The killing of a serving police official, inspector Subodh Kumar Singh, in communally sensitive western part of India’s most populous State of Uttar Pradesh on 3 December is a sign of a deeper malady that has afflicted the body polity of India.
It is no isolated incident, and the ground reports from some of the Hindi-speaking States are alarming. They point to targeted efforts to divide society on communal lines. A top serving police official confided that some ruling party leaders in Rajasthan, where the electorate is engaged in electing a new government and is going to vote on 7 December, are asking district administration to help in creating a communal frenzy. While a former director general of a para-police organization was reconfirming the above information, the Bulandshahr incident took place.
Eyewitness accounts of and independent investigations of the tragic killing of the on duty UP police official clearly point out that the culprits belong to outfits that enjoy political patronage of those controlling the levers of political power in the State.
Yogesh Raj, who is absconding, is the prime accused in the first information report (FIR). He is a second year LLB student. The accused rose to prominence in Bulandshahr’s Nayabas village by targeting suspected or alleged “eve-teasers”, physically intervening in domestic and property disputes and participating in raids against cattle smugglers as part of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh’s nation- wide campaign against cow slaughter. The district police as well as residents of this area say that Raj is affiliated with the local unit of the Bajrang Dal holding the post of zila sanyojak (district coordinator).
Police has arrested four for the role in violence and has detained another five on grounds of suspicion. A close perusal of their respective profiles reveal that they have, in one way or the other, sympathies with the movement of cow vigilantism that was launched by the RSS decades back but was given a definite forward push in 2012-13.
In the run-up to the 2014 general elections, the issue of beef eating and cow slaughter was prominent and was aggressively pursued by several of the BJP leaders, including the prime ministerial candidate. The BJP scored a spectacular victory in the elections, winning majority on its own for the first time in the history of the country’s electoral politics. Following this, the cow vigilante groups felt encouraged to take law into their own hands. There was no one to dissuade or discourage them.
Cow protection was an old agenda of the RSS and other Hinduatva outfits. In 1966, Hindu organisations, including the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, had agitated to demand a ban on cow slaughter as enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution. The agitation had culminated in a massive demonstration outside the Sansad Bhavan (Parliament House) on 7 November 1966. The agitators had tried to storm the Sansad but were prevented. Mobs rampaged through the national capital and a 48-hour curfew was imposed. However, the then Congress government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not accept their demand.
Violence over slaughter of cows once again started immediately after the installation of the BJP government in the union capital in May 2014. Brutal incidents of killing of Dalits and Muslims began to occur in different parts of the country, particularly in the Hindi-speaking States. One of the major incident took place on 28 September, 2015 in which 55-year old Mohammad Akhlaq was mob-lynched in village Bisada in district Dadri in western UP because of alleged rumours of the slaughter of a cow and beef being kept in Akhlaq’s house in a fridge.
It needs to be recalled here that when this ghastly incident took place, the elections for the State Assembly were about 18 months away and the BJP was in the opposition and the western UP was very crucial to the party. It knew cow politics was an effective tool to polarise the society.
Similar incidents broke out in not only UP but also in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and other States. Former Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel became a victim of an incident in Una in which Dalits were killed. She had to step down, providing an escape route to BJP’s top leadership that wanted to placate electorally crucial sections of the society.
What happened in Bulandshahr or what transpired earlier in Bisada, Una or in many other places were not stray or accidental happenings. In the name of protecting the cow, Gau Rakshak Samitis (Cow Protecting Committees) have sprung up in many States. Their members collect funds from public and then indulge in violence on the pretext of saving cows from alleged Muslim slaughters, taking law into their hands. While not all such alleged incidents are false but majority of them are based on rumours.
Now that the country is going for the next general elections in next 3-4 months, efforts would be made to rake up violence to polarise the society and polity on religious lines as the ruling party’s developmental agenda is no more a vote enhancer.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Satish Misra was Senior Fellow at ORF. He has been a journalist for many years. He has a PhD in International Affairs from Humboldt University ...
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