How it felt to be Pakistani in Hindu Nationalist India

I thought often about his journey as I packed up two years of life in Delhi in preparation for my own, very different, Indian departure. My partner’s job had brought us there, and we returned to Washington this month. But despite the privilege of my U.S. passport, I lived in Delhi with the painful echoes of my grandfather’s partition. For almost two years, I lived as a Pakistani-born Muslim in Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist India. I knew that the experience would be disorienting, but nothing could have prepared me for how vast, toxic and enduring partition had become.

When I first landed in Delhi, the city seemed eerily familiar and welcoming. I beheld the same faces, music, spices and noisy alleyways from my childhood in Lahore. The city’s colonial avenues blended with its red sandstone Mughal monuments, just as they do in my home city. But then in the middle of introductions that first day, my driver revealed his great hope for war. He hated Pakistanis. “They’re a nation of terrorists,” he said. He wanted the new prime minister to consider using nuclear weapons against them. My instinct was to pass this off as the ramblings of an uneducated man. But I soon discovered how normalized, among all kinds of people, these views had become.

One example is a new intolerance for India’s history of religious coexistence. A month after I arrived, students at Delhi’s leading public university were arrested and charged with sedition for criticizing the government. They were eventually released and suspended, but the term “anti-national,” which implied pro-Pakistan (and thus pro-Muslim), entered the lexicon soon after as a powerful epithet. Trolls took to Twitter and the streets to police anyone who dared to speak out against the state. One day I opened the newspaper to find an image of two bodies — one a 35-year-old man, the other a 12-year-old boy — dangling from a tree. They were Muslim cattle traders who had been lynched by Hindu cow-protection vigilantes. Their corpses were meant to send a warning to those suspected of eating, transporting or selling beef. As similar attacks on Muslims grew in frequency and brutality, the leadership’s silence spoke volumes. Although I was privileged by Indian standards, with a gated apartment and a driver, I became depressed and increasingly nervous about leaving home.

A yoga teacher concluded a much-needed meditation practice with an unexpected tirade against Muslims. According to him, they’d ruined the city with their filth and multiplying population. He told me I needed to accept my community’s culpability in its subservient condition. I stayed silent during political dinner conversations that turned to the question of my nebulous heritage. “I’m American” never sufficed, so I evaded the subject. Everywhere I went, I was simply mistaken for an Indian Muslim and treated with neither the reverence nor the hustle reserved for Western tourists. I passed. But I was definitely elsewhere on the inside.

After a skirmish over the conflict in Kashmir, Pakistani actors and musicians were banned from Bollywood films, and it became mandatory to stand for the Indian national anthem before each movie. A disabled man was slapped and berated in one cinema for not standing up, in a case of mistaken anti-nationalism. I always obligingly mouthed the words of the anthem I didn’t recognize. I adapted my parents’ Urdu to sound like Delhi’s colloquial Hindi. (The languages that once played together had also become partitioned.) I raised my hands to say “ram ram” to the saffron-robed walkers in Lodi Gardens when “salaam” had once been my default setting. I was a closeted Pakistani, and only my very closest friends knew. I often wondered when and where I would be found out.