The murder of a Muslim man by a communal lynch mob on the pretext that he had ‘eaten beef’ should be an urgent wake-up call for the country to recognize and reject the dangerous divisive politics being systematically fostered by the ruling party and Central Government.
In Bisahda village of Dadri district in Western Uttar Pradesh, close to Delhi, a mob forced its way into Akhlaque’s home, molested his wife and daughter, beat his mother, dragged Akhlaque and his son Danish away, and beat them up with stones, bricks and a sewing machine. Akhlaque was killed, while Danish is still struggling to survive after two brain surgeries. The pretext being offered by Sangh Parivar and BJP leaders for this ghastly murder has been that the mob believed, thanks to an announcement from a temple, that Akhlaque had ‘stolen and killed a cow’ or ‘eaten beef’ and thereby inflamed Hindu sentiments.
Facts however point to a larger conspiracy and an organized communal mobilization, with ‘beef’ and ‘cow’ being a mere pretext to kill Muslims and incite communal violence. The ‘Samadhan Sena,’ one of the many saffron armies of the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar, has been spreading communal venom in the area for a long time.
The deafening silence of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the spate of statements by Modi Government Ministers, BJP MPs and MLAs and RSS leaders rationalizing the lynching, all make it clear that the lynching was part and parcel of the BJP’s politics of hate-mongering.
VHP leader Sadhvi Prachi has warned that all those eating beef will meet the same fate as Akhlaque; local BJP leaders have demanded that a case of cow slaughter be registered against the survivors of the lynching; Modi’s Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma has called the lynching a mere ‘accident’ for which no one should be punished; BJP MP and former editor of the RSS mouthpiece Organiser Tarun Vijay wrote a piece playing down the Dadri lynching. Mahesh Sharma, even more outrageously, praised the lynch mob for its restraint in ‘not lifting a finger against the 17 year old daughter’ of Akhlaque! It is clear that the Culture Minister, who seeks to ‘cleanse’ India’s culture of ‘pollution’, needs to cleanse his own mind of crass rape culture.
Modi himself is the fountainhead of the provocative hate-speech around ‘cow slaughter.’ In his election speeches during the Parliamentary elections, he repeatedly stoked emotions against eaters of beef and meat, referring to the killing of animals as ‘murder’ (hatya) and calling the meat industry ‘Pink Revolution.’
India is a vast country, where people have very diverse diets and food cultures. To impose Brahminical Hindu taboos on beef or meat on the rest of the population – through ever-proliferating food bans in various states – smacks of totalitarianism. It needs to be recognized, however, that ‘beef’ is one pretext among many others, for inciting murderous communal violence against minorities and casteist violence against Dalits.
The Dadri episode and its aftermath also makes a mockery of the ‘secular’ claims of the Samajwadi Party and its Government in Uttar Pradesh. The UP police not only failed to prevent the lynching. It began its investigation by sending the meat in Akhlaque’s fridge for forensic examination, to check whether or not it was beef, thereby turning the victim into the accused. BJP MLA Sangeet Som, accused of stoking the Muzaffarnagar riots with inflammatory speeches accusing Muslim youth of ‘love jehad’, has made violent provocative speeches in Bisahda village, threatening violence if the arrested members of the lynch mob are not released. Why was Sangeet Som, with a known history of provocative speech-making and riot-mongering, allowed by the UP Government and Police to violate Section 144 and make provocative speeches in the wake of a communal mob lynching? Clearly the SP Government of UP has learned no lessons from Muzaffarnagar, and is doing nothing to protect vulnerable minorities and curb communal forces.
What is most ominous of all is that Dadri is no isolated incident, but part of a disturbing and dangerous pattern. Just days before the Dadri lynching, a Muslim man was lynched to death in Kanpur on the strength of a rumour that he was a ‘Pakistani terrorist.’ In August this year, three young Muslim men were lynched to death by a mob in the same Dadri district on the pretext that they were ‘stealing cows.’ Last year in August, in Delhi’s Najafgarh bordering Western UP, a Dalit man was lynched to death on the pretext that he was found skinning a cow. The excuse proffered by the local BJP Councillor on that occasion that the mob has mistaken him for a Muslim who had stolen a cow! There have been many recent incidents in various parts of India where Muslim youth have been stripped, beaten or lynched to death on the allegation that they have befriended/loved/married/‘raped’ Hindu women. In the past couple of weeks, Sangh Parivar elements fomented communal tensions in Ranchi and Banaras. In the latest Cobrapost sting operation, leaders of Sangh outfits confessed on camera how they use false cases of ‘love jehad’ to foment communal tensions, how they indulge in ‘Hindutva terrorism,’ and how they “are sad when they fail to kill a Muslim and hold celebrations the day they succeed.”
And can we forget that in 2002, five Dalits were killed in Jhajjar in Haryana on the pretext that they had killed a cow. The VHP leader Giriraj Kishore had then answered the question ‘Is a Dalit’s life worth less than that of a cow?’ with the words “The scriptures say that the life of a cow is priceless.”
Such lynch mobs are not spontaneous ‘reactions to rumours’ – they represent a planned, systematic injection of communal poison into the very fabric of Indian society. And the purpose of this poison is to promote the politics of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar that make no secret of their aim to transform India from a secular country into a Hindu Nation. The Prime Minister himself, while on foreign tours, openly mocks at India’s secularism and secular values.
The Prime Minister who calls the eating of beef and non-vegetarian food ‘murder’, needs to tell us if he considers the lynching to death of a human being, murder? His calculated silence on the Dadri lynching and his inability even to issue a simple condemnation of the murder, is screaming out to the whole world his approval for and promotion of the politics of divisiveness, hate-mongering and communal violence.
