In the name of Gau Mata

My Mirror column:

A stark new film by Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham documents the normalisation of Hindu vigilantism.

Gyandev Ahuja, ex-BJP MLA (best known for his remarks about condoms in JNU), appears in the documentary at the head of a troupe of gau rakshaks. 

“When the public lynches in daylight, they make videos of it,” says the man. “It happened at night. Had it happened in daylight, there would have been a video of him.”

The man speaking is a family member of Rakbar Khan, a 28-year-old cattle farmer from Nuh, in the Mewat region of Rajasthan, who was murdered while bringing home two cows one night in July 2018. He is speaking of the circumstances of Rakbar's death, as part of a new documentary called The Hour of Lynching, directed by independent filmmakers Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham, which was released for public view on The Guardian website yesterday.

We live in surreal times, and the more surreal things get around us, the less we seem able to see them for what they are. An increasingly thick ideological smokescreen seems to stand between us and the violence of post-2014 India: violence against solitary or small groups of Dalits and Muslims, invariably committed by larger groups of upper caste Hindu men.

But perhaps if you pause and simply listen again to that line I quoted, you might hear the madness echo, even through the blur of allegations and counter-allegations that is our new soundscape. Here is what I heard in it: that in the India in which we now live, so many incidents of “mob lynching” have taken place that there is now an accepted public understanding of the practice, and that public understanding includes, first and foremost, the fact that lynchings are public events, mostly conducted in broad daylight. They are recorded, sometimes by bystanders but quite often by the lynchers themselves. (The most well-known instance of such self-recording was in Una, Gujarat, in 2016, when four members of a Dalit family were stripped, paraded and thrashed by upper caste men who had come upon them skinning a dead cow.)

Rakbar Khan is one of the 47 people killed in cow-related hate crimes since 2014. The government does not keep records of cow-related violence, but the website https://lynch.factchecker.in/ documents 127 incidents of violence centred around the transportation of cattle and/or meat that is rumoured to be beef. Almost all of them have been against Muslims and Dalits, with the frequency of attacks rising steeply since 2014, across both BJP- and non-BJP-ruled states.

A still from Amit Madheshiya & Shirley Abraham's The Hour Of Lynching (2019) 

The cow has been seen as sacred in India for centuries, but it was only under conditions of colonial modernity, in the late 19^th century, that it became a symbolic rallying point for the organisation of Hindu identity. Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, set up the first sanctuary for cattle in 1879, and also began the first gaurakshini sabha in 1881 in Agra. 

The banner of cow protection slowly grew into a countrywide campaign against cow slaughter. Akshaya Mukul’s exemplary work on the Gita Press documents the history of the movement, which was preoccupied enough with the cow to be organising an anti-cow slaughter day on August 10, 1947 – five days before independence. Over the next three decades, the banner of cow protection united various non-political Hindu organisations, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with orthodox elements within the Congress. Such Congress figures as Seth Govind Das, Purushottam Das Tandon and Thakur Das Bhargava opposed Nehru's position on the matter, even defying the Congress party whip on occasion.

In September 1966, various cow protection groups came together to form the Sarvadaliya Goraksha Maha Abhiyan Samiti (SGMS), whose supreme council had members from the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Arya Samaj and various religious groups alongside the Congress and the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP. In November 1966, a massive gathering assembled in Delhi before a stage that included MS Golwalkar, Gita Press's Hanuman Poddar and the Jana Sangh's Atal Bihari Vajpayee, turned violent. At the end of a police lathi-charge, as Akshaya Mukul writes, “The movement for non-violence against the cow had led to widespread violence in the heart of New Delhi with eight dead and several more injured.”

I offer this distilled and necessarily incomplete history of cow protection to draw attention to something that will certainly strike you if you watch The Hour of Lynching: the bitter irony of violence committed in the name of non-violence. 

“Look closely at Mother Cow,” says Gyan Dev Ahuja, a BJP ex-MLA (who had hit national headlines for saying “thousands of condoms were found on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi daily”.) “You will see that she is deserving of compassion [“daya ka paatra”]”. He goes on to speak of “cow smugglers” as people of “rakhshas vritti”, and painting the battle between this imaginary enemy and his army of gau rakshaks as that between Ravan and Ram.

A little later in the film, we watch as another BJP politician is cheered resoundingly for exhorting the crowd to heed the call of Gau Mata, take out their swords and behead the heathens (“dussahasi vidharmiyon ka [sar] kalamkar do”). “You mere 200 million Muslims, we are 1 billion Hindus. If we lose our minds, we will sacrifice you 200 million – and the country will be cleansed.”

On May 23, the country gave Narendra Modi’s government another resounding electoral mandate. We can only hope that this #Tsunamo will not involve such cleansing.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 May 2019.