A “Hindu” Victim
On 23 August 2024, Aryan Mishra lost his life to a bullet shot on a highway near Palwal, Haryana. His fault: he could have been a Muslim and a “cow-smuggler”. This is as per the admission of his killers. Despite the best Hindu supremacist attempts to segregate society on caste and religious lines, India remains to a large extent, a plural, diverse and mixed society. Cities, towns, villages, neighborhoods, and sometimes even homes, are inter-caste and inter-religion. Looks remain deceptive, despite the best attempts to profile and stereotype. In other words, there is enough reason for cow vigilantes – out to harass and kill Muslims – to be confused.
The confusion among Aryan’s killers generated anger among the wider population. Some asked, how does it matter if he was a Hindu or a Muslim? Is religion a reason to shoot people dead? Many said, no. But some – a small but significant number – quietly reiterated to themselves: yes, it is.
A two-member team of the All-India Lawyers’ Association for Justice (AILAJ), consisting of Akash Bhattacharya and Harshit Sethi, visited the site of the incident in Palwal soon after the incident and spoke to locals. The team found that many were sympathetic to Aryan Mishra because he was killed despite being “not guilty”. There didn’t seem to be a strong opinion against cow vigilantism per se.
As Hindu majoritarian poison gets systematically injected into our society, some people are beginning to enjoy videos of Muslims being harassed and threatened. They are reacting nonchalantly to the lynching of Muslims and demolition of their properties under some bogus pretext or under no pretext at all. State enabled cow-vigilantism is one of the major instruments of injecting this poison.
A Cow Vigilante Heaven
Aryan Mishra belonged to Haryana. The state and its surrounding regions, as well as other states ruled by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government for a long time, have witnessed a spate of majoritarian violence against specific individuals as well as against entire communities in recent years.
In Haryana and its bordering districts, Pehlu Khan (Nuh, 2017), Umar Khan (Alwar, 2017), Akbar Khan alias Rakbar (2018), Asif Khan (Nuh, 2021), Waris Khan (Nuh, 2023), all lost their lives to cow vigilantes. Cow vigilantes orchestrated last year’s anti-Muslim violence in Nuh, for which the administration promptly blamed Rohingyas and other Muslims and bulldozed dozens of their houses and imprisoned many young people form these communities.
This cow vigilantism is neither spontaneous nor is it a byproduct of BJP rule. It is being systematically enabled by BJP governments. Haryana provides a good example of how this is being done. The Haryana Cow Protection Act (2015), amended and made more stringent in 2019, allows cases to be registered through citizens’ action against suspected cattle traders. As soon as a case gets registered, a huge hue and cry is raised in social media, and polarization starts through hearsay and social media. Monu Manesar and Bittu Bajrangi – the key orchestrators of the July 2023 violence in Nuh – rose to prominence through such activities, e.g. telecasting the attack on Waris Khan live on Facebook, demanding “justice” for Hindus through tough punishment for Muslim cow traders, and so on.
Very few cases registered under this act actually end in conviction. Of the 69 cases decided by the Nuh district and sessions court in the second half of 2022, only four ended in conviction – an acquittal rate of 94%. Despite an abysmally low conviction rate, almost one case every second day has been registered under this act in Nuh district alone over the last seven years. As of December 2022, there were 1,192 such cases pending before the Nuh court. The act of registration is of the case is the pivotal moment in the spiral towards violence.
Another Beef Lynching and Need for Action
Haryana is not an exception. Besides Haryana, BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and many other states have issued “gau rakshak” identity cards. It is important to recognize that the cow vigilantes are not really vigilantes as such. For all practical purposes, they have been handed formal or informal contracts by the police department. The legitimacy granted to them is playing an active role in creating an atmosphere of violence.
The lynching of a Bengali migrant worker in Charkhi Dadri on suspicion of beef consumption on 27 August adds to the list of beef lynchings in recent times. The victim, Sabir Malik (22) came to the state to work as a ragpicker around five years ago, and was living with his wife and two-year-old daughter in Hansawas Khurd village.
Hours before his death, police had been called to the village by a group of youths, who claimed beef was being cooked and consumed in shanties there. Even as the meat was seized by the police and sent for testing, the accused, police say, took the law into their hands and beat Sabir to death. Sabir’s relatives had been called to the police station in the meantime and asked if they consumed beef.
A team of students led by the Jawaharlal Nehru Students’ Union (JNUSU) visited Sabir’s village in Haryana on 15 September and learnt that such was the terror among Muslim migrant workers that they had left their homes and returned to their native places in the aftermath of the incident. Following the targeting of Muslims for the violence in Nuh last year, Muslims in the cow vigilante hotbeds are fearful of falling victim to communal profiling and targeting in the aftermath of cow vigilante violence.
There is an urgent need for the entire political opposition to realize that cow vigilantism represents a systematic disruption of the rule of law by a fascist state. Right from the time the BJP has been in power, these incidents have been dismissed as actions of fringe-elements by many. They are anything but fringe. They represent Hindutva fascism in its most brutal and systematic form. The BJP governments need to be held directly accountable for this by the political opposition. The courts too must act to put a stop to cow vigilantism. Legal and administrative mechanisms enabling it must be demolished.
