Macho Ado About Cow

BJP supporter turned detractor Arun Shourie recently described the current NDA government as UPA government plus cow. And to prove him right the cow vigilantes are burning gallons of midnight oil, lying in wait at unearthly hours in many highways to pounce upon those transporting cattle. Thanks to conniving police force and an apathetic (and sometimes even proactive) ruling class they have been having a free run in most parts of the cow belt.

Having got away with Dadri and many other such attacks, the impact is now being felt in cattle and leather trade. It has begun to falter, thanks to the fear factor generated by the gau rakshaks. Kolhapuri chappal industry is currently in doldrums and even the prices of cricket balls have shot up as cow hide is hard to come by and manufacturers have been forced to go on a 'leather hunt'.

Emboldened by these successes, the hubris of gau rakshaks got better of them when they posted a video of few Dalit people in the prime minister's home state Gujarat getting beaten up with iron rods for skinning a dead cattle. They thought the grisly spectacle, which happened on July 11, would send chills down the spines of people and quite literally 'cow them down'. 

As they wished the video did go viral, thanks to their social media propaganda machinery, but the subsequent events did not pan out as they would have thought of. They underestimated the penetration of the internet, especially the mobile internet in our society. They failed to realise the access it had among the Dalits, especially their opinion leaders, and the rest they say is history.

Even the government and its intelligence machinery, which had acted with alacrity in banning WhatsApp and internet during the Patel quota agitation, failed to read this smouldering discontent on the cyber space. The administration woke up only on July 18, when in Surendranagar district a group of Dalits dumped cow carcasses at the District Collector’s office.

This dramatic Boston Tea party type incident also knocked mainstream media out of its page 3 obsessed stupour, as it provided a good potential for a colourful copy and package! When the clubbing of Dalits happened on July 11, they had behaved as if it was happening in some other planet.  

According to a Scroll report the Surendranagar march was organised by two social workers Nathubhai Parmar and Maheshbhai Rathod and a businessman Hirabhai Chawda, who trades in the by-products of dead cows. They went from village to village showing the infamous video on a laptop. They also used WhatsApp, Facebook and file sharing apps to spread the video and exhorted the villagers to come out and fight.

To drive home their point the Dalits also decided not to pick up dead cows on the street. This was indeed a rude jolt to a society which pays scant regards to dignity of labour.

Having caught the imagination of the country, leaders of various political hues, many of them with dubious credentials, are trying to court the Dalits of Gujarat. One just hopes the movement sustains itself for a long time and does not fizzle out or even worse get co-opted by some opportunistic groups.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Dadri Syndrome: Lynch Mob At The Gates

The solemn and heartfelt manner with which the Indian Air Force corporal Mohammad Sartaj conducted himself at a TV programme despite undergoing a grave tragedy of losing his father Mohammad Akhlaq to a lynch mob, left many misty eyed. Probably that was the only take away from the infamous killing in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, where a man was killed based on beef eating rumours, to assure us that all is not lost even in this bleak moment. The India our founding fathers had visualised still lives on in some pockets.

The fact that a lynch mob can enter the kitchen of a house and attack a family for the type of food they were having provides a chilling reminder of the rising tide of hatred and communal polarisation in the society. 

The political class, the chief architects who brought things to such a pass, have once again showed that whatever be the tragedy they cannot see anything beyond electoral arithmetic and political mileage. In a way Union Minister Mahesh Sharma's statement that the incident happened due to 'misunderstanding' was unwittingly true. 

The cow vigilantes picked up a wrong household - one with hardly any blemish. None of the family members faced any criminal charges and one of them had even donned the Air Force uniform to serve the country - hence very high on deshbhakti quotient.

Moreover it later came to be known that the meat in the refrigerator was not beef as alleged. But the supporters of the lynch mob would have none of it, because for them rumour is the fuel and the medium of communication ranges from good old loudspeakers and word of mouth to new age WhatsApp. They are working overtime posting photoshopped pictures of cow remnants and other rabid campaigns in social media, which would make late Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels rest assured that at least in India his credo would last another millennium! 

Just imagine if the meat in the refrigerator was actually beef, then it would have been 'advantage' lynch mob (to use a tennis analogy). They would have gone to town saying 'justice' has been done as the killers of our 'mother' have been avenged and some favourably disposed newspaper columnists would have marshalled extreme forms of sophistry to rationalise the killing as 'spontaneous reaction' to 'hurt sentiments'. The fact that possession of beef or its consumption is not prohibited in Uttar Pradesh and Akhlaq had not broken any law would have been relegated to a footnote for the academia, edit pages or TV studios to chew on.

Or think of an even grimmer scenario of beef being found in a house where some family members have a criminal past, a la Sohrabuddin Sheikh. That would have been godsend and the lynch mob would have easily got away with their savagery. Anyone criticising the legality of the lynching would have been branded as supporters of cow killers and desh drohis fit to be exported to Pakistan. "He was anyway a criminal, then why are you speaking on his behalf" would have been the taunt, and the average IPL-fixated Indian Pappu would have nodded in agreement.

The fact that Sartaj had an air force uniform on his back, helped the family land on the positive side of 'good Muslim, bad Muslim' binary, but others may not be that lucky and hence need to be very afraid.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat