India’s Hindu right-wing unleashed a monster. Now it is out of control

The horrifying newspaper headlines are from the past two months, but they sum up the gruesome tragedies that have been befalling India with unfailing regularity for the last ten years.

'Eleven arrested in Nashik for killing man, brutally assaulting another for transporting beef,' screamed one. 'Migrant worker from West Bengal lynched in Haryana over beef rumours,' said another among many other reports that made it to the front pages in recent weeks.

Such headlines being regular, Indians have somewhat become inured to the recurring violence unleashed in the name of protecting cows over the years.

Yet, the latest headline left a large section of people in disbelief in the world’s most populous nation.

Nineteen-year-old Aryan Mishra – an upper caste Hindu – had stepped out of his home in capital Delhi for a late- night bite of snacks with some friends in late August when a gang of armed youths – who claimed to be protectors of cows – mistook him to be a Muslim cattle trader and gave him a chase.

They followed Mishra's car for some 30 km on the road that leads to the famous Mughal-era monument Taj Mahal in Agra and shot him dead.

Holy cow!

In Hindu-dominated India, where the community makes up some 80 percent of the country's 1.3 billion population, the cow is a revered figure.

For Prime Minister Narendra Modi's majoritarian Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bovine species is also a potent weapon to deepen the religious divide, whip up hatred towards minorities such as Muslims who trade and eat cow meat, and consolidate its vote bank among conservative Hindus.

Worshipped by Hindus, the slaughter of cows and consumption of beef have always been a sensitive issue. They are banned in many of India's 28 provinces and have often triggered religious tensions.

But since Modi assumed power in 2014, tensions are boiling over with self-styled ‘gau rakshaks’ – armed youths claiming to be cow protectors – taking the law into their own hands to enforce the ban.

In a country with the world’s third-largest Mulsim population after Indonesia and Pakistan, the BJP's ascendancy has emboldened them further.

Armed with sticks and also, at times, with guns, the vigilantes act with near total impunity. And the list of victims such as Mishra is getting longer.

Anyone and everyone is a target while the self-appointed cow protectors - enjoying a fair degree of government approval - hold sway over sizeable tracts of the large country.

Northern states such as Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Bihar are particularly their favourite hunting grounds.

But other provinces are not entirely no-go areas for them. In western Maharashtra, an octogenarian Muslim man travelling on a suburban train was bullied and beaten by a group of men last fortnight for carrying buffalo meat in a tiffin box.

Finer details, such as that buffalo meat is not banned in Maharashtra, were no deterrent.

But mindless high-handedness is the flavour of the season amid heightened religious tensions, and only last week, a seven-year-old boy was expelled from his school in Bijnor of Uttar Pradesh for bringing non-vegetarian biryani in his lunch box.

Activism gone rogue

Much of the activism in the name of protecting cows makes little sense.

Much of the outrage on social media in the wake of Mishra's killing also made little sense, with many right-wingers regretting that a Hindu teenager had been killed on being mistaken as a Muslim.

What was left unsaid was that it could have been possibly kosher if a Muslim had been killed instead.

The misdirected outrage - or the general lack of it over the incessant killings - defies conventional logic.

So does the Modi government's reluctance to follow up on the 2021 directive of the Supreme Court - the country's top court - to classify lynchings as a separate category of offence with clearly defined punishment. The government has not acted upon it.

Meanwhile, the National Crime Records Bureau - the authority tasked with collating and publicising data on various types of crimes - has discontinued giving out statistics about lynchings after it did once in 2017.

Bereft of authentic details, one can only fall back on anecdotal evidence such as newspaper reports to determine the scale of the scourge. Going by their regularity, it is safe to assume that it is huge.

Meanwhile, the headlines are piling up with trigger-happy policemen often joining in at some places to act upon unfounded rumours concerning beef.

'Woman dies after raid on beef suspicion,' said one recent report from Bijnor. 'Cow smuggler shot dead while being chased in Rajasthan,' said another.

Evidently, the holy cow is claiming many lives in India.