On August 24, 19-year-old Aryan Mishra, studying in class 12, received a call at around 1 am.
Two of his friends, both sons of Mishra’s landlord, wanted him to join them for a late-night snack — noodles, according to reports.
Mishra soon joined them, holding the passenger seat in the landlord’s red SUV in a middle-class neighborhood in Faridabad, a city in Haryana state outside the national capital New Delhi.
According to Indian media reports, a brother, Harshit Gulati, was at the wheel, while his elder brother, 26-year-old Shanky Gulati, was in the back along with their mother Sujata Gulati and her friend Keerti Sharma.
As they drove through the mostly empty streets of Faridabad, a car with flashing red and blue beacons on top tried to stop them, local media reports said. Such beacons are generally only allowed on government vehicles. But illegal use of these beacons by private vehicles is common – especially when the owner is politically influential.
Details of what happened next are unclear and are being investigated by police. But according to most reports, the car Aryan and his friends were in tried to get away from the chasing vehicle. Was it because they were just scared of being followed by an unknown car? Was it because the suspect, according to some reports, was accused in a separate case of attempted murder, and his family thought he was being chased by a police vehicle?
What is known is that a 40-kilometre (25-mi) chase ensued. During the chase, a bullet fired from the back of the car hit Mishra on the shoulder. Harshit stopped the car. The men behind pulled up. One of them walked up to the car and another shot hit Mishra in the neck from close range. The teenager was rushed to a local hospital, where he died.
Although the murder took place almost two weeks ago, the details are only now emerging, shocking and upsetting the country.
Mishra was killed in cold blood. But he is not the only one who has caused outrage. It is a fact that Mishra was a Hindu, who was killed by another Hindu – who thought he was a Muslim.
were suspects Seeing the cowMembers of a nationwide right-wing Hindu militia, the Gau Raksha Dal (GRD or Cow Protection Sangh), which claims to protect cows – considered sacred by many Hindus – from slaughter by mainly Muslim cattle traders.
Homicide is prohibited or regulated in most Indian states.
Vigilantes have rarely encountered the law. Instead, it is their victims and their families who have often faced police cases and investigations into whether they were actually in possession of the beef.
Against that background, global and Indian rights groups believe that these vigilantes are operating under this shelter and protection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since the Hindu nationalist leader came to power a decade ago.
The BJP has denied any connection with the attacks and in 2016 Modi publicly criticized the vigilantes. But a cow vigilante in the southern state of Karnataka has got an election ticket from the BJP. Eight vigilantes convicted of lynching a 45-year-old Muslim meat trader were garlanded by a BJP minister in 2018. And another BJP minister attended the funeral of one of the accused in the lynching of a Muslim man in 2015.
The Gau Raksha Dal has chapters in about half of India’s states, mostly in the north. Their logo depicts a cow’s head, flanked by two automatic rifles or a pair of daggers. Vigilantes are armed with guns and sticks and patrol the streets through a vast network of WhatsApp groups. They are the judge, jury and executioner, who dole out their brutal justice on the streets of India.
Vigilantes also share information with the police about alleged incidents of homicide or cattle trafficking and are reported to have joined police officers in raids or arrests.
Since 2014, when Modi first came to power, around 50 cow-related lynchings of Muslim men have been reported – most of the victims are poor farmers or daily wage workers, who have left behind grieving families facing an uncertain future. In almost all such incidents, no cow meat was found, only the dead bodies of the victims and torture.
‘We killed our brother’
According to a report on The Print website, when the local police told Mishra’s father Siyanan that they suspected the involvement of cow vigilantes in his son’s murder, he did not believe they could kill “one of their own” and asked to meet the alleged shooter, Anil Kaushik, who is a judicial officer. was in custody.
During the meeting, Kaushik confessed to the distraught father that he regretted killing “a brother”, thinking he was a Muslim, and apologized. The report added that Kaushik did not know that Mishra was a Brahmin, the most privileged class in India’s complex caste hierarchy.
“This incident is a shame for us. This is the first time such an incident has happened in a decade. It is a sad truth that we have killed our brother,” Shailendra Hindu, a member of the Bajrang Dal, a far-right militia that runs cow vigilante groups, told The Print.
Many Indian media outlets, meanwhile, called it a case of “accidental” murder. This is India’s new normal: that killing itself is not wrong, killing a Hindu is.
Just three days after Mishra was shot, a 26-year-old Muslim ragpicker, Sabir Malik, was beaten to death by a mob in Charkhi Dadri, Haryana, about 130 km (80 mi) from Faridabad, on August 27, on suspicion of consuming beef.
Malik was a migrant worker from the eastern state of West Bengal. According to media reports, he lived in Charkhi Dadri with his wife and two-year-old daughter.
News reports quoted police as saying that there were rumors in the area where Malik lived that some migrant workers had eaten beef. A group of men called Malik to a shop on the pretext of selling empty plastic bottles and beat him severely. When bystanders protested the attack, the assailants took him to another village where he was beaten.
When asked about Malik’s murder, BJP’s Haryana Chief Minister Naib Singh Saini said: “Who can stop him?” Moreover, in a pattern familiar from such cases, Saini blamed the deceased instead for the alleged violation of cow protection laws.
Modi 3.0 is no different?
When the BJP lost its absolute majority in the general elections three months ago and was forced to Relies on suspicious companions As for the political survival, many Indian political experts felt that it was humbled after its run A divisive and anti-Muslim campaign ahead of the vote.
They said that Modi 3.0 would be less threatening to the security and dignity of India’s 200 million Muslims and that the world’s most populous country would breathe a fresh air of inclusive politics and development.
But persistent xenophobic attacks on India’s largest minority and the killing of innocent men have belied those predictions, according to analysts.
Nearly half a dozen cases have come to light since Modi won his third consecutive term Cow related lynching All over India. Some houses have been bulldozed because Muslims living in them were suspected of storing beef in their refrigerators. Last month, an elderly Muslim traveling in a train was brutally beaten by a group of men on suspicion of carrying that beef. A viral video of the incident shows the traumatized man being abused and beaten by several men as others in the coach witnessed and filmed the attack.
Why do cow protection crimes continue?
But why isn’t the BJP, weakened in Parliament – and if its critics are to be believed, abetting such attacks – cracking down on them? It is not difficult to understand. The party cannot be seen shedding its core Hindu supremacist base when assembly elections are due later this year in several key states, including Haryana, where the Faridabad and Charkhi Dadri incidents took place.
Many analysts say that such vigilante attacks serve a dual purpose. They say the attacks allow the government to deny in the face of international criticism that the state was not directly involved in the killings. At the same time, they feed an anti-Muslim narrative on this ground that helps energize the BJP’s primary voters.
In this, the BJP has been helped by the continued praise and support of a large section of the docile and uncritical mainstream media, now known as “Godi Media” in Hindi. A leading journalist A vivid translation of “lapdog media”.
In his 2021 book, Modi’s India, Christophe Jafferlot, professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s College London, wrote that Hindu militias like the GRD were participating in the creation of an “unofficial” Hindu state.
Jaffrelot said such groups are cogs in a larger wheel called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a men-only right-wing group formed in 1925 along the lines of European fascist parties, which counts Modi and millions of other Hindus as its lifetime members. . BJP is the political wing of RSS.
“The Indian state was built around a bureaucracy handed down by the British, but there was work to be done. composition A Hindu state, and vigilantes are working for it,” he wrote in his book, emphasizing “formation”.
In this context what happened in Faridabad on August 24 or three days later in Charkhi Dadri should be seen. Is either killing legal? If not, why has the nation been shocked by what many describe as a “mistake”?
And why have other murders, like dozens before, been reduced to second figures in a long list of mob lynchings, not worthy of sympathy and outrage or banner headlines on the front page of a newspaper?
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