N ARENDRA MODI , India’s prime minister, likes to talk tough on terror. On the campaign trail he tirelessly projects himself as a fear-inspiring avenger. If Pakistan returns a captured fighter pilot, as recently happened following an airstrike India says hit a Pakistan-based terror camp, it is because the neighbouring state is scared of him, he says. Referring to the carnage at Easter in Sri Lanka, he claims that no such attacks have occurred in India during his five years in office. “Under Modi they cannot escape punishment,” boasted the prime minister, who often refers to himself in the third person, at a rally ahead of the third phase this week of India’s seven-stage general election. His opponents, he insinuates, are soft on terror.

Yet Mr Modi is not against all terrorism, it seems. Shocking many of his own supporters, earlier this month he picked a woman accused of it as his party’s candidate for the parliamentary seat representing the city of Bhopal. Pragya Singh Thakur, who is free on bail, has been charged with helping to orchestrate a bombing that killed six Muslims in 2008. A self-styled holy woman of Hinduism, the faith professed by 80% of Indians, she wears saffron-coloured robes and claims to have been cured of cancer by drinking cow urine. She likes to needle Muslims, as well as those misguided enough to try to protect them. Hemant Karkare, a storied (Hindu) police inspector whose work on the bombing first implicated Hindu extremists, happened to fall victim to a bloody jihadist assault on Mumbai in late 2008. Ms Thakur boasts that she caused his death by putting a hex on him.

It is not unusual for Indian politicians to stand for office while facing charges for serious crimes, including rape and murder. But terrorism is new. It is also the point, according to Mr Modi: the prime minister told a television interviewer that her candidacy is a symbolic rebuke to those in the opposition Congress party who dare insult Hindus by talking about “saffron terrorism”. India’s murky justice system seems, in effect, to share Mr Modi’s view. Despite copious evidence that Indian Muslims have repeatedly been targeted by radical Hindu groups, the conviction rate for such criminals lags puzzlingly far behind that of alleged Muslim terrorists.

For Mr Modi’s core Hindu-nationalist constituency, talking tough on terror is polite code for harsh treatment of the relatively poor and scattered 14% of the population who are Muslim. In the effort to rally the Hindu majority other leaders of Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) have been more direct. The party’s powerful chief strategist, Amit Shah, says India is in deadly danger of being overrun by Muslim infiltrators he has described as “termites”. On the campaign trail Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, has gleefully proclaimed the election to be a fight between “Ali and Bajrang Bali”, the former being a common Muslim name and the latter an epithet for Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god.

Taking identity politics to a higher level, Anantkumar Hegde, a minister of state in Mr Modi’s government who is running for re-election from the state of Karnataka, scoffed that if Rahul Gandhi, Congress’s leader, was asking to see evidence that the airstrikes in Pakistan had been as successful as Mr Modi had claimed, then he would like to see evidence of Mr Gandhi’s claimed religion and caste. “What is the proof that he is a Hindu?” he sneered. “How did a person born to a Muslim father and Christian mother become a Gandhi? A Brahmin?” (This is nonsense: although Mr Gandhi’s mother is Italian, neither his father nor any other close relative is Muslim.)

As Kerala, one of India’s most religiously diverse as well as peaceful states, headed to the polls on April 23rd, blasts of sectarian rhetoric reverberated from the rest of the country. The quiet hillside district of Wayanad, which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians, briefly became a focus of national attention after it was chosen as a second constituency for Mr Gandhi to contest. (The other one, in Uttar Pradesh, does not seem like a sure thing.) Mr Modi mocked Mr Gandhi for seeking “shelter where the majority is in a minority”. To win the support of Kerala’s Hindus, the BJP also seized on a controversy over Sabarimala temple, a hugely popular pilgrimage site, which had barred all women of menstruating age until the Supreme Court threw out the ban earlier this year. The BJP is calling on local Hindus to defy the Supreme Court.

During Easter week in Kottayam, another district where Hindus fall just short of a majority, ancient Muslim and Christian communities rub along well with their neighbours. Parishioners at St Mary’s church, which is sandwiched between an 800-year-old mosque and a Shiva temple, break their Good Friday fast by sharing rice porridge and mango chutney with neighbours and strangers. Two days before the attacks in Sri Lanka and four before the election, the atmosphere was one of relief. “Different kinds of people always get along with one another in Kerala, it’s how we are,” says a local. “It would be good if the rest of India could do the same.”