This article provides a deep dive into several recent cases of majoritarian hate speech and violence perpetrated against Muslims in India. We first provide an introduction to Hindutva as a social movement in India, followed by an examination of three case studies in which Islamophobic hate speech circulated on social media, as well as several instances of anti-Muslim violence. These case studies—the Delhi riots, the Love Jihad conspiracy theory, and anti-Muslim disinformation related to the COVID pandemic—show that Hindu nationalism in India codes the Muslim minority in the country as particularly dangerous and untrustworthy.

The cost of highway accidents in terms loss of lives, injuries and road closures is a major strain on the Nigerian economy. It has therefore become pertinent to explore the causes of such accidents from a road condition perspective with a view to limiting their frequency and degree of severity. Three federal roads in Bauchi State were considered for this study; Bauchi-Jos, Bauchi-Gombe and Bauchi-Yobe Border, respectively. The pavement condition data indicated that Bauchi-Jos rouate has the highest Road Condition Score (RCS) while Bauchi-Gombe route has the lowest RCS. The Jos route also accounted for the highest number of accidents and fatalities despite having the best pavement condition, while the Yobe route accounted for the least number of accidents and fatalities. The results support the general view that there is no strong correlation between pavement condition and traffic safety, however some design and planning issues like the degree of curvature of horizontal and vertical curves and number of towns/villages on the routes seem to play an important role in traffic safety.

Perhaps it is best to summarize what this article is not about, and then highlight what it seeks to do instead, finally surmising those strands together cohesively. This article is not on Urdu as a medium for self-fashioning elite Ashrafi Muslims in Lucknow who lamented the “death of the city” in shahr-i-adab (the city of high culture and noble manners) kind of literatures, instead it is about how Ashrafis came to be normatively portrayed by prominent leaders of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh as “foreigners.” This article is not exclusively about caste politics,  but rather how the trope of the foreigner was used as a way to otherize and prevent some of the most downtrodden Muslims from availing affirmative action policies and how lower caste and Dalit Muslims themselves tried to find liberation away from their stigmatized caste histories, unfortunately without success as conversion did not eclipse casteist tropes against them. This article is not just about the institutional history of the fall of Urdu in Uttar Pradesh, but it focusses on how Urdu was used to shape the minority citizen status of Muslims, and how it impacted their political economy and caste histoies in Lucknow by using both written materials documenting these issues and oral testimonies of Ashrafi and Pasmanda Muslims in Lucknow. In the process, this article is about the contours that defined the production of Muslim minoritysm in India, externally by Post Colonial governmentality of the 1950s and internally by Muslims themselves who were compelled to “self homogenize” despite political and social fractures within the community in the face of demonizing and ahistoric stereotypes of the Muslim community as “backward Musalmaans” that ignored their multiple layers of institutionally created marginalization.

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