At The Polis Project, we are concerned about the ways in which the State perpetuates violence with impunity. In response to this concern, we set up Watch the State in December 2019 during the Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests in India. With the work we do at Watch the State, we hold the State and the people in power accountable by creating a repository of state violence and maintaining public and institutional memory. As part of this project we’ve been tracking the wave of extremism and hate violence in the Indian state of Uttrakhand that has been growing since 2017, and particularly since early 2023. Closely observing what’s happening in this state can tell us a lot and show us the clear patterns of violence:

• about how this violence is engineered;

• about how government and party connive with a handful of hatemongers to engineer a violent atmosphere;

• and about impunity and a media that fails to investigate can create the impression of general “communal violence” rather than what is actually going on: a systematic, criminal campaign.

Tracking the actual incidents shows a clear pattern. In addition Meenakshi describes what are called ‘Laboratories’ of mass violence where both in India and across the world, the State trials methods of ethnic cleansing and mass oppression before applying them on a broader scale.