Hindu nationalist mobs torched Delhi mosques and flew the Hanuman flag over them.

Evidence

The mob finally stopped at the entrance of the mosque. Then one of its members torched the building, setting it ablaze as scores of extremists stormed inside to desecrate the walls, destroy the prayer room, and exact the populists’ message that Islam is a foreign faith and India a Hindu state. … Hindu extremists mercilessly beat Muslim children and women outside of the mosque as it was set ablaze. As the mosque burned, a member of the mob climbed its minaret while his friends cheered him on with “Jai Shri Ram” and “Hinduon ka Hindustan,” Hindu nationalist chants. Their cheers drove him higher and higher, until he reached the pinnacle of the minaret and placed the Hanuman flag, symbolizing a Hindu India, atop it. The man’s face beamed with pride—the same hateful pride displayed by Trump and Modi at the cricket stadium in Delhi and the rally in Houston—as the mosque underneath him burned. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 478

Categorization

• SEED: The flag-over-burning-mosque image is a visceral symbol pairing for an essay on how nationalist symbols physically overwrite minority sacred space.