Hateful speech mainly targeting India’s Muslim and Christian minorities have become, since 2014, a routine and increasingly normalised element of India’s public life.Hate speeches commonly resound on political platforms. These have become the principal currency of election campaigning. They reverberate in what pose to be religious discourses. They resonate in television studios, on social media, in newspapers and cinema.India led by Narendra Modi has been marked also by the conspicuous and consistent reluctance of the police and courts at every level to prevent, investigate or punish even dangerous hate speech that directly incites violence. Hateful speeches cumulatively have created a vast, alternative common sense that depicts the Muslim as disloyal, violent and lustful and the Christian as people who have been bribed by charitable social services to abandon their birth religion.Many citizens who are appalled by the consistent failure of the criminal justice system to act against hate speech call for a dedicated hate speech law, believing that if such a statute is legislated, the spread of the poison of hate speech will be halted. Based on such beliefs, the legislatures in two Congress-led states, Karnataka and Telangana, have voted to pass the country’s first hate speech laws. The Karnataka law is awaiting presidential assent at the time I write this, and the Telangana law has been referred to a legislative committee.I will argue, first, that it is not the absence of law that explains the failures of the executive and courts to punish hate speech. It is the absence of will, sometimes spurred by ideology. And second, that the hate speech laws canvassed by the two Congress governments are probably well-meaning, yet inherent in them are dangers of the misuse of the laws to suppress dissent and persecute minorities.Despite the Supreme Court directing police to register hate-speech cases suo motu, the situation on the ground appears to have changed little.https://t.co/QubP4OYmkTRatna Singh reports on the apex court's latest stances on #hatespeech— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) March 25, 2026