U.S. President Donald Trump invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit the United States later this year, during a phone call on Tuesday in which the leaders discussed economic and defence cooperation.

In its readout of the conversation, the White House said the two leaders also discussed security in South and Central Asia. The region includes Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are still battling Taliban militants, and Pakistan.

The two leaders “resolved that the United States and India stand shoulder to shoulder in the global fight against terrorism,” according to the readout that was posted on the White House website.

Tweeting from his personal account, Modi said his conversation with Trump had been “warm”, and that they would work closely in the coming days to further strengthen bilateral ties. He also invited Trump to visit India.

The U.S.-India relationship has flourished of late and New Delhi is hopeful that this will continue under Trump, who courted the votes of the Indian diaspora in his presidential run.

Trump’s pledge to ban immigration by Muslims from countries he says harbour Islamic militants has also played well among Modi’s Hindu-nationalist base, which is hostile to Pakistan.

There are concerns, though, that Trump may pull back the U.S. security umbrella from the region, exposing India to a rising China. His tough line on immigration and “America First” jobs policy could make it tougher for India’s information technology sector to send staff to the U.S. to do project work.

Indian security forces on Tuesday killed five protesters and injured 10 in clashes that erupted after crowds angered by the killing of a separatist militant in disputed Kashmir pelted them with stones and defied a curfew, officials said.

Indian-ruled Kashmir has witnessed violent protests since July 8, when security forces killed a field commander of Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Hizbul Mujahideen who enjoyed widespread support in the Muslim-majority region.

Kashmir also saw an upsurge in violence around India’s Independence Day holiday on Monday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the country would not bow to terrorism and accused neighbour and archrival Pakistan of glorifying it.

A senior police official said hundreds of protesters threw stones at security forces as they tried to restore order on the streets of Budgam, a district 30 km (18 miles) south of Srinagar, the state’s summer capital.

The latest casualties came as security forces opened fire with automatic rifles, a step up from their earlier use of shotguns, whose pellets are meant to incapacitate but not kill. Locals say the shotguns have inflicted severe injuries, and even blinded, hundreds of people, among them innocent bystanders.

Indian troops killed a total of seven militants on Monday in two incidents, five of them gunmen who had attempted a cross-border incursion and two more, who had attacked a Srinagar police station.One officer died in the police station shootout.

At least 64 people have been killed and thousands injured during 39 days of protests, while schools, shops, banks and offices remain closed in much of Kashmir as paramilitary troops patrol arterial roads, residential areas and mosques.

Kashmir is at the centre of a decades-old rivalry between India and Pakistan, which also rules its northern part, and backed an insurgency in the late 1980s and 1990s that Indian security forces largely crushed. Both countries claim Kashmir in full.

New Delhi has rejected Pakistan’s invitation to hold talks on the future of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s northernmost state, and Modi said he had received messages of support from leaders in restive parts of Pakistan.

In a speech on Monday, Modi accused Pakistan of committing atrocities in its own province of Baluchistan, escalating a war of words that Islamabad said was intended to divert attention from the troubles in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Modi’s defence minister, Manohar Parrikar, raised the temperature further on Tuesday, saying Indian troops had “sent back five terrorists yesterday”.

He told a rally, “Going to Pakistan is the same as going to hell.”

In a rare appeal to India’s Muslim minority, Islamic State says it is planning to avenge the deaths of Muslims killed in riots in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat and elsewhere.

India, a Hindu-majority country, is home to more than 160 million Muslims, but only a handful of them have joined the Middle Eastern group. Indian leaders and members of the community say this testifies to the strength of the country’s secular democracy.

In a video monitored by the U.S. intelligence group SITE, Islamic State mocked Muslims living in harmony with Hindus who worship cows, trees and the sun, and urged them to travel to IS-held territories in the “Caliphate”.

“In this land you get to have hatred for the kuffar [disbelievers]. In this land you get to perform jihad,” said an Indian fighter who is identified as Abu Salman al-Hindi operating in the Syrian province of Homs.

“In this land your religion is safe. In this land Allah’s Law is the highest. In this land you have nothing that stops you from doing good deeds, from doing da’wah [preaching], from preaching Islam. In this land your life, your honour, your property is protected.”

Another fighter then says Islamic State will come to India to liberate Muslims and avenge the violence perpetrated against them in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat as well Kashmir and the destruction of a mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992.

“We will come back, with the sword, to free you, to avenge Babri mosque, Gujarat, Kashmir,” the fighter says. More than 1,000 people were killed in Gujarat. Most of them were Muslims, attacked by Hindu mobs in retaliation for the burning of Hindus in a train.

Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time and faced allegations that he did not do enough to stop the bloodshed. But a Supreme Court-ordered investigation has said there was no case against him.

India has suffered from Islamist attacks. In 2008 a militant group based in Pakistan launched a rampage through the city of Mumbai that killed 166 people and traumatized the country.

Some of India’s most prominent scientists have signed a petition and returned awards to draw attention to India’s growing intolerance.

The petition accuses the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of curtailing free speech and stoking Hindu nationalism.

Signatories include Ashoke Sen, who won the Fundamental Physics Prize, the world’s most lucrative academic award in 2012. Pushpa Bhargava who founded the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. D Balasubramanian, former president of the Indian Academy of Science. And Dr Vineeta Bal of the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi.

The statement reads: “It is the same climate of intolerance, and rejection of reason that has led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi and the assassinations of Prof Kalburgi, Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Shri Govind Pansare.”

Professor Malleshappa Kalburgi’s murder shocked India. Who would murder a “straight-talking, rationalist researcher of ancient Kannada literature”? As local media described him. One theory is that Hindu nationalists murdered him in response to his criticisms of idol worship.

The founder of the right-wing Hindu group Sri Rama Sene, Pramod Muthalik, rejected any links to Kalburgi’s murder. He also threatened to cut off the tongues of writers if they continue to “insult” Hindu gods.

In February, Communist and rationalist Govind Pansare died from gunshot wounds near his home in Kolhapur, in the state of Maharashtra. The main suspect in Pansare’s murder is Samir Gaikwad, a member of the Hindu nationalist group Sanatan Sanstha. In the past, members of Sanatan Sanstha took part in a bombing campaign in Thane and Vashi in Maharashtra and Madgaon in Goa.

In 2013, unknown individuals murdered rationalist campaigner Narendra Dabholkar. It took two years to identify any suspects.

More worrying, however, is the possibility that all three murders are linked.

Critics point to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the issue and interpret it as tacit approval – as he shares their ideology of Hindutva. A product of this ideology is anti-Muslim prejudice. It fuses cultural norms and the trauma of partition in north India and Bengal. The misuse of history allows these groups to reconfigure the frustrations of the Hindu middle classes. As Pankaj Mishra noted, Modi stokes this false sense of victimhood and chauvinism with the “old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule“.

Jyoti Punwani accused Modi of stoking anti-Muslim tensions during a recent assembly election rally. In his speech, Modi made various references to beef export figures and Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’.

Turning Islamophobia into a normalised, everyday prejudice is nothing new. Sumanta Banerjee highlighted this in 1991. For Banerjee, Hindu nationalists need this external enemy to justify their Hindu superiority and support base.

For the BJP, Hindutva has “awakened the Hindus to the new world order where nations represented the aspirations of people united in history, culture, philosophy, and heroes.

Hindutva successfully took the Indian idol of Israel and made Hindus realize that their India could be just as great and could do the same for them also“. The logic is also peppered with numerous anti-Islamic refrences.

Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder, on the belief that he and his Muslim family had consumed beef, in early October made global headlines.

Some Hindu nationalists came close to justifying Akhlaq’s murder. Sadhvi Prachi, a leader of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad, told local press that “those who consume beef deserve such actions against them”. It took days for Modi to break his silence on the murder and call for religious tolerance.

Mahesh Sharma, India’s culture minister and a local MP, told the Guardian that Akhlaq’s murder was a ‘misunderstanding‘. Sharma is no stranger to controversy. Last month he told India Today that the Bible and Qur’an are not central to India’s soul. Yet there are 172,245,158 Muslims (14.23 per cent) and 27,819,588 Christians (2.3 per cent) in India. Nor has India been immume from Islamisation conspiracies.

The furore over beef (though banned from export) risks damaging the profitable buffalo meat trade. Hindu mobs have attacked suppliers of buffalo meat on suspicion of possessing cow carcasses in recent weeks.

Graffiti advocating the hanging of beef eaters recently appeared in a Mumbai suburb. Within the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai resides, a ban on the slaughter and consumption of beef has existed since March. This caused tensions during the Islamic celebration of Eid-al-adha. To breach this ban in Maharashtra can result in a 5 year prison term or a fine of 10,000 rupees. A minority of states permit cow slaughter – including Kerala – which had its own recent beef scandal.

On a cultural note, organisers of a film festival faced government pressure to drop a documentary on the beef industry. The documentary, Caste on the Menu Card, was the only film the Information and Broadcasting Ministry did not clear.

Critics like Amartya Sen have accused the BJP of filling public and cultural institutions with party loyalists. Though the reasons are a little more complex. Other Hindu nationalists have lobbied to ban Muslims and other religious minorities from participating in festivals like Navratri.

More than 40 Indian writers have also returned their literary awards or written letters of protest in response to the “rising intolerance and growing assault on free speech”.

In a statement, the poet Surjit Patar said: “The practice of killing writers and thinkers in our multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious country is disheartening”.

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