Radha Semwal Dhoni is a Hindu extremist leader based in Uttarakhand. She runs a vigilante gang that roams across the state doing moral policing and executing the Hindu nationalist mandate in the state. Dhoni claims that the mission of her vigilante group is to stop the alleged religious conversion drive carried out by Christian missionaries in the state that threatens its demographic composition.

In one such video of her extrajudicial adventure that went viral, she and her goons abused and assaulted three Christian men and woman on the pretext that they were trying to convert Hindus to Christianity. The victims were, however, reported to be tutors and social workers.

She openly boasts of her high political contacts. Her audacity to take the law into her own hands in broad daylight testifies that she is in fact, assured of complete impunity by the state in her hate-filled anti-Minority drive.

Dhoni frequently employs the narrative that ‘Hindu Khatre me hai’ (Hindus are in danger) and implores Hindus to unite against the supposed ‘threat’ of Muslims and Christians. She is of the view that Uttarakhand is the land of Hindu deities thus, the Muslim shrines and the Christian Churches should be removed from the state.

She even runs a campaign that aims at uprooting non-Hindu religious places from the state, with the slogan:

“Show the registry and save the shrine!

“Uttarakhand is the land of (Hindu) gods, only (Hindu) gods will reside here!”

“Nature does not speak of any brothers but Joshimath Kedarnath Dhari Devi.”

“Do you remember, if you do too much dirt, you will have to suffer”

Going beyond the polemics of hatred, Dhoni has personally vandalized many ‘dargah’ (Muslim Shrines) and disrupted Christian congregations in Uttarakhand. She records the visuals of such destruction and shares them on social media platforms fearlessly.

Another item on her hateful agenda is the passionate endorsement of the idea of a ‘socio-economic boycott’ of Muslims, which is a crucial part of the Hindu far-right’s meta-narrative.

In February 2023, Dhoni shot and uploaded a video of “nabbing” a Muslim vegetable vendor and harassing him in Uttarakhand. In the video, she manhandles the vendors and asks them for their names and their Aadhar card (Identity Card). She says that the Muslim vendors are habitual liars, and they spit on the vegetables and sell these in her area (where she lives).

“I am not going to buy vegetables from a Muslim,” she tells the vendors.

Dhoni appears to run parallel machinery that decides who is an Indian citizen and who is not. She regularly goes on the rampage, authoritatively demanding identity cards from individuals who appear to be Muslim, asking them to prove their citizenship. In one such video, she stormed inside a ‘jhuggi(slum) settlement of rag pickers in some parts of Uttarakhand and demanded identity cards from the poor inhabitants. She, without any qualms, brands them ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ while those desperate beings continuously plead that they were from the Indian state of Assam.

Her Facebook page is rife with anti-minority narratives and Hindu extremist propaganda.