The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi

ON RARE OCCASIONS, the Indian government—which prides itself on visions of universal digital literacy, online services, and biometrical identity schemes—still conducts certain official communications by radiogram. An operator sitting at a radio transmitter taps out a message, and then a receiver spits out the transmission in another part of the country, generating an instant legal document. And so it was that on December 31, 2015, the superintendent of the jail in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, received a copy of a radiogram from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, marked “urgent.”
The...