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This article contains descriptions of violence that you may find is stressing.

We are witnessing a crime against humanity.

Arun Dharoy on India's Covid catastrophe.

It's hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity

that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain.

By Arun Dharoy, read by Shaheen Khan and produced by Esther Apoku Jenny.

During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uthar Pradesh in 2017,

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi waited into the fray to stir things up even further.

From a public podium, he accused the state government, which was led by an opposition party

of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards,

gubblestans, then on Hindu cremation grounds, shamshaans.

With his customary brain sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence,

before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd.

If a gubblestan is built in a village, a shamshaan should also be constructed there.

He said, shamshaan, shamshaan, the mesmerised adoring crowd echoed back.

Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from the mass funerals

in India's cremation grounds is making the front page of international newspapers.

And that all the cobblestans and shamshaans in his country are working properly,

...