If you are looking for a place filled to the brim with hatred for Muslims, try India. And it started its hostility for this year very early.
On Jan 1, writes University of Delhi academic Apoorvanand in Al Jazeera, photographs of 100 Muslim women appeared in an app called "Bulli Bai", claiming that they were for sale as "maids". They were no "maids".
Among the 100 were prominent journalists, actresses and activists. Even if the women were maids, no nation should treat their women like this. Yes, let's say it again: no nation should treat its women like this.
This isn't the first time it is happening in India. The BBC reported a similar sale in July, this time on a website called "Sulli Deals" that created profiles of 80 Muslim women from images uploaded online and described them as "deals of the day". Thanks to the BBC, we learn that sulli is a derogatory Hindi slang that right-wing Hindu trolls use to describe Muslim women. Bulli, too, is pejorative.
As the BBC tries to assure the rest of humanity, there was no real sale. But that wasn't the primary purpose as the broadcaster seemed to acknowledge. What such acts are aimed at is to degrade and humiliate Muslim women.
The pathology of this disease is astounding, given the fact that we live, not in some barbarous times of very long ago, but in the so-called "enlightened" 21st century.
How can we claim to be civilised and yet act so despicably against our women? It tells on the people behind such dastardly acts. There is yet another thing.
The "Sulli Deals" story broke in July and when the BBC reported on Jan 3, some of the Muslim women put on sale told the broadcaster that though six months had passed, the police had made no arrests. Little wonder the Muslim hate-mongers are at their worst behaviour again and again. There is some small comfort, however, with the Jan 1 incident.
The app was taken down after much backlash and few arrests were made.
If Apoorvanand is right, the frequency with which elected and unelected leaders in India call for the genocide of Muslims is on the rise. Ministers are no longer shy to spill their venom in public.
This doesn't help when India's media, once the voice of the people, has chosen to be brazenly pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim. Arguably, The Telegraph is the only prominent newspaper that dares to speak for diversity. As they say, justice begins to die when the media ceases to speak truth to power. It has been so since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. If Muslim hatred was private before, it is now very public.
Apoorvanand puts it thus: "Today, far-right Hindu nationalists, with the support and at times encouragement of the government and local authorities, are making it clear to Muslims that they are no longer seen as equal citizens in their own country. Their dietary habits and religious rituals are being attacked and even criminalised."
This isn't a way forward for India, which has been home to more than 200 million Muslims since time immemorial. Because majoritarian hatred for the other will tear a nation apart. Even one as large as India.
India prides itself on being the world's largest democracy. It can be one if it treats its Muslims well.