For nearly 90 minutes, the woman in a sari spoke uninterrupted, her voice echoing over the microphone into a cavernous room at the main temple hall of the Umiya Dham Mandir in Edison, New Jersey. “So long as the last enemy is on Earth, peace is impossible!” she shouted. “So long as the last demon is on Earth, peace cannot come!” […] The woman’s speech seemed to turn progressively more virulent. Life in the U.S., she chided the audience, had made them lazy and complacent. They were unaware that the danger was at their door. Its form? A “demon,” a “monster standing on the chests of Hindus” — Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, the speaker falsely claimed, had been backed by George Soros and his son Alex to the tune of $34 million. […]

Soon after, the woman began to lay out how Muslims — whom she referred to alternatively as “braindead zombies,” “treacherous jihadis,” or “living monsters” — were conspiring, through halal-certified food, to make Hindus sexually impotent, and called for an economic boycott of Muslims. “If someone consumes halal food in front of us, and we know it, and remain silent, then we too are committing a sin,” she exclaimed. “Every moment, you must do your religious duty. So stop eating there, stop purchasing halal! Look, who is making the food, and what drugs they are adding to it.” […]

The woman on stage was Kajal Hindusthani. Recorded as the worst purveyor of hateful rhetoric in India in 2023 by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, Hindusthani has multiple cases registered against her in India for inciting violence.

[…] in Edison, Hindusthani explicitly recounted a story from an earlier event on her tour, invoked as a lesson for the audience. It involved a young man who had confronted her at an event, telling her that her hate speech against Muslims was unwarranted, and that Hindus and Muslims lived in harmony. But the man was being duped, she told the audience. “Voh miyan tera bhai nahi, wo kasai hai.” (“That Muslim is not your brother, he is your butcher.”) Hindusthani went on to say that Muslims could not be considered human. “When I speak about Hindu-Muslim, you call me racist, you say I should speak of humanity,” she shouted. “But I told him, ‘Son, humanity is for humans. These are braindead zombies. Humanity can’t be applied to zombies … If even one of them were human, they would try to stop this mob of braindead zombies.’”