Emboldened by Modi's ascent, India's cow vigilantes deny Muslims their livelihood
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-politics-religion-cows/
ON PATROL: A group of cow vigilantes prepare
to set up a roadblock, accompanied by police, near the northern Indian
city of Chandigarh in early July. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton
Hindu
nationalists are beating up Muslim farmers and seizing their cows on
the grounds that the animals are headed for the slaughterhouse. But
there's another side to the religiously tinged violence: The stolen cows
are being given to Hindu farmers.
BEHROR, India – The
beating that ended Pehlu Khan’s life was televised nationwide. Cell
phone video captured a group of men punching and slinging Khan around
the middle of a road in north India, stomping on him and then slamming
the 55-year-old farmer down on concrete as he begged for mercy.
Khan
had been stopped by the lynch mob of right-wing Hindus as he rode home
from a market in April with two cows and two calves in the back of a
truck. The crowd was furious at the sight of a Muslim transporting
animals held sacred by Hindus, according to the accounts of his sons and
two fellow villagers who were also attacked. Before the men beat Khan
so badly that he later died, breaking his ribs in multiple places, they
screamed that he was planning to slaughter the cattle for beef.
Outside
the frame of the video, something else was happening: Pehlu Khan’s cows
were seized. They were hauled off to a nearby Hindu-run shelter that
takes in cattle snatched from Muslims and sells them.
Assaults
meted out in broad daylight against India’s Muslim population, some 14
percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people, have sparked concern about
the direction the country is taking under Hindu nationalist Prime
Minister Narendra Modi. There has been another, less noted dimension to
the violence: The theft from Muslims and redistribution to Hindus of
cows that provide crucial income in the Indian countryside.
Such scenes
clash with India’s image as an investor darling in Asia and the
pro-business message Modi broadcasts to foreign investors. But three and
a half years after his electoral victory, the cow seizures illustrate
how the nation’s right-wing Hindu factions that propelled Modi to power
are now shaping India and stirring religious upheaval.
Having
stoked Hindu nationalist passions in his bid for the highest office,
it’s unclear to what extent Modi can now control them. The bands of
right-wing Hindus who seize the cows are operating essentially as
private militias. They are undeterred by the prime minister’s public
calls on them to end the violence. States governed by Modi’s party have
seen a marked increase in cow theft from Muslims as well as funding for
cow shelters that in many cases take in the stolen cattle.
Interviews
with nationalist Hindu leaders and militia members across the country
reveal an impatience for Muslims to demonstrate obeisance to the Hindu
majority.
There are no
official statistics for how many cows have been stolen from Muslims in
incidents involving such groups since Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) came to national power in 2014. Reuters’ reporting across India,
though, puts actual numbers on the extent of the cow theft. It also
provides the first in-depth look at how the actions of cow vigilantes
are leading to further economic marginalization of the country’s Muslim
minority.
In northern
India, the leadership of just two of the main organizations of “gau
rakshaks” – right-wing Hindu cow vigilantes, or literally “cow
protectors” – said they have taken about 190,000 cows since the year of
Modi’s election, some in the presence of police and almost every single
one of them from Muslims, the reporting shows.
“Everyone in this world is born Hindu. They are turned into Muslims when they are circumcised and Christians when they are baptized.”
Separately,
Reuters surveyed 110 cow shelters or farms, known as “gaushalas,”
across six Indian states that were led by BJP chief ministers from
before or just after Modi’s 2014 election win. The survey found an
increase of 50 percent in their cattle holdings - from about 84,000 head
before Modi came to power in 2014 to more than 126,000 today.
The survey, conducted by phone and in person, covered a fraction of the thousands of cow sheds nationwide.
It
was not possible to determine how much of the 50 percent increase was
due to cow vigilantes, because record-keeping in many cases is
non-existent. But of the 110 cattle facilities surveyed, all but 14 said
they receive cows from the Hindu vigilante groups. About a third said
they sell or give cows away, nearly all to Hindu farmers and households.
In
a separate survey, Reuters found that only three of 24 cow facilities
in four states not ruled by a BJP chief minister said they sold or gave
away cattle - mainly to Hindus - after receiving them. While cattle
stock has risen about 40 percent in these gaushalas since Modi took
office, only a small part of the increase was due to vigilantes. In many
of the cases, cows were donated to the shelters for religious reasons
or purchased from cattle markets for fear they would be slaughtered.
It
is hard to put a value on the seized cattle because the price of cows
ranges from zero for animals near death to 25,000 rupees (about $385),
if not more, at cattle markets for healthy milk cows. But taking the
average of those two points, just the 190,000 cows captured by the two
vigilante groups in northern India would be worth more than $36 million.
That is a significant amount of money in India, where some 270 million
people live on less than $1.90 a day. In rural areas, home to about 70
percent of the nation’s population, a family’s milk cow is often its
most valuable possession.
Cow
slaughter is illegal in most of India, while committing cruelty to
cattle by transporting them crammed into small spaces is outlawed across
the country. Slaughtering buffalo, an animal not considered holy, is
allowed, fueling a multi-billion dollar meat export industry that is
dominated by Muslims. Penalties for killing a cow differ from state to
state, with most ranging from six months to five years in prison.
The
fatal assault on Pehlu Khan unfolded among the rolling hills of India’s
northwestern Rajasthan state. Travelling with his two adult sons in a
rented truck, Khan was headed home to the village of Jaisinghpur in the
neighboring state of Haryana. He’d borrowed 40,000 rupees (about $620)
to add to cash he’d cobbled together to buy the cows.
His
four animals were among 32 other cattle seized on April 1 at makeshift
roadblocks near the town of Behror. A day after the attack on Khan and
his two sons, police began an investigation against them under a state
law barring cow slaughter. On April 3, Khan died.
“If the sentiments of the majority community are respected, there would be no such incidents. Can we demand pork in any Gulf country?”
In its
April 18 order following a bail hearing for the sons, a local court
noted that the Khan family, found lying injured on the ground, was
unable to produce a waybill showing they’d legally purchased the
animals. Also, the cows were bound together at the mouth and, the judge
noted, “our society does not allow animals to be treated in an inhumane
way.”
Khan’s elder
son, Irshad, told Reuters that the cows had not been tied together. The
receipt they got at the cattle fair where they bought the animals, he
said, was snatched by the mob at the start of the violence. The family
handed Reuters a copy of the bill that they later retrieved.
A
Reuters reporter showed the receipt to clerks and a local official from
the office that issues the documents near the fair, in the city of
Jaipur. They said the document was authentic and should have ensured
safe passage.
The men
who delivered the cattle to the local cow shed, with the help of police
who rounded up the cows at the scene of the attack, were members of
right-wing Hindu organizations, according to the manager of the
facility. Survivors said the lynch mob let the driver of the truck, a
Hindu, escape.
The
shed often receives cattle “taken from Muslims” by Hindu vigilante
groups who suspect they’ll use the animals for meat, according to Vijay
Singh, its manager. Singh said he sells the best cows to local Hindu
farmers and landowners.
Speaking of the men who took the animals from Khan, Singh said they had performed “an act of devotion.”
The
cattle shelters range from tiny pastures to large complexes. They have
traditionally operated as religiously-motivated charities, taking in
cows abandoned by farmers because they no longer produce milk or those
dropped off by local government workers who found them wandering the
streets.
People
involved in snatching cattle from Muslims speak with a triumphant sense
that their moment in history has arrived. “Everyone in this world is
born Hindu. They are turned into Muslims when they are circumcised and
Christians when they are baptized,” said Dinesh Patil, a district head
of the Bajrang Dal group in the southwestern state of Maharashtra.
The
Bajrang Dal organization is closely linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS), the nation’s umbrella right-wing Hindu organization. The
RSS argues the purity of India was soiled by the foreign intervention of
Muslims and then Christians beginning in the 8th century. The RSS
helped create Modi’s political party, and the prime minister himself
first attended the group’s meetings as a child.
At
the complex he manages, Patil said that almost every one of the 1,700
cows grazing outside was “rescued by the Bajrang Dal” from “these Muslim
slaughterers.” Patil described how a degree of law enforcement
sanction is conferred on the cattle seizures: His group takes the cows
and hands them over to the police, who then deliver the cattle to his
facility. “The entire investigation and catching of the culprits is done
by us,” Patil said.
The police, he added, “have to listen to us because the BJP is in power.”
Told
of Patil’s comments, Bipin Bihari, second-in-command of police for
Maharashtra, said: “In a way their work supports the police. It eases
our work. If they have some information on some illegal activities, they
can share it with us, and we act on it. But they are not allowed to
take the law into their hands.”
A national spokesman for the ruling BJP, Sudhanshu Trivedi, said
his party expects anyone with knowledge of illegal acts, such as cow slaughter, to inform the police. In cases where cows were taken, he added, it was because their owners had broken laws: “It is not redistribution of wealth. It is just stopping of illegal activities,” he said.
his party expects anyone with knowledge of illegal acts, such as cow slaughter, to inform the police. In cases where cows were taken, he added, it was because their owners had broken laws: “It is not redistribution of wealth. It is just stopping of illegal activities,” he said.
Modi's office
referred Reuters’ request for comment to the Home Ministry. The ministry
said it is "not correct" that cow vigilantism has risen on Modi's watch
and "preposterous" to conclude that Hindus are organizing to confiscate
and redistribute cattle. Some people have taken the law into their own
hands “in the name of protecting the cows,” the ministry noted in a
written statement, but "the Government is committed to protect the legal
rights of all citizens, including minorities in India." State
governments, it said, have been directed to take “prompt action” against
such people.
Reuters
found no evidence of a formal plan by the BJP to use cow vigilante
groups to engineer the seizure and transfer of cows from Muslims to
Hindus.
But in states
where the BJP has taken power, cow seizures have ramped up. In the
absence of official data on the number of cows taken, Reuters reporting
and a review of past incidents show that the largest vigilante groups
and the cattle seizures are concentrated in BJP-led states.
One
organization of cow vigilantes in the northern state of Haryana has a
golden cow with crossed swords and two AK-47s beneath it as its logo.
The leaders of the Gau Raksha Dal, or cow protection group, say they
have captured up to 120,000 across the country since beginning their
campaign in 2013. Most of that activity was carried out after Modi’s
victory in 2014, which was followed by a BJP chief minister taking
office in Haryana later in the year.
Dinesh Arya,
state head of the Gau Raksha Dal, acknowledged his group is breaking
the law. Arya produced a list of 27 criminal complaints lodged by cattle
traders against his members that he said were still pending. “Seizing
cattle is not legal and we know that well. We are not authorized to do
this, it’s the police department’s work,” Arya said.
But
he claims a higher calling: “Our religion has given us the right to
stop our mother being butchered,” he said, referring to “gau mata,” or
mother cow. “We have forcefully taken that right.”
Outside
his office, a truck converted into a “mobile cow ambulance” used to
transport seized cattle bore a bullet hole – the aftermath of a recent
gun battle with Muslim “cattle smugglers,” Arya said.
Modi
has at least twice publicly criticized cow vigilantism. “Do we get the
right to kill a human being in the name of cow? Is this ‘gau bhakti’? Is
this ‘gau raksha’?” he declared in a speech in June, using the Hindi
phrases for cow devotion and cow protection. “Violence is not the
solution to any problem,” he added.
The
Supreme Court has also addressed the issue. In September, the court
ruled that central and state governments must deploy police officers to
prevent cow vigilante violence.
On
the ground, some Hindu activists aren’t heeding Modi’s calls. The
leader of a group of cow vigilantes, which claims 10,000 members
concentrated mostly in western and northern Indian states, said they
were unmoved by the prime minister’s condemnation of what he called the
vigilantes’ “anti-social activities.”
“The
cow protection movement totally belonged to the BJP before 2014,” said
the group’s leader, Pawan Pandit, a part-time software engineer. “Now
groups like ours have the momentum.”
SLIDESHOW: A member of
the Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal cow vigilante group raises his arms to stop
a truck at a roadblock set up in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh
in early July. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton
Pandit said networks of
vigilantes operating under his Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal – or Indian cow
protection group – captured as many as 60,000 cows in the three years
before Modi came to office. Since 2014, Pandit said, the group has
grabbed more than 100,000 cows, often working with police.
A
similar scenario has unfolded in Assam, where the BJP won power last
year. Located in the farthest reaches of India’s northeast, the state is
in a region where cow vigilante activity was all but unheard of.
The
leader of a right-wing Hindu youth organization said he waited a year
for the BJP-led government in Assam to crack down on what his group
views as illegal cattle trading. Then, said Balen Baishya, head of the
Hindu Youth-Students Council of Assam, he decided that local party
leadership was not made up of “hardcore believers.”
On
July 2, Baishya said, he and his men seized three vehicles carrying
cows. Video of the incident posted to the Internet shows a mob
surrounding one of the drivers as a man beat him with a baton while he
writhed on the ground and tried to shield himself.
This
lawlessness extends beyond the 18 states Modi’s BJP now controls
directly or with coalition partners. In the southern state of
Telangana, one of 11 states where the BJP is not in power, a man named
Purushottam Gupta was arrested shortly after Modi gave a speech in
August last year condemning cow vigilantes. Gupta had refused a court
order to hand back 20 cattle seized by cow vigilantes and kept them with
some 5,000 other cows at a facility next to the ashram where he is the
de facto deputy head. Gupta said he was released the same day he was
arrested and that the cows have yet to be returned to their Muslim
owners.
India’s laws
against cow slaughter predate Modi’s administration, and cow vigilantes
were operating in India before Modi came to power. At the federal level,
the BJP’s predecessor, the relatively liberal Congress party, funded
the cow sheds via a federal animal welfare association at higher levels
than Modi. Spending from the association’s four main gaushala grants,
the primary source of federal funding for the facilities, was about 150
million rupees for the 2010-11 fiscal year, compared with some 58
million for 2015-16, the most recent period available.
But
at the state level, BJP politicians have in many cases sharply
increased funding for the cattle shed facilities through government
bodies. In Haryana, the state where Pehlu Khan lived, the Gau Seva
Aayog, or cow protection commission, went from allotting 18.5 million
rupees to cow sheds in the 2014-15 fiscal year, when a BJP chief
minister took over, to more than 37 million for 2016-17. In Rajasthan,
the state where Khan was killed, funding doubled from about one billion
rupees in 2013-14, as the BJP captured the state, to more than 2.3
billion rupees in 2016-17, according to a state official.
Officials
in two of the states surveyed by Reuters that are not governed by a BJP
chief minister, said the government provides no funding for gaushala
facilities. A third state does not make payments annually and a fourth,
Karnataka in the south, began increasing its grants because of droughts
that caused farmers to abandon their cows, increasing the burden on
gaushalas, according to the state’s animal husbandry department.
Police
completed their formal court charge sheet in May for Pehlu Khan’s
death, naming 15 alleged attackers as taking part in the killing. The
charge sheet included a statement Khan gave from the intensive care unit
at 11:50 p.m. on the night of the April 1 assault. He said of the men
who assaulted him: “They were calling themselves workers of the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal” – both founded by members of the RSS,
the nationalist organization that Modi joined as a youngster.
Surendra
Jain, joint general secretary for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, parent
organization of the Bajrang Dal, said that “not a single person from VHP
was involved” in the attack on Pehlu Khan. Asked whether he was
certain, Jain said: “I can’t say. We have not looked in detail into
these cases.”
“If the
sentiments of the majority community are respected, there would be no
such incidents,” said Jain. “Can we demand pork in any Gulf country?”
Manmohan
Vaidya, national spokesman for the RSS, said his group doesn’t “support
any act of violence or people taking the law into their hands.”
Another
senior RSS official, speaking on condition he not be named, was more
pointed: “Hindus never had the courage to stand up for their religion
and now they are standing up,” he said. “The cow issue has led to an
awakening.”
In
Jaisinghpur, the small, poor village that Pehlu Khan called home, his
name is still in a fat, red notebook listing loans given out to
villagers by a local dairy operation. Entries on the front and back of a
faded page for Khan reaching back to 2006 show that he borrowed money
and paid back the loans in milk.
Mohammed
Yunus, the 58-year-old patriarch of the Muslim family that runs the
dairy, shook his head. He said he had suggested to Pehlu Khan that he
make the trip that ended his life, the one to the city of Jaipur to buy
cows with his two adult sons. The cattle fair there has better milk cows
than the local markets, Yunus explained.
At
the district police station, the head constable took out his book of
criminal records for the village and searched for the names of Pehlu
Khan, the Yunus family, and others interviewed in the area. None of them
had been arrested for anything related to cow smuggling or slaughter,
according to the records. There were two notations for one of Pehlu
Khan’s sons when he was a teenager, one for being found with a dead cow
and the other for travelling with animals stuffed in a vehicle.
The
son, Irshad, said one case involved a buffalo that was later returned
by police, and the other was rooted in a dispute with a distant
relative.
In the weeks
after the murder of Pehlu Khan, a leader of a small opposition party
visited the family home to pay his respects. He gave the Khans something
to help pay back the 40,000 rupees they still owed the Yunus family
from the loan Pehlu Khan took – something to give Khan’s widow and
children hope.
It was a cow.
Additional reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj, Mohi Narayan and Rupam Jain in New Delhi.
Cow politics
By Zeba Siddiqui, Krishna N. Das, Tommy Wilkes and Tom Lasseter
For
Hindus, the cow has long been holy. In ancient scriptures, it is
celebrated for its ability to nurture humanity and is compared to
deities.
During
Modi’s Hindu nationalist administration, the cow has taken on additional
political significance. In his campaign for office, Modi referred to
the danger of a “pink revolution” under the relatively liberal Congress
party, the domain of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
It
was a play on Congress’ “green revolution,” under which agricultural
output increased, suggesting the party had allowed the production and
export of meat including beef to surge.
Those in
hardline Hindu groups supporting Modi frequently complain that Congress
and its allies looked the other way when it came to illegal cow
slaughter operations run by Muslims to gain favor with that community at
the polls.
Two spokespeople for Congress did not respond to questions from Reuters.
In
May, Modi’s government banned the trade of cattle for slaughter. The
measure mostly affected the buffalo industry, as killing cows for meat
was already forbidden in most states. But the move was seen by many
Muslims as a ploy to further squeeze them out of the multibillion dollar
beef and leather industry, which employs millions in India.
India’s
Supreme Court in July suspended the government measure, effectively
lifting the ban on the trade of buffalo for slaughter.
Cash Cows
By Zeba Siddiqui, Krishna N. Das, Tommy Wilkes and Tom Lasseter
Photo Editor: Thomas White
Design: Catherine Tai
Edited by Peter Hirschberg and Paritosh Bansal
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