Hate crime, again

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Hate crime, again

Monday, 03 August 2020 | Pioneer

Hate crime, again

Cow vigilantes beat up a young man suspecting he was transporting beef. Only he wasn’t

It is official. India has a major law and order problem on its hands as communal conflicts are rising and are being settled outside the justice system. Hate Crime Watch documented 254 criminal attacks targetting religious minorities between January 2009 and October 2018, which killed 91 people and injured 579 others. And to worsen matters, our police force is inefficient, ineffective and distressingly complicit in most crimes and atrocities that are committed on religious minorities, Scheduled Castes, tribes, backward classes and the underprivileged. The most recent example of this chilling indifference and perversion of the law comes from Gurugram where a group of five cow vigilantes beat up a young man with a hammer in the presence of policemen on the suspicion of transporting beef. Later, it turned out that it was buffalo meat that the young man was transporting at the behest of his boss, who has been in the business for 50 years. For now, the victim, who was beaten within an inch of his life, is alive, but who is to say what will happen tomorrow? This incident is a throwback to the Dadri lynching case of 2015 when one Mohammad Akhlaq was killed by cow vigilantes in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly slaughtering a cow and consuming its meat. The Gurugram incident, that occurred on the eve of Eid al-Adha, which is colloquially known as “Bakri Eid”, shows that it was pre-planned and pre-meditated as the cow vigilantes were out to create trouble or even spark off communal disturbance. Just like the Dadri case, the police was faster at sending the meat to a lab for testing than taking the half-dead victim to the hospital or catching any of the suspects. This also reminds one of the Alwar policemen, who delayed rushing another lynching case victim, Rakbar Khan, to the hospital and were reluctant to take action against the guilty cow vigilantes despite video evidence.

It is obvious that emboldened by political patronage and police inaction, cow vigilantes, basically criminals positing themselves as wingmen of Hindutva, are no longer afraid of the proverbial long arm of the law and don’t hesitate to violate it with impunity. What else can explain the fact that assaulters continued to beat the young man even after dragging him to his village with the police watching in silence? In fact, so brazen and fearless were the men that they turned on the cops themselves when they finally deigned to intervene. This loss of respect for the law and the guarantee of protection for a “majoritarian cause” are the reasons why there has been a surge in kangaroo courts across the country over the last two months. The vigilantes dispense instant justice for what they call “theft”and “selling beef.” This latest incident not only shows how cow vigilantism is on the rise again in India but that the politics of otherisation is set to be the new pandemic.

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