I was once that teen, just another kid navigating changes. But what set my experience apart, what stripped away the innocence of that growth, was my identity as a Muslim. More specifically, as a Bengali Muslim in a part of India, I hesitate to name out of fear. In that region, being a Bengali Muslim meant being seen as a pest, an “illegal” outsider, something so subhuman that it needed to be erased.
At the time, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the wider worldview to explain the phenomenon, but I knew something was not right. I could feel the weight of prejudice, the suffocating grip of xenophobia, even if I couldn’t fully articulate it. I’m certain I wasn’t alone. Growing up Muslim in such an environment forces you to mature in ways kids of your age don’t. It accelerates your political awareness, making you see and understand things far earlier than your peers.
Two years ago, when the hijab ban was enforced in schools and colleges across Karnataka, I was still working full-time at Alt News, a fact-checking and media literacy-focused organization in India. It was a busy time for me -- I had just finished my undergraduate thesis, and the world was beginning to emerge from the Covid lockdowns.
Amid all this, part of my job involved watching interviews of the hijab-donning Muslim girls who were barred from entering the institutions they had studied at for years. It was a self-assigned exercise so that I could be familiar with the faces and context, had there been a need to fact-check something, and part of it was just curiosity to know what was happening.
These students had been betrayed, not only by their peers, who eagerly supported denying them their right to education, but also by their teachers and principals, who readily endorsed these discriminatory policies.
As I watched these interviews, I couldn’t help but notice how articulate and politically aware these Muslim students were compared to their peers who were also interviewed by reporters on the ground. These Muslim kids were about to miss out on critical exams and potentially a year or more of their education, yet they carried themselves with intelligence and resilience. I kept thinking about how incredibly bright and deserving these students were, even as the system worked against them.
Eventually with the change in state government, the hijab ban gradually faded away, but I often find myself wondering -- where are those kids now? What became of them after enduring such deep pain and humiliation, simply because of their religious identity? While their peers moved through their academic programs as if nothing had ever happened, these girls were forced to navigate the crushing weight of exclusion, shame, and lost opportunities.
I wonder how that experience has shaped them. Did they find a way to reclaim their education and their futures, or were they left behind by a system that so easily discarded them? What scars do they carry from being told they didn’t belong, from watching their classmates sail through life while their own world was upended? It haunts me to think that this was their reality, that a bright and promising future was put on hold, perhaps indefinitely in that moment, all because of a piece of cloth and the faith it represents.
What scars do they carry from being told they didn’t belong, from watching their classmates sail through life while their own world was upended?
Like their peers, I moved on -- partly because my work required it. There was so much happening at that time, Alt News’ co-founder Mohammed Zubair had been arrested by the Delhi Police over a social media post, which contained a screengrab from an obscure Bollywood film, which was a wordplay on a Hindu deity; every day brought new forms of violence and injustice, and it became impossible to keep track of it all. As I evolved from a fact-checker to an open-source researcher, I found my footing and confidence in covering these issues in my way.
At Alt News, we were gradually developing a focus on tracking inflammatory speeches made by prominent faces, many of whom were Hindutva figures. The task was straightforward but critical: Using foundational open-source research and journalistic methods, we would document, transcribe, and translate these speeches to understand when, where, and what kinds of dangerous ideas were being spread.
It was a gruelling process, often demoralizing, listening to speech after speech filled with hatred and vitriol, and manually recording every word. There was no way to automate this process. Tools do not comprehend the various accents of India. I was acutely aware of how delicate this work was. I knew that if challenged in a court of law, my reporting had to be airtight -- standing solely on its own merits.
What kept me going was the commitment to objectivity. I meticulously analyzed and broke down specific comments and conspiracy theories with the utmost honesty, even when they were drenched in bigotry. Throughout, I had to steel myself, often ignoring the constant barrage of dehumanizing remarks made against my own community. It wasn’t easy, but I believed in the power of truth and documentation, no matter how uncomfortable the process was.
After all, journalism is the first draft of history. Eventually, it took a toll on me and I decided to quit. It was not because I was unhappy at my work, I just couldn’t keep up with these hateful remarks. I thought I was brave and more resilient than others because I had seen it all growing up, turns out, I wasn’t that brave.
Despite serving my notice period, I continued to subject myself to these videos, and with those videos parallelly, videos of cow vigilantes assaulting Muslim youth would appear on the social media feed. I would see myself in every video. What if that was me? What if it was someone I love?
These children, just beginning to understand the world, are already being taught that they are different and that they don’t belong
Then came another video, another assault, another hate crime. Some left me more hurt than others. In August 2023, a video emerged from Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, showing a teacher instructing her students to slap a Muslim boy while she made hateful remarks against his community. The boy was in the second grade -- far too young to understand what was happening, too young to be as articulate compared to the girls barred from entering their schools and universities for wearing hijabs in Karnataka. But like so many of us, this child is now forced to grow up faster than he should, his innocence stolen simply because of his identity.
A year later, another video surfaced -- another child, another school. This time, a seven-year-old boy from Amroha, Uttar Pradesh, was expelled for bringing “non-veg biryani” in his lunchbox. In the video, the principal could be heard saying he “won’t teach children who will demolish temples when they grow up,” going so far as to accuse the child of attempting to convert others through food. This boy was in the third grade.
Both of these kids, barely old enough to tie their shoes, are now marked by these experiences -- forced to navigate a world that’s hostile to their existence, burdened with a premature awareness of the hate that surrounds them. The simple acts of being in school, of bringing lunch from home, become acts of defiance in the eyes of those who see their faith as a threat. These children, just beginning to understand the world, are already being taught that they are different and that they don’t belong. And in this, they are forced to grow up far too soon.
The despair
When Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, I was just 14 years old. Despite the xenophobia I had already experienced, I remained hopeful. I wasn’t aware of the horrors of 2002, and the liberal elite of the country filled their columns and editorials with praise, claiming that the Modi era would transform India. This false optimism intoxicated me -- I wanted to believe in a better future.
By 2015, after the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq -- one of the first to be brutally murdered by a mob on the mere suspicion that he had beef in his fridge -- I thought his name would be etched in my memory forever. I couldn’t wrap my head around how a person could be killed over something as trivial as a dietary preference, something so personal, so ordinary.
But as the years passed, more and more people were lynched, and the unimaginable became routine. Slowly, the names blurred into numbers, each new tragedy overshadowing the last. Akhlaq’s name, once a symbol of the horror I couldn’t forget, eventually became a stand-in for the countless others who suffered the same fate -- an emblem for all those whose lives were stolen by mob violence. The reality had hit hard. Something had shifted in the country, and despair began to settle in.
Kalim Ahmed is a columnist and open-source researcher specialising in technology, meme culture and disinformation. A version of this article was previously published on Maktoob Media and has been reprinted under special arrangement.