Chandigarh: Soon after Bajrang Dal member Monu Manesar was booked for his alleged involvement in the deaths of two cow smuggling suspects in Haryana, photos of him posing with police and government officials were widely circulated. But this should not be surprising, given that Manesar is a key member of the Haryana government’s cow protection machinery.
Back in July 2021, Haryana’s Manohar Lal Khattar-led BJP government notified the setting up of a state-level Special Cow Protection Task Force Committee, comprising several senior officials, to prevent the smuggling and slaughter of cows, rehabilitate stray cattle, and take legal action against those found to be involved in such activities. Under this committee are special cow protection task forces (SCPTFs) for every district, which include some nominated gau sevaks/rakshaks (cow caretakers).
Monu Manesar — whose real name is Mohit Yadav — is a member of the SCPTF set up by the Gurugram administration. During his stint, he has built up a social media reputation as a swashbuckling seeker of justice for cows with his livestreamed raids, high-speed car chases, and posts about being felicitated by senior police officers for his efforts.
There is an ‘unofficial’ system operating in Haryana too, which feeds into the official cow protection set-up.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, four gau rakshaks from Sirsa and Fatehabad districts independently claimed there are over 15,000 cow vigilantes active in the state, with affiliations to different groups, the main three being the Gau Raksha Dal, Bajrang Dal, and Gauputra Sena.
“We do everything for the police, right from setting up barriers to check the smuggling of cows, and chasing vehicles or traffickers, to bringing them to book by handing them over to the police,” said a gau rakshak from Sirsa.
These gau rakhsaks also said that they cultivated networks of informants and were issued special I-cards that helped them bypass police checkposts and the like while “chasing” cow smuggling suspects.
A deputy superintendent of police (DSP) told ThePrint Sunday that when a vehicle transporting cattle is held by gau rakshaks or the police, the district-level SCPTF members usually arrive at the spot to assess the situation. “The SCPTFs are duly functional,” he added.
Gau rakshaks are often felicitated by the state police as they help check the smuggling and slaughter of cows, which are crimes under the Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act that was implemented by the Haryana government in 2015.
Speaking to The Print, Shravan Kumar Garg, the chairman of the Haryana Gau Seva Aayog (Cow Service Commission) and the de facto head of the state SCPTF committee, said that gau rakshaks were doing a commendable job in the state, whether or not they were direct members of the SCPTFs.
He added that the allegations against gau rakshaks like Monu Manesar were still under investigation and that nothing had been substantiated yet. He also suggested that gau rakshaks were being unfairly implicated because they were helping the state government be “strict” about cow protection laws.
However, a spate of incidents in Haryana has drawn criticism from political opponents and humanitarian organisations about the human costs of cow protectionism, whether state-sanctioned or carried out by extra-state actors.
Monu Manesar, who remains at large, has been named in at least three such cases.
Last week, when the charred remains of two Muslim men from Rajasthan’s Bharatpur — Junaid and Nasir — were found in neighbouring Haryana’s Loharu, their relatives accused Manesar of abducting them. The police booked him, but he remains at large and has claimed in a Twitter video that he had been in a Gurugram hotel at the time, had nothing to do with the deaths, and that the actual culprits should be punished.
In another complaint filed this month in Haryana’s Nuh, Manesar’s name came up in connection with the death of Waris Khan, 21. The police claimed that Khan died in an accident, but social media videos purportedly showed injured men being questioned by cow vigilantes about their names and villages of origin. Manesar claimed that his team had rescued a cow from Khan’s car but did not harm anyone.
In yet another incident from 6 February, Manesar was named in a scuffle between gau rakshaks and residents of Pataudi in Gurugram, where 20-year-old Mohin Khan suffered a bullet injury.
Also read: From force-feeding people dung to livestreamed ‘raids’ — rise of cow vigilantism & Monu Manesar
Official cow protection set-up
The abduction and deaths of Junaid and Nasir, allegedly at the hands of Bajrang Dal workers, has caused an outcry and fingers are also being pointed at the state government.
In a tweet Friday, senior Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala had written in Hindi that Haryana was turning into a “hate factory” and that accused Monu Manesar, who already had criminal cases against him, clearly had “state patronage”.
हरियाणा को अब “नफ़रत की फ़ैक्टरी” बना रहे हैं।
दो भाईयों का अपहरण कर बजरंग दल के लोगों द्वारा ज़िंदा जलाने की दिल दहलाने वाली दुर्दांत व दर्दनाक घटना ने भारत की आत्मा को छलनी कर दिया है।
मोनू मानेसर पर पहले भी हिंसा के केस हैं।
साफ़ है कि ये सरकार के संरक्षण में हो रहा है। pic.twitter.com/ul4u115s4K
— Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) February 17, 2023
While in a January interview with ABP in the wake of the alleged lynching of Waris Khan, Manesar had claimed that he and other gau rakshaks operated without government assistance and instead relied on benefactors from the community, he is also a part of the state’s official cow protection task forces, which come under a hierarchy of high-level officials and government appointees.
When the state-level Special Cow Protection Task Force Committee was notified by the Haryana government in 2021, it was deemed to have six members — the chairperson as well as the secretary of the state Gau Seva Aayog, the special secretary of the Revenue and Disaster Management Department, the special secretary of the Animal Husbandry and Dairying Department, the additional director general of police (ADGP), and the additional legal remembrancer (ALR) of the Department of Legal Affairs.
At the district level, each special cow protection task force has 11 members. Six of these are government officials — the deputy commissioner, the superintendent of police, the municipal corporation commissioner, the zilla parishad chief executive officer, the district attorney, and the deputy director of Animal Husbandry and Dairying.
The remaining members include three people nominated by the state Gau Seva Aayog and two gau sevaks nominated by the deputy commissioner.
The Gau Seva Aayog is a commission set up by the state government to look after the interests of cattle. Its ex-officio members include the principal secretaries of several departments — Revenue and Disaster Management, Urban Development, Agriculture, Finance, Animal Husbandry, and Development and Panchayat — as well as the director general of police and the director general of the Animal Husbandry and Dairying Department.
The secretary of the Gau Seva Aayog is an officer of the Haryana Civil Services, and the post is currently occupied by Vijay Kumar Yadav.
The chairperson of the Gau Seva Aayog is appointed by the state government and is also the head of the state-level cow protection committee.
Card-carrying ‘gau sevaks’
Over five years ago, in August 2017, Haryana had announced that the state would have certified gau rakshaks.
Bhani Ram Mangla, the then chairman of Haryana Gau Seva Aayog, had said that the organisation would get the record of the gau sevaks verified from the police and then issue identity cards to them.
However, Shravan Kumar Garg, the current chairman of the Haryana Gau Seva Aayog and state SCPTF committee chief, said that the identity cards are being issued by the organisations to which the gau sevaks belong and not by the commission.
“These organisations are registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. The commission has also recognised these organisations for the services they are rendering for cow protection,” Garg said.
When asked about the role of gau sevaks in the official machinery, he said that, at the district level, each SCPTF has two gau sevaks nominated by the deputy commissioner and three others nominated by the Gau Seva Aayog.
Therefore, across the state’s 22 districts, there are 110 gau rakshaks who are members of the government’s SCPTFs. In addition to these, many others volunteer their services for cow protection.
Monu Manesar, who was named in the FIR regarding the deaths of Junaid and Nasir, is a member of the Gurugram SCPTF. He has been associated with the Bajrang Dal for at least a decade.
“Gau rakshaks are doing a good job by helping the police in stopping cow slaughter. They risk their own life to stop criminal activities,” Garg said.
When asked about this month’s incidents of violence as well as a 2016 case in which gau rakshaks reportedly confessed to forcing suspected cow smugglers to eat cow dung, Garg claimed that there was not enough evidence. The burnt bodies in Loharu, he said, could be due to an “accident”, he said.
‘Security guards as informants, toll-free pass’
ThePrint tried to contact several prominent gau rakshaks in Haryana, including Monu Manesar, Shrikant Marora, and Acharya Yogendra, but their mobile numbers were switched off.
However, four gau rakshaks, two each from Sirsa and Fatehabad, agreed to speak about their activities on the condition of anonymity. They claimed that the state’s cow protection attempts were a success largely because of the efforts of organisations like the Bajrang Dal, Gau Raksha Dal, and Gauputra Sena, among others, and their legions of volunteers who work without renumeration.
“We have our sources in society who keep us informed about the activities of the cow smugglers. Our sources are largely people who operate during the night shifts, like security guards, and workers of the dairies,” said a gau rakshak from Sirsa.
When there is any information about suspicious activities, he added, local gau rakshaks quickly get into gear.
“Once we get a tip-off regarding any vehicle transporting cows or we ourselves find a suspicious vehicle, we inform the police and at the same time our teams chase them. We then hand them over to the police after apprehending them,” said the gau rakshak.
What helps these “chases” along is the relative ease of movement that card-carrying gau rakshaks have in Haryana, the sources from Sirsa claimed.
“Our I-cards are duly recognised by the police and toll plazas. We don’t have to pay toll at any toll barrier in the state,” said a gau rakshak from Fatehabad.
However, the legality of some of gau rakshaks’ attempts to uphold Haryana’s cow protection laws has come under question numerous times over the last few months.
‘Harassment and murder’ or ‘hue and cry’?
The abduction and deaths of Junaid and Nasir, allegedly at the hands of Bajrang Dal workers, is not an isolated incident.
On 28 January, Waris Khan from Haryana’s Nuh, which is part of the Mewat region, succumbed to injuries that his family claimed had been inflicted by gau rakshaks of the Bajrang Dal. Manesar was named in the complaint too.
A video also surfaced in which three injured men sitting in a vehicle were being thrashed and asked to spell out their names. One was heard saying that his name was Waris.
A day later, Amnesty India tweeted: “We are horrified by the reported killing of Waris, a 21-year-old Muslim farmer in Haryana’s Nuh district. Haryana’s govt must promptly, independently & impartially investigate whether his murder was motivated by discrimination & intolerance and bring the perpetrators to justice.”
However, the police maintained Khan succumbed to injuries sustained in a road accident. Monu Manesar was mentioned in the complaint lodged by Waris Khan’s family but the police didn’t convert the complaint into an FIR.
The police, though, did file two FIRs based on complaints from Monu Manesar that he had received death threats after the incident. He and the Bajrang Dal denied any culpability in this incident.
Notably, people in the Meo Muslim-dominated Mewat region of Haryana often complain of harassment by cow vigilantes.
In August last year, villagers at Ferozepur Zirka of Nuh district held a mahapanchayat and alleged they were being harassed by cow vigilantes.
In several cases, people have complained about extortion by cow vigilantes in the name of the protection of cows.
In May 2021, the Punjab and Haryana High Court had asked the Haryana government to explain the authority vested in cow vigilantes to raid the homes of citizens.
The high court was hearing the bail plea of Mubin, a resident of Mewat, who was booked by the police under the cow protection law.
The FIR against him mentioned that members of the Gau Raksha Dal raided his house and found a cow, a bull and a calf tethered there.
Meanwhile, state SCPTF committee chairman Garg insisted that such controversies were much ado about nothing.
“For a long time, the Mewat area has been known for the slaughtering of cows,” he said. “Now, when the state government has shown some sternness in this direction, there is so much of a hue and cry.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Also read: ‘Crime to be a Muslim?’ Village seethes after 2 found dead in Bhiwani; ‘gau rakshaks’ blamed