. The editor of a television channel, Sudarshan News, stated on air that his channel existed specifically to oppose “love jihad” and “land jihad.” This category also includes some incidents linked to Asaduddin Owaisi’s party, the AIMIM, and social-media remarks by one of its leaders.
Finally, 17 incidents (13.5 per cent) could not be traced to any identifiable speaker or organisation, and a further 4 incidents (3.2 per cent) were the acts of lone individuals — proof that ordinary people as vulnerable as the vendors named in Section 1.1 remain targets even without an organised campaign behind them.
3. When Did the Incidents Occur?
The data show that the calendar of elections and the calendar of hate ran side by side. From January to June 2025, Bihar recorded fewer than three incidents a month on average — a calm, stable baseline. This baseline broke in July 2025, precisely the month the Election Commission launched the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls, an administrative exercise to re-verify every voter’s eligibility. Hate-speech incidents then rose sharply: 6 in July, 19 in August, 12 in September, 17 in October, and 27 in November — the month of polling. Once the election ended, incidents fell just as sharply, dropping to only 4 in December 2025. They rose again in March (9) and April (7) 2026, as political activity intensified once more.
Most pre-election “infiltrator” rhetoric was directly tied to the question of who should and should not remain on Bihar’s electoral rolls. Case after case in October–November 2025 shows a senior leader asking the crowd, almost like a chant, whether the names of “infiltrators” should be struck off. Set against the backdrop of the SIR, this was no abstract debate but a deliberate campaign built on delegitimising the presence of a particular religious-linguistic community on the electoral rolls.
4. Where Did the Incidents Occur?
The state capital, Patna, recorded the highest number of incidents, 16 (12.7 per cent), largely because the state’s major rallies, press conferences, and demonstrations are concentrated there. Darbhanga ranked second with 9 incidents, consistent with the region’s longer history of religious and identity-based mobilisation.
A more significant pattern emerges in the Seemanchal region — the districts of Purnia, Kishanganj, Araria, and Katihar — which together recorded 15 incidents. Though this number may appear small, it is disproportionately high, because these are precisely the districts with the largest populations of Bangla-speaking Muslims, where the “infiltrator” accusation cuts deepest. Here, the charge stops being rhetorical flourish and becomes an attack on real families who have lived there for generations but whose speech and appearance make them easy targets. The remaining 14 incidents could not be tied to a single location, as they spread through social media, television, and messaging apps.
5. The Assault on Women
Running beneath every category above is a current that strikes directly at women’s autonomy. The “love jihad” narrative, present in 23 cases, rests on the assumption that girls cannot choose their own partners and, where necessary, must be forcibly prevented from exercising that choice. In one instance, a group openly declared it would patrol parks to keep watch on couples. The repeatedly staged tableau of the mutilated effigy uses an image of violence against a woman’s body to sell a political narrative. Targeting Muslim women specifically with terms such as “miyain” fuses discrimination on the grounds of both religion and gender.
6. The Impact of Hate Speech
6.1 Social Impact
The clearest consequence of the past year and a half is the fracture in the everyday relationships that ordinarily bind Bihar’s different communities together: customers and shopkeepers, classmates, neighbours, friends, colleagues. When Union Minister Giriraj Singh, at the Purnia rally, called on the crowd to buy only from Hindu shops and eat jhatka meat instead of halal, he was not merely attempting to destroy Muslim livelihoods. He was attempting to tear apart this fabric of relationships. Muslim and Christian cultural life is being “quietly erased” from public spaces even as majoritarian religious symbols grow more visible and assertive — a slow, silent form of social exclusion, hard to quantify but no less real. One account describes a graduate from the Sherhshahbadi Muslim community who grew up sharing schoolwork with a close Hindu friend, and who avoided meat out of consideration for him; he now says an unbridgeable rift has opened between them. A Sherhshahbadi Muslim from Kishanganj puts it plainly: the entire community grows fearful whenever a “Hindu majoritarian leader” visits Seemanchal.
The administration added fuel to the fire. On 29 August 2025, the Superintendent of Police of Siwan district issued a public notice appealing to residents to report any “suspected illegal migrant, particularly Bangladeshi,” to the nearest police station. Three days later, the District Magistrate of Kishanganj directed officials to establish a formal mechanism for gathering information on “illegal” migrants. Such measures do more than reflect suspicion already present in society — they give that suspicion official sanction, turning a government office into a platform on which one neighbour is invited to inform on another.
6.2 Communal Violence and the Erosion of Law and Order
Hate speech in Bihar was not confined to the podium. In January 2026, in Madhubani, a Muslim labourer named Noorshed Alam was beaten and branded “Bangladeshi,” and forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram.” His attackers examined his phone contacts and accused him of ties to Pakistan and Bangladesh on that basis. Video of the assault circulated widely on social media. The episode enacted, in real life, the very accusation catalogued above: the same language, the same method, but a single labourer in place of a rally crowd. Rhetoric crafted from above by ministers, chief ministers, and party spokespersons seeps downward, shaping how an anonymous individual treats a stranger selling goods on the street.
Earlier, on 16 February 2025, communal violence broke out in Jamui over a Hindu religious procession. All eight people subsequently arrested were Muslim. This fits a broader pattern seen repeatedly in BJP-governed states: regardless of who initiated the violence, arrests fall disproportionately, and sometimes exclusively, on Muslims.
7. Institutions: Who Did What
Every administrative or constitutional institution examined shows the same structure: complaints filed in accordance with due process and backed by solid evidence were met, at every level, either with silence, a routine response, or, in some cases, a response that inflamed the very issue it was meant to resolve.
7.1 Election Commission
The Election Commission ran the 2025 Bihar election with genuine rigour, deploying 824 flying squads, a 24-hour helpline, and swift action on routine violations. Yet this same Commission both designed and defended the Special Intensive Revision that ran alongside the hate speech documented in this report. It dismissed allegations that the exercise disproportionately harmed Muslims as “communal,” insisting instead that it was secular in nature.
On 29 October 2025, Citizens for Justice and Peace wrote to Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officer listing complaints against several prominent leaders, including: (a) Giriraj Singh, for his “namak haram” remark against Muslims in Arwal and Begusarai; (b) Union Minister Nityanand Rai, who referred to “Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators” in a speech in Hayaghat on 30 October; (c) Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who, speaking in Siwan on 10 November, compared an opposition candidate to Osama bin Laden and urged the crowd to “finish off” such people in Bihar; and (d) BJP MP Ashwini Choubey, who called on Muslims to “reduce their population” in a speech in Bhagalpur on 13 November.
Yet the specific complaints filed against Giriraj Singh, Nityanand Rai, Himanta Biswa Sarma, and Ashwini Choubey drew no show-cause notice, no censure, and no other public action from the Commission — even though each complaint clearly cited the Model Code of Conduct’s prohibition on religious appeals. This mirrors the Commission’s conduct in the previous general election. There too it acknowledged that campaign speeches violated its guidelines, yet sent only generic letters to party leadership without naming a single speaker. Hate speech continued unchecked.
7.2 Police and Administration
Bihar Police did take action during the 2025 election, but who that action targeted is telling. The Economic Offences Wing filed 21 FIRs during the election period — against anonymous social-media handles and AI-generated deepfake videos, not against the senior, named leaders whose speeches were, in those very weeks, the subject of written complaints from Citizens for Justice and Peace.
Enforcing the Model Code of Conduct during elections is a shared responsibility of the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police. Ahead of the 2025 election, the Election Commission had set up 824 “flying squads” and a C-Vigil app across the state so that any citizen’s complaint could be investigated and resolved within 100 minutes. Yet there is not a single instance of a District Magistrate acting on a hate-speech complaint, even though the complaints described above were specific enough — in date, location, and legal provision — that verifying them within the Commission’s own 100-minute window should not have been difficult.
7.3 State Government
Nitish Kumar remained Chief Minister of Bihar, as head of the NDA, through the November 2025 election and for several months afterward. Yet when controversy erupted over Giriraj Singh’s “namak haram” remark in October 2025, the JD(U) spokesperson said only that “voters rise above such remarks when making their decisions,” while another party leader came to Singh’s defence. No disciplinary action was recorded against any coalition leader over hate speech during the election.
On 14 April 2026, the BJP’s Samrat Choudhary was sworn in as Chief Minister. This is the same Samrat Choudhary who, as Deputy Chief Minister in July 2025, told journalists that a tenfold rise in residence-certificate applications in Kishanganj showed that “Bangladeshis must be attempting to infiltrate.”
7.4 National and State Human Rights Commissions
The National Human Rights Commission is the apex body for investigating human-rights violations anywhere in the country, and one of its strongest powers is the ability to take suo motu cognisance of a matter without waiting for a complaint. Its recent list of suo motu cases includes medical negligence in Madhya Pradesh, child abuse at a Karnataka crèche, bonded labour in Uttar Pradesh, and a building collapse in Kolkata — but not a single case relating to hate speech or communal incidents in Bihar. The story is no different at Bihar’s State Human Rights Commission. Against the entire pattern documented in this report, the Commission issued no complaint resolution, conducted no inquiry, and made no public statement. The state Commission’s complete silence on hate speech speaks to the broader ineffectiveness of these constitutional institutions.
7.5 National Commission for Minorities
On 30 September 2025, Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) filed a detailed complaint with the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) describing a “worrying, deliberate rise” in hate speech against Bangla-origin Muslims, naming Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Union Minister Giriraj Singh, and BJP leaders Jagannath Sarkar and Samik Bhattacharya. The complaint sought a full inquiry, FIRs, and preventive orders to stop such rhetoric in future. This was one of at least six major complaints CJP filed with the NCM in 2025. On this Bihar-specific complaint, the NCM produced no findings, issued no statement, and took no other visible action.
7.6 The Courts
India’s courts have, over the past decade, developed substantial jurisprudence on this subject — holding that hate speech undermines the right to equality, that preventing hate-driven violence is a “sacred duty” of the state, that public figures bear a heightened responsibility for their words, and that police must register cases on their own initiative the moment hate speech comes to their notice, without waiting for a complaint. In practice, however, courts exercise far greater caution when powerful leaders are involved: the Patna High Court’s dismissal, in 2023, of a long-pending complaint against Giriraj Singh, and the Supreme Court’s refusal, in 2025–26, to issue new guidelines, both illustrate the gulf between principle and practice.
8. Conclusion
Taken together, the seven trends described above sketch the full pattern of hate speech examined here: the language and ideas used in these speeches; when they intensified; where they occurred; which political and religious forces were involved; the impact of hate speech on women, religious minorities, the social fabric that binds communities together, and law and order; and the role played, amid all this, by the institutions constitutionally and legally entrusted with protecting citizens. The purpose of this inquiry was to understand precisely these questions. The 126 incidents examined here are only a sample — the incidents this author was able to identify. The picture that emerges from them is deeply troubling and poses a formidable challenge to the country’s pluralistic and syncretic social culture. All progressive individuals, particularly human-rights defenders and organisations grappling with this challenge, need to redouble their efforts.
[On sources: This article is based on an examination of newspapers, news portals, research papers, organisational statements, official documents, and court records. A detailed list of sources is available on request.]
The author, Aarav Kandoi, is a third-year LLB student in the Department of Law, Central University of Punjab. This article is based on his internship report with PUCL Bihar, completed in June 2026.