Just over twenty years ago, Hindu militants destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, northern India, prompting riots around the country that claimed thousands of lives—overwhelmingly Muslim—including nine hundred in Bombay (now Mumbai) alone.* Ten years later, a conflagration of violence in India’s northwestern state of Gujarat killed at least as many Muslims, with the support of the state’s right-wing government. These “hiccups” in the rise of “the world’s largest secular democracy” received international attention at the time, though not enough to shatter the narrative of India as a liberal powerhouse propelled into the twenty-first century by economic reforms.

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