In India, pro-BJP tycoon and yoga guru Baba Ramdev regretted the existence of laws coming down from the British colonial days which prevented him from beheading those who refuse to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” (Victory to Mother India).

The assassin and the would-be assassin will both claim to be driven by the supposedly admirable motive of nationalism, which brands in their eyes deviants from their creed as “traitors”, the term Jo Cox’s killer used in court to describe her.

In India, the students of JNU have been held under the colonial-era law of sedition for their rebellious chanting of “Azadi” when it challenged the country’s unity. Their leader has also been threatened with death.

It is clear that from Britain to India, ultra-nationalism is very much in the air. It also pervades Europe in the form of xenophobic parties which recall the continent’s history of fascism which had Jews and gypsies in their sights.

At present, the animus of these present-day fascists towards those they regard as anti-nationals is directed at blacks and browns and Muslims.

In the US, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential candidate, Donald Trump, does not follow the Ku Klux Klan in displaying his hatred for blacks; his anger is directed mainly towards the Muslims since he considers virtually all of them as terrorists.

The preferences of Trump, the neo-Nazis of Europe and the Britain First group are for restoring their countries and continents to their pre-World War I condition when they were overwhelmingly white.

Their xenophobia is based as much on colour as on ethnicity or religion or adherence to political extremism. In India, the BJP’s ultra-nationalism is fuelled by animosity towards the three “internal threats” identified by the saffron brotherhood’s Guru MS Golwalkar. They are Muslims, Christians and communists.

The brotherhood’s present method of recognizing these “threats” is the Bharat Mata ki Jai (BMkJ) test. Those who refuse to say it have no right to stay in the country, as Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has decreed.

There are other tests as well, such as the consumption of beef. Those who eat it deserve to be sent to Pakistan, as the BJP’s general secretary, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi laid down.

Attitudes of this nature underline the presence in India and elsewhere of a sizeable section of people who harbour primordial, sectarian, tribal instincts which are intensely mistrustful of those who are dissimilar in terms of colour or faith or eating habits.

Like kupmanduks or frogs in the well, they favour societies comprising the original inhabitants with their proven loyalty towards the land of their birth which has no place for aliens. Anyone who desires integration with the wider world or follows a distinctive lifestyle deserves to die.

The killing by a saffron mob of a Muslim and a suspected beef eater in Dadri near Delhi is an example of this hate-filled outlook. So was the killing of Muslim cattle traders in Jharkhand by gauraksha (save the cow) activists of the Hindutva camp.

The cold-blooded assassinations of rationalists and communists because their views did not echo the pseudo-religious and superstitious theories of the BMkJ brigade fall in this category.

Where Maoists kill policemen for serving the bourgeoisie in what they deem a political-revolutionary mission, the saffron group targets beef-eaters and the so-called left-liberals as they defy their religious and political beliefs.

In Bangladesh, liberal bloggers and isolated Hindus have become the victims of Islamic terrorists associated with the ISIS. Of all the killers, barring those of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, the ISIS today is undoubtedly the biggest organized group of murderers.

Their driving force is their psychopathic wrath against infidels. But their insane murderous ventures, which are carried out by the organization itself as well as by individuals motivated by their propaganda on the Internet, help to tilt the political balance in favour of white xenophobes like Trump. The latter is already said to have gained in popularity ratings over the moderate Democratic candidate. Hillary Clinton, after the Orlando massacre carried out by an Islamic radical.

In the midst of these killings, the murder in Britain can seem like an oddity as it is carried out by a white on a white for a reason which can appear to be somewhat less vital than the vote on Scottish independence.

For ultra-nationalists, however, no reason is unimportant. Otherwise, the JNU student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar, would not have been beaten up in the presence of the police by a group of pro-BJP lawyers in the court premises when he appeared for his trial on sedition charges. Nor would a BJP MLA have asserted that he would have shot the “traitor” if he was carrying a gun. (IPA Service)