The Audition That Never Ends: Civilizational Maskirovka, the Permanent Audition, and the Cognitive War Against Muslim Belonging in India (2014–2026)

ABSTRACT On January 22, 2024, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of the Republic of India, a republic whose constitution begins with the word secular, performed a Hindu religious consecration ceremony on the site of a mosque demolished by a mob in 1992. The Supreme Court of India had found that demolition a wrongful act, and then awarded the land to those who committed it. The ceremony was broadcast to one billion people. India's 200 million Muslims watched. What they watched was not a religious event with political implications. It was the culminating performance of a decade-long, institutionally comprehensive cognitive warfare campaign, the most systematic ever conducted by a formally democratic state against a religious minority within its own borders. The campaign operates across five dimensions simultaneously: visible violence, legal architecture, cultural erasure, political exclusion, and the progressive colonization of the Muslim self. Together they constitute what is named here the Permanent Audition, the condition in which a religious minority is required to perform loyalty continuously, on the majority's terms, without the possibility of completing the performance to a standard that removes the requirement to perform again. Six new analytical concepts are developed across the empirical analysis, civilizational maskirovka, the permanent audition, the model minority cage, the sacred spectacle, historical unwriting, and demographic epistemic warfare, built at the intersection of cognitive warfare doctrine, relational dramaturgy, and political psychology. The analysis descends through five archaeological layers, from the most visible surface of the campaign to its deepest and most consequential work: the partial achievement of civilizational-scale cognitive surrender in a community of 200 million people. The theoretical contribution is the first complete account of the multi-generational cognitive warfare campaign as a distinct strategic form, a form whose ambition is not the defeat of a political movement but the reclassification of a civilization's claim to belong.