Instances of communal violence between Hindu and Muslim groups have steadily increased across India, including a clash this week in Delhi during a Hindu religious procession. This incident in the capital is only the most recent in a string of increasingly intense sectarian clashes that have broken out between Hindus and Muslims throughout India, including the states of Karnataka, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, and Andhra Pradesh, with many, including this week’s in Delhi, beginning during religious processions as many Hindus celebrate the festival of Hanuman Jayanti. However, as in Delhi, the processions have been often coopted by Hindu nationalists who begin shouting anti-Muslim slogans, vandalizing Muslim property, and harassing Muslim neighborhoods, leading to violent confrontations between the two groups that the police must break up.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have not commented on the surge in violence, with Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi downplaying the violence to the Economic Times, dismissing the “Fringe elements, who are unable to digest the peace and prosperity in the country, try to defame India’s inclusive culture and commitment.” However, many in India blame Modi and the BJP for the bitter divide between Hindus and Muslims, with 13 opposition parties releasing a joint statement this past weekend condemning the Prime Minister, who they say “Has failed to speak against the words and actions of those who propagate bigotry and those who, by their words and actions, incite and provoke our society.”

In a statement to the Indian Express, Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, described, “An apocalypse of hatred, bigotry, intolerance and untruth…engulfing our country,” and imploring Indians to not, “Stand by and watch as peace and pluralism are sacrificed at the altar of bogus nationalism.”

Pakistan’s Foreign Office condemned the violence and called on Indian authorities to investigate those involved, with a statement that, “notes with deep regret the rapidly increasing trend in India of using religious processions of the Hindu community to fan communal hatred and instigate anti-Muslim violence,” and even accusing that, “Local authorities…complicit in the fear-mongering,” have enacted, “A concerted campaign against the Muslims on the pretext of crackdown against alleged rioters.”

These clashes are the inevitable consequence of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP’s divisive Hindu nationalist rhetoric, and responsibility for all the damages, injuries, and deaths caused by this sectarian violence should fall squarely on the BJP.

India has the third largest Muslim population of any country in the world with at least 200 million, but this still only makes up 14.7% of the population, with nearly a billion of its 1.2 billion population being Hindu. But although much of India is Hindu, Hinduism is not a centralized religion with universally [adhered to] tenets, instead it, like all of India, is highly diverse across the demographic and geographic divisions of the country. Hundreds of different languages, cultures, historical experiences, and religious practices flourish across India, enjoying a plurality that is hard for many outside the country to appreciate.

Unfortunately for so many in India, the BJP has found a way to use fear and Hindu nationalism to galvanize wide electoral and social support from the diverse Hindu population of India, whipping up fears of the eternal enemy Pakistan and of the supposed danger Muslims pose to Hindus.

This divisive Hindu nationalist fear-mongering isn’t going to leave the BJP’s political lexicon any time soon, despite consequences both extant and impending, and as Modi and the BJP further encroach on the rights of the tens of millions of Indian Muslims, there is no way of knowing just how much danger this population is in.

The actions the BJP has already taken do not bode well for the future, such as the 2019 Citizenship Amendment which the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called “fundamentally discriminatory” and which, “Undermine[s] the commitment to equality before the law enshrined in India’s constitution,” by providing protections to religious minorities fleeing to India while explicitly excluding Muslim immigrants. Despite what Modi and the BJP say, the Indians most in danger today are Indian Muslims, and the threat to them is their government.