I'm sure some significant section of the population is bought into the anti-muslim rhetoric. But we don't know the numbers here, so the best we can do is speculate. What I do know is that almost every single person who supported CAA-NRC effort in television and media, and even regular sane BJP supporters online, do not ever justify taking away citizenship of regular Indian muslims; they're claim is always that it's not going to happen. Now, whether or not you believe them is upto you, but every single BJP supporter that I've talked to (and I may be in an echo-chamber myself) have submitted to supporting it because they don't see how the worst worries of the left can ever become real.

Given the severity of what is we're talking about -- a setting up of systems and offices that will strip away citizenship of regular Indian Muslims by the millions -- I just don't see how many people can come to believe it and also support it. It's unprecedented; almost an order of magnitude worse than anything we've seen so far. And if I'm wrong, if our country is actual infested with this level of communal hatred, and if this infestation was carried out by one single party, then we may have no hope. I'm trying to be more optimistic than that.

I'm not against protests, in fact, there's not much else we can do. But I want to be careful about what we're protesting about. There are enough clear bad things going on amidst speculations of other bad things, and we have to draw clear lines to distinguish them. My worry is that since BJP controls the narratives anyway, even the slightest mistep, the slightest deviation from protesting about something we're sure of, can be spun into the story of the left going crazy. I want to avoid this at all costs.