When an eight-year-old Bakarwal girl was raped and brutally murdered in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, no one outsideKashmir batted an eyelid. Three months later, after international media carried stories on the gruesome crime, the “conscientious Indian” woke up to the threat of India’s claim to being the world’s largest democracy being busted globally. It was little besides a face-saving attempt by those who have found a perfect scapegoat in Narendra Modi and the Sangh Parivar to blame for everything wrong in India. To them, the only thing wrong about India today is the ascent of right-wing forces to positions of power. Any crime in India since 2014 can become a rallying cry to pit national conscientiousness against the right wing, though the long tradition of violence against the downtrodden castes and exploited classes doesn’t seem to prick that conscience. Numerous allegations of lawlessness related to counter-Maoist operations by police and paramilitary forces in several states of central and eastern India, including sexual assaults, extrajudicial executions, large-scale displacement of Adivasis and burning down of entire villages, have proved inadequate to trigger conscientious outrage on any sustained basis. The same has been the fate of the continued imposition of AFSPA in several northeastern states.