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, neighbourhoods, 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.
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.
Aryan Mishra belonged to Haryana. The state and its surrounding regions, as well as other states ruled by the Bharatiya 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.
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 polarisation 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 of the case is the pivotal moment in the spiral towards violence.
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 recognise 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.
There is an urgent need for the entire political opposition to realise 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. The courts must act to put a stop to cow vigilantism. Legal and administrative mechanisms enabling it must be demolished.
