This Ram Navami Is Different

A concerned citizen's letter about what converges on March 26, 2026

A Note Before You Read

I want to be honest with you about what moved me to write this letter.

For some months I have been studying the relationship between communal violence and elections in India — reading data, cross-referencing sources, building a framework that any careful citizen could use. I am not a professional researcher. I am someone who pays attention and cannot stop paying attention once a pattern becomes visible.

What I did not expect was to find that credible international institutions had already arrived at sobering conclusions independently of my own study.

Genocide Watch — whose early warning framework is used by the United Nations and the US State Department, and which was developed specifically after the Holocaust so that the world would never again say "we did not see it coming" — has published a formal assessment concluding that all early warning signs of mass violence against Muslims are present in India today.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Early Warning Project, using statistical modeling developed from the study of past genocides, currently places India fourth highest among 168 countries for risk of a new mass killing beginning in 2025 or 2026.

I share this not to frighten you, and not to make a political statement. I share it because I believe you deserve to know that my concern is not merely personal intuition — it is grounded in documented evidence that serious people have examined seriously.

Gandhi taught us that the truth, however uncomfortable, is always our friend. Evasion serves no one.

The letter that follows is written in the spirit of ahimsa — gently, without blame, addressed to your conscience rather than your alarm. But it is written in full knowledge of what the data shows. I ask you to read it in the same spirit: with open eyes and an open heart.

— A devotee of Venkateshwara, citizen of Hyderabad, March 2026

Written in the spirit of ahimsa — for friends, family, and fellow citizens

"A Hindu says, 'I love Ram.' A Muslim says, 'I love Rahman.' Both fight and die without knowing the truth." — Kabir, 15th century

Dear friend,

I write to you not to frighten you, and not to tell you what to think. I write because I have been paying close attention to something that troubles me, and because I believe you deserve to know what I have found. I trust your judgment. I trust your conscience. I only ask that you read this carefully and then decide for yourself.

Ram Navami falls on March 26 this year. I love this festival. It celebrates a king who stood for truth, who protected the vulnerable, who kept his word even at great personal cost. Whatever our religion, most of us know Ram this way — as a figure of integrity, not of power.

This year, Ram Navami arrives during Ramadan, three days before Eid. And it arrives approximately six weeks before West Bengal goes to elections.

I want to tell you why that combination asks something of us as citizens.

What I Have Been Watching

For some time now I have been studying the relationship between communal violence and elections in India. I want to be careful here — I am not saying anyone orders violence. I am saying that data, carefully examined, shows a pattern that every responsible citizen deserves to know about.

Independent researchers have documented that communal riots in India spike significantly in the months before elections — concentrated in particular states, particularly in the weeks closest to voting. The Centre for Study of Society and Secularism recorded an 84% rise in communal incidents in 2024 compared to the previous year, and attributed this explicitly to the election cycle. International organizations including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Genocide Watch have raised formal early warnings about India that I found deeply sobering when I first read them.

I am not sharing this to alarm you. I am sharing it because I believe an informed citizen is a protected citizen — and a protective one.

The pattern I have observed has two phases. In the months before an election, social tensions are slowly raised — incidents accumulate, narratives are built, communities are reminded of their differences. Then, in the final weeks before voting, a specific flashpoint — often a religious festival — becomes the moment of sharpest intensity.

Ram Navami has appeared in this pattern repeatedly. Not because Ram Navami is anything other than a beautiful celebration. But because processions, music, crowded streets, and mixed neighbourhoods create conditions that, when not handled with care and good faith, can produce incidents that then get amplified far beyond what actually happened.

This year's overlap with Ramadan makes the calendar unusually sensitive. Both communities will be at their most emotionally present simultaneously. In that atmosphere, a small spark travels further than usual.

What Ahimsa Asks of Us

Gandhi taught us that ahimsa is not passivity. It is the most active principle there is — it requires us to refuse to harm, even when we are frightened, even when others around us are choosing otherwise.

Ahimsa in language means we do not speak of any community — Hindu, Muslim, or any other — as a threat, an enemy, or less than fully human. This applies to what we share on WhatsApp. To what we say at the dinner table. To how we describe an incident we heard about from someone who heard about it from someone else.

I have noticed that in the weeks before elections, stories circulate — of attacks, of insults, of provocations — that arrive already inflamed, already demanding our outrage. Some of these stories are true. Some are exaggerated. Some are manufactured entirely. Almost none of them arrive with the full context that would allow us to judge them fairly.

Gandhi's satyagraha — insistence on truth — asks us to pause before we pass these stories on. To ask: do I know this is accurate? Do I know who benefits from my outrage? Am I being invited to see a neighbour as an enemy?

This is not asking you to be naïve. It is asking you to be careful with a power you genuinely have — the power of what you choose to amplify and what you choose to let pass.

A Word About This Particular Moment

"No one reads the Vedas in the womb. No Turk is born circumcised. Dropped from the belly at birth, every man puts on his costume. The world was born from one mother. Which wisdom teaches separation?" — Kabir

Before I tell you what I am watching, I must tell you something that happened four days ago — because it changes the meaning of this Ram Navami in ways that deserve honest acknowledgment.

On February 28, 2026, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — Iran's Supreme Leader for 36 years and a revered Shia cleric — was killed in joint US and Israeli airstrikes on his compound in Tehran. Iran declared forty days of mourning. That mourning period runs through approximately April 9. Ram Navami falls within it.

For India's Shia Muslims — concentrated in Hyderabad, Lucknow, parts of Bihar and UP — this is the loss of a figure of deep religious and spiritual significance. For many Muslims more broadly, across both Shia and Sunni communities, his death has become a symbol of grief about what they see as ongoing Western and Israeli military aggression against Muslim-majority nations — a grief that sits alongside the still-raw wounds of Gaza.

I say this not to alarm anyone. I say it because it is true, and because Gandhi taught us that ahimsa begins with seeing others' pain clearly.

On March 26, our Muslim neighbours will be fasting — it is the last sacred days of Ramadan, three days before Eid. They will be in mourning. They will be watching a war in which people who share their faith are dying. This is not a threat. This is a human reality. They are people — our neighbours, our colleagues, our fellow citizens — carrying a weight that we should at minimum acknowledge, and at most gently share.

Ram understood grief. He carried his own. He did not ask those who were suffering to hide it.

What this means practically is simple: this Ram Navami calls for extra tenderness. Extra care in how processions are conducted. Extra patience if we encounter someone who seems withdrawn or sorrowful. Extra willingness to simply be a kind presence rather than an assertion of any kind.

The politics of manufactured tension relies on communities being strangers to each other's pain. But we are not asked to carry each other's burdens — we are asked only to recognise that we stand under the same sky, held by the same care, watched over by the same presence that each of us calls by a different name. That recognition, quietly maintained, is itself a form of resistance to everything that is trying to make us strangers.

What I Am Watching This March 26

I will be paying attention to a few specific things around Ram Navami, and I share them in case they are useful to you too.

I will watch whether procession routes in sensitive areas are being chosen to build bridges or to assert dominance — there is a difference, and it is usually visible to anyone paying attention.

I will watch how quickly organized political groups appear at any incident with pre-prepared demands and social media content — genuine community concern looks different from activated political machinery.

I will watch whether the law responds the same way regardless of which community is involved — because asymmetric justice is itself a form of violence, slow and institutional but real.

And I will also watch for the moments of beauty that always exist alongside the darkness — the Hindu neighbours who stand with Muslim families, the Muslim communities who welcome Ram Navami processions with flowers and water, the ordinary citizens who simply refuse to be enemies. These moments are not naive. They are the actual India, stubbornly present beneath the noise.

What Ram Actually Stood For

"Hari is in the East, Allah is in the West. Look within your heart, for there you will find both Karim and Ram." — Kabir

I cannot write about Ram Navami without saying this plainly, in the spirit of ahimsa:

Ram stood for the protection of the vulnerable. He stood for truth over convenience. He stood for keeping his word even when it cost him everything. He stood for a kingdom — Ram Rajya — where every citizen, regardless of birth or status, lived with dignity.

I think here of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa — Bengal's own beloved mystic, devotee of Kali, brahmin by birth and saint by attainment. In 1866, he did something his Hindu devotees found shocking: he accepted initiation into Islam from a Sufi teacher, wore Muslim dress, prayed the namaz five times daily, chanted the name of Allah, gave up visiting the Kali temple, and even gave up beef restrictions to eat as Muslims ate. For three days he immersed himself so completely that, in his own words, "the Hindu mode of thought had disappeared altogether from my mind." On the third day he had a vision of a radiant figure — understood to be the Prophet — who merged into the formless Absolute. His conclusion, reached not through argument but through lived experience: "This is a legitimate faith. It leads to full spiritual realization."

Ramakrishna's own words carry the simplest possible statement of what India's mystical tradition has always known:

"Different people call on God by different names: some as Allah, some as God, and others as Krishna, Siva, and Brahman. It is like the water in a lake — some call it 'jal', others 'pani', others 'water'. But it is one and the same thing."

This is not interfaith diplomacy. This is a Bengali brahmin speaking from direct experience. If Ramakrishna could pray to Allah with his whole heart and find the same Brahman he had always known — what exactly are we protecting when we use Ram's name to make a neighbour afraid?

A procession that frightens a neighbour is not Ram's procession. A festival that leaves a community feeling unsafe is not Ram's festival. The name of Ram invoked to harm the very people Ram would have protected is not devotion. It is, if we are honest, its opposite.

I say this not to attack anyone's faith. I say it to name something that I believe is true and important.

Those who use Ram's name to spread fear, divide communities, or harm the innocent are revealing — through their very actions — that they do not actually believe Ram sees what they are doing. If they genuinely believed in Ram's sovereignty, in his cosmic awareness, in the inevitability of dharmic accounting, they would be afraid to misuse his name. Their confidence in doing so betrays their actual position: they treat Ram as an inert symbol, a brand, a cultural marker that can be deployed without consequence.

This is the functional definition of atheism — not the philosophical position that God does not exist, but the practical position that God does not see. By that measure, those who invoke Ram's name most loudly for adharmic purposes are, in the deepest sense, atheists.

And what awaits them is what both Hindu and Islamic traditions name with the same trembling: ghazab — the divine wrath that falls when sacred things are violated, when the name of the holy is used as an instrument of harm. That Ram sees. That Allah sees. That Venkateshwara sees. This is not a threat composed by any human authority. It is the cosmic accounting that no political victory, no electoral majority, no earthly power can defer indefinitely.

The misuse of Ram's name is not beyond his reach. It is precisely within it.

What Ram asks of us — his actual devotees — is simply that we not add our own actions to that account.

A Small Request

I am not asking you to protest, or to post, or to confront anyone. I am asking only for your awareness.

Between now and mid-April, please pay gentle attention to what is happening around you. If you see or hear something that feels like it is pushing communities apart — a story, a video, a rumour — pause before passing it on. If you see something that is pushing communities together, share that with the same care.

If you live near areas where Ram Navami processions will pass, perhaps consider being present — not as a political act, but as a human one. Your calm, friendly presence as a citizen who refuses to be an enemy is itself a form of ahimsa.

And if you find this letter worth sharing, please share it with the same spirit in which it was written — not as an alarm, not as a political statement, but as one concerned citizen's honest offering to people they trust and care about.

On this Ram Navami, I find myself turning not only to Ram but to his greatest devotee — Hanuman.

Hanuman is what genuine Ram bhakti looks like in the world. He did not merely love Ram in his heart. He served Ram's dharma with his entire being — with intelligence, with courage, with complete fearlessness, and with absolute freedom from personal ambition. His bhakti was never passive. When Ram's purpose was threatened, Hanuman leapt. When darkness gathered, Hanuman brought light — literally, the burning torch of Lanka that destroyed adharma from within.

Hanuman cannot be deceived by those who wear Ram's name as a costume while serving other purposes. His discriminating devotion — his viveka born entirely of love — sees through performance to reality. He is the eternal guardian not of Ram's reputation but of Ram's actual dharma.

I pray to Hanuman this Ram Navami: teach us what proper devotion looks like. Teach us to love Ram so completely that we cannot be used against him. Teach us to see through the performance of bhakti to the substance of dharma. And stand, as you have always stood, in the way of those who seek to use your beloved Ram's name for purposes Ram himself would not recognise.

Jai Hanuman gyan gun sagar. Jai Kapis tihun lok ujagar.

Glory to Hanuman, ocean of wisdom and virtue. Glory to the Lord of monkeys, who illuminates all three worlds.

Ram Navami Mubarak. Ramadan Mubarak. May this festival season pass in the peace that both traditions, at their deepest, are asking us to build together.

Sai Baba of Shirdi — whom Hindus and Muslims claim with equal love, who lit his lamp with water when others refused him oil, who prayed in mosque and temple alike — left us three words that are perhaps the most complete prayer for this moment:

Sabka Malik Ek.

One God is master of all.

May Hanuman teach us to live as if we truly believe it.

With love and concern,

A devotee of Venkateshwara, citizen of Hyderabad

The data and research referenced in this letter — from the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Early Warning Project, Genocide Watch, and peer-reviewed academic research — is available to anyone who wishes to examine it. I have not cited it heavily here because I wrote this for your conscience, not your bibliography. But I stand behind every factual claim and will share sources with anyone who asks.

A Note on How This Was Written

This letter was developed through an extended dialogue with Claude, Anthropic's AI system, which served as a collaborative partner in research, synthesis, and articulation.

The concern, the moral framework, the pattern recognition, and every substantive claim are entirely my own — the product of months of careful attention to public information and documented evidence. What the AI contributed was the capacity to rapidly cross-reference data sources, identify relevant peer-reviewed research, stress-test the reasoning, and help shape raw analytical thinking into coherent expression.

Importantly, the AI was willing to engage seriously with difficult questions that other systems deflected — including the Genocide Watch findings, the electoral-violence correlation, and the significance of international events for India's communal situation. That willingness to think carefully rather than retreat into comfortable evasion made genuine collaboration possible.

I share this transparency for a specific reason. Gandhi's spinning wheel was not a rejection of tools — it was a demonstration that tools should serve human dignity and conscience rather than replace them. AI, used with discernment and grounded in values, can be such a tool. It can help ordinary citizens — not just researchers or journalists — synthesize complex information, find the pattern in scattered data, and express their conscience clearly.

Anyone can do what I have done here. The spirit of ahimsa, the insistence on truth, the concern for one's neighbours — these belong to no expert and require no institution. They require only attention, honesty, and the willingness to speak what one has carefully seen.

That is what this letter is. Nothing more, and nothing less.

— A citizen of Hyderabad, March 2026

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