Political ideologies, social hierarchies, and social meaning are represented in language use by people who occupy positions of power. Once registered in public discourse, such ideologies enter spaces where discrimination can be legislated and legalized. This paper showcases four examples from the last five years in India—policing of women’s clothing in Bollywood films, regulating queer access to sacred Hindu objects such as designer Sabyasachi Mookerjee’s mangalasutra necklaces for Hindu women, policing the use of Dabur Fairness Cream (used for skin lightening) by protesting an ad featuring a lesbian couple using the product while observing the Hindu festival karva chauth, and sanctioning brutality against Muslims in the name of cow protection—which speak to the way Hindu nationalism first enters public discourse and eventually leads to legal action or the threat of legal action. Each is an example of “hurt sentiments,” a translation of what is said to have been felt when something goes against Hindu prescribed norms, which speaks to moments of rupture in the history of semantics of culture associated with the Hindu right. In each case, the Hindu right has focused on “hurt sentiments” of the Hindu community as a keyword for harboring anti-Muslim and anti-queer stances that they have embraced (Williams 1976). This paper argues that there is a normalizing of and ordinariness to anti-Muslim and anti-queer discourse which are communicated through language of sentiments and negotiated through legal and political means. In each example, language use is analyzed to show both how the Hindu right became the key granter of rights and social meaning (Heller 2011) embedded in Hindu practice and to demonstrate the “hustle” of language (Beaver and Stanley 2023) in determining legislative and judicial action. Each “hurt sentiment” is understood as a keyword for the construction, circulation and uptake of anti-Muslim and anti-queer discourse.