AHAD AI SamyaTattwa rebuttal to Vidya Krishnan’s “The Dark Side of Holi” on Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2026/3/4/the-dark-side-of-holi
Holi does not need a defense from those who cannot bear to understand it. It needs protection from two very different predators: the criminal who uses crowds as cover, and the propagandist who uses isolated crimes as an excuse to stigmatize an entire civilization.
Vidya Krishnan’s Al Jazeera essay, “The dark side of Holi,” tries to do both at once: it condemns harassment while quietly converting that condemnation into a moral prosecution of Hindu culture itself. The giveaway is not that she criticizes misbehavior. It is that she treats misbehavior as the essence of the festival and then uses that essence to indict Hindus as a collective “we” that supposedly “consecrates nothing” and treats “women” as a consumable. That is not women’s rights reporting. It is narrative warfare dressed up as concern.
Start with the basic arithmetic that the essay carefully avoids. India is a country of roughly 1.4 billion people. Around four fifths of Indians are Hindu. Holi is celebrated across India and the wider Hindu world by millions, frequently in dense urban gatherings that flood streets for hours. The author offers no credible national count of Holi-linked sexual crimes, no rate per participant, no comparison to ordinary-day baselines, no distinction between organized events and uncontrolled street mobs. Instead, the essay relies on a handful of dramatic anecdotes and a recycled media reference to a 2018 BBC report, then declares that “women are up for grabs” and that the festival has “crystallized” into a “rampage” of assault. That is not perspective. It is amplification.
Worse, it is a bait and switch. If the claim is that India has a serious problem with violence against women, that is a year round governance and social challenge and it is already visible in national crime reporting. NCRB data shows crimes against women in the hundreds of thousands annually. But that reality does not justify turning Holi into a symbol of Hindu depravity, any more than New Year’s Eve assaults justify declaring New Year’s a “rape festival,” or football hooliganism proves that football is a civilizational pathology. When a day of mass public gathering sees misconduct, the responsible lens is enforcement and deterrence aimed at offenders, not cultural indictment aimed at everyone.
Holi’s religious and cultural meaning is not “mischief” sliding into molestation. It is the arrival of spring, the loosening of social stiffness, reconciliation, community, and joy. The story of Holika and Prahlad is not a celebration of a woman’s burning. It is a moral story about the defeat of arrogance and the protection of devotion. Krishnan rewrites this into a modern political allegory: Holika becomes “a narrative tool,” her death becomes proof that Hindu women are punished, and the ritual is described as “ritually re-enacting her burning,” capped with a sloganistic flourish about her being a “modern feminist hero,” “especially in Modi’s India.” This is not cultural literacy. It is an ideological rebrand designed to make Hindu ritual look like gendered sadism.
The diversity she erases matters too. Even within Hindu communities, interpretations and observances differ. Some groups treat Holika Dahan with solemnity rather than celebration, precisely because the story is read as a warning and a moment of reflection. That internal plurality is what serious writers acknowledge. Krishnan’s essay cannot afford to, because the argument requires Hindu dharma to appear monolithic, and Hindus to appear collectively complicit.
Now to the authorial context that readers deserve but Al Jazeera does not provide. Krishnan is presented on the site as an “investigative journalist” who writes about “social justice.” Social justice is not a flaw, but it often becomes a license for a particular style of moral storytelling: maximal condemnation, minimal measurement. The Holi essay reads exactly like that style. It is heavy with certainty and light on data, heavy with personal narrative and light on proportionality, heavy with sweeping “Indian men” generalizations and light on the vast number of Hindu men who do not harass, who celebrate in families, who volunteer in community events, and who want offenders punished.
The second contextual clue is her repeated use of “Modi’s India” as a framing device, even when the subject is not governance but culture. The Holi essay drops “especially in Modi’s India” in the middle of a “mythological” reinterpretation, signaling that the piece is not really about a festival. Her own Al Jazeera author page highlights another recent essay titled “In Modi’s India, scandal still embarrasses but rape has become ordinary.” You can criticize any government’s failures without turning an entire society into a caricature. But this is not merely criticism. It is a recurring frame where India is flattened into a moral dystopia and Hindu public life is treated as its telltale symptom. That predisposition shapes what she chooses to see and what she chooses to ignore.
Al Jazeera’s institutional context is even more important, because Krishnan is not writing into a neutral editorial ecosystem. The outlet has a long record of describing Hindutva as “Hindu supremacist.” It runs features with titles like “As hate spirals in India, Hindu extremists turn to Christian targets,” with sweeping assertions about violence “soaring” and “Hindu majoritarianism” as the explanatory centre of Indian life. It has published opinion pieces explicitly analogizing “Hindu nationalists” to white supremacists as a core framing of the Indian political story. These are editorial choices. They normalize a template where “Hindu” is the problem category and where Hindu self assertion is pre interpreted as menace.
The accurate correction from a Hindu perspective is this: for a vast majority of Hindus, Hindutva is not a slur and not a synonym for hatred. It is the civilizational self understanding of Hindu dharma as lived reality, a dharmic basis for private conduct and public ethics, emphasizing duty, restraint, plural worship, and social responsibility, alongside cultural continuity and national belonging. The attempt to collapse that broad dharmic ethos into a default label like “supremacism” or “fascism,” without precision and without differentiating between mainstream cultural assertion and any genuinely violent fringe, is not neutral description. It operates as a form of Hinduphobic framing because it pathologizes Hindu identity and delegitimizes Hindu self definition by treating it as inherently extremist.
That template is exactly what makes the Holi essay so useful as a weapon. Once your audience has been trained to read Hindu identity through the lens of supremacism, you do not need statistics to tar a festival. You need vivid lines. “Women are up for grabs.” “Predatory animal.” “We consume everything.” In such writing, evidence is optional because affect is the point. The festival becomes a proxy, and Hindu society becomes a defendant that must answer for the crimes of the worst individuals, while other societies are allowed the dignity of individual culpability.
A strong rebuttal does not beg for approval by conceding the frame. It rejects it. Yes, offenses occur around Holi, as they do around any large gathering anywhere in the world. They are offenses, not features. They are crimes, not customs. They are already illegal, already punishable, and they are condemned by ordinary Hindus who are tired of their faith being held hostage by thugs in the street and by ideologues in international newsrooms. The correct target is the offender, not the festival. The correct remedy is enforcement and deterrence, not civilizational blame.
If Al Jazeera and Krishnan wanted to protect women, they would demand measurable interventions: visible policing at hotspots, rapid arrest and prosecution for groping and assault, consequences for public intoxication and mob behavior, safer designated community events, and public messaging that “Bura na mano” is not a license to violate consent. Instead, the essay chooses a different project: to make Holi itself look morally suspect by design, and to make Hindu tradition appear like a convenient explanation for social pathology. That is not reform. That is stigmatization.
Consider, too, what happened in Delhi this very Holi week, when a 26 year old man, Tarun, was killed in Uttam Nagar after a minor Holi related dispute escalated into mob violence, reportedly triggered by colored water from a balloon splashing a woman. Police and multiple reports describe an attack involving rods, bricks and stones, with arrests made afterwards. This is precisely why reckless civilizational framing is not a harmless literary flourish. When an international platform trains audiences to see Holi as a ritualized permission slip for predation and to see Hindu society as uniquely depraved, it contributes to a climate where ordinary Hindus are easier to dehumanize and where local disputes can be reframed as communal score settling. No single columnist “causes” a killing, but stigma making narratives do have consequences: they legitimize suspicion, they reduce empathy, and they create a permissive atmosphere in which hate entrepreneurs can escalate everyday friction into targeted cruelty, sometimes with fatal results.
Holi will outlast this genre of writing because it is deeper than the caricature. It is a civilizational affirmation that joy can be shared across status, age, and difference. It is precisely because Holi dissolves boundaries that it enrages those who prefer to treat Hindu life as nothing but hierarchy and harm. Protecting Holi is therefore not denial of wrongdoing. It is refusing to let wrongdoing be used as a red herring to vilify a billion people, while insisting, with absolute clarity, that anyone who exploits the festival to harass women deserves swift punishment and lasting social disgrace.