In Nuh district, a mere 90-minute drive from the nation’s parliament, cars were set ablaze, shops were ransacked and the crackle of gunfire filled the air. By Sunday last week, six people had been killed – right on New Delhi’s doorstep.
On the other side of the world, a group of 20-somethings scattered across North America and Europe got to work scouring social media for evidence of who or what might have lit the fuse.
Five hours – and incalculable gigabytes of data – later they had found what they were looking for: a speech given moments before the violence erupted by a Hindu-nationalist leader aligned with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), insisting that Muslims had no place in Nuh and calling for the region’s “character” to be changed.