Over the last few months, Muslims have been advised to become part of the national mainstream that wants education and jobs. Abandon old fears, embrace the new order, they have been told.A front-page story in the Indian Express on Wednesday exposed the fallacy underlying such appeals: that Muslims live in cloisters, study in madrassas, and are different from their "aspirational" Hindu counterparts.It is the story of Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, a 24-year-old Muslim man from Solapur district.Shaikh was a member of the new economy that the Bharatiya Janata Party has sold to young Indians: he worked as an IT manager with a private firm in Pune.But even a membership to this new economy could not save Mohsin's life.On Monday night, as he returned home after a day of rioting in the city, he was killed by a mob of people identified by the police as members of the Hindu Rashtra Sena, a radical Hindu outfit. His friend, who was with him that night, said he was targeted because "he was wearing a skull cap and had a beard."A large section among cosmopolitan urban elites has supported Narendra Modi in the belief that economic prosperity is a secular good that accrues to all and flattens social differences.Does economic growth reduce religious conflict? Anjali Thomas Bohlken and Ernest John Sergenti studied 15 states, including Gujarat, between 1982 and 1995 and found that the occurrence of Hindu-Muslim riots came down in the years of higher growth. However, they found "no support for the conventional wisdom that higher levels of socio-economic well-being – either in the form of higher GDP per capital or higher literacy rates – reduce the occurrence of violence”.While it is fairly plausible that economic distress puts an additional strain on the social fabric, it is simplistic to argue that the social fabric itself is a product of the economy.Society is constructed out of the daily encounters of people, as well as their sustained engagements with each other.In its three decade of existence, the BJP has not distinguished itself as a party that constructs or fosters associations between communities. Instead, it appears to inhabit a parallel civic universe of its own, populated by Hindutva organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and the Durga Vahini. Its leaders are often seen sharing space with an assortment of fringe Hindu groups and activists – for instance, Pragya Thakur, the Sadhvi of Indore, accused in the Malegaon blast.Recently, the party nearly inducted Pramod Muthalik, the leader of Sri Ram Sene, infamous for its attack on young women in a pub in Mangalore. The chief of the Hindu Rashtra Sena in Pune, Dhananjay Desai, according to this report in the Indian Express, has connections with Muthalik and has been a vocal supporter of Pragya Thakur.Regardless of whether the BJP’s top leadership approves, its sweeping victory and ascendance to power in Delhi has filled its hardline supporters, both within and outside the party, not just with a sense of elation, but also with a sense of empowerment.In the Karnataka town of Bijapur, while taking out a victory procession, BJP workers reportedly “molested women belonging to a minority community and tried to forcibly smear gulaal on the faces of vegetable vendors from a particular community”, the region’s Inspector General of police has told the Hindustan Times. A former BJP Union Minister has been arrested in the rioting case.In Assam, a BJP MP told the Deccan Chronicle that the party’s youth wing would “launch a house-to-house campaign urging people not to engage the immigrants in any kind of work”.The trigger for the rioting in Pune might have been come from morphed pictures of Shivaji and Bal Thackeray that circulated on social media. But the scale of rioting – more than 200 buses were burnt – indicates that organised groups were involved. The Hindu Rashtra Sena leader has been arrested in relation to Shaikh's murder.In a primetime discussion on NDTV, BJP spokesperson Shaina NC sought to downplay the role of Hindutva fringe groups in Pune by deflecting blame on the Congress-led Maharashtra government which she claimed had failed to contain the unrest.While party spokespersons cannot be expected to rise above the fray of partisan politics, surely more can be expected of India’s new prime minister who has won a decisive victory by selling an economic dream to all Indians. He must speak up before it begins to take the shape of a nightmare for some – which, in truth, would be a nightmare for all.