Lathis raised for battle and screaming praise of the Goddess Kali, police inspector Gyatri Prosunno Ghosal would later recall how the crowd surged toward him as the sun began to set. The villagers of Basantpur in Bihar’s Siwan had become the claws and fangs of the cows grazing in the mango grove next to the police station. Earlier that week, a mob had intercepted a herd of cattle as they were being transported to a slaughterhouse. “The cows will not be allowed to leave,” the police officer was told, “It would be better if you get the butchers to accept a price for the cattle.”
The gun provided Ghosal his final argument: Two men were killed and several injured by the buckshot fired at point-blank range, finally forcing the mob to retreat. There were menacing words of parting, historian Anand Yang records in a brilliant essay. “To-day you have escaped, but to-morrow we will see how you will fare.”
A hundred and thirty-one years since cow-protection riots tore across a great arc of northern India, all the way from Mumbai to Yangon, the cow has lost none of its power to claim human life. Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepared to begin his third term in office, cow-traders Guddu Khan and Chand Miya Khan were murdered in Chhattisgarh. In Telangana, Odisha and Himachal Pradesh, violence broke out after rumours spread that cows were being illegally slaughtered.
The government of Madhya Pradesh—not always enthusiastic about implementing its own laws against cow-vigilante violence—promptly demolished the homes of people accused of being in possession of beef.
Even though the rise of killings by cow-vigilantes is often linked to the growth of Hindu nationalism, the riots of 1893—and many others that followed—point us to an unaddressed fracture in Indian society. There is nothing new, nor startling about cow-vigilante killings. The self-serving fiction that communal killing might comfort India has kept deeply embedded cultural hatreds obscured.
There’s little evidence, it needs to be said, that riots have accelerated during Modi’s tenure. While official data is fragmentary, killings have remained static since the Gujarat riots of 2002. Like the name of the Prophet has often crystallised extreme violence in many parts of the world, the cow has become the endpoint of rational behaviour in India.
The question is: why has this long war of attrition continued to rage?
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Politics of the cow
“The cloven hoof of the Gorakshini Sabha [Cow-Protection Society] is visible throughout,” the colonial administrator GE Manisty reported to his superiors after the Basantpur riot. Founded in the 1870s by the Gujarat-born Brahmin proselytiser Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the Arya Samaj movement spread out of Punjab, claiming to be fighting against a long civilisational decline of Hinduism. Gorakshini Sabhas appeared across British India, casting the cause of cow-protection as a means to rebuild Hindu spiritual power.
Kuka Sikhs, historian Shivangi Sharma records, also engaged in cow-protection campaigns in the late 19th century. It was a means of opposing English rule. In 1887, a Kuka bard wandered through Amritsar, singing: “The unclean have come from London, and have established slaughter houses in every place. They have killed our Gurus, and we must now sacrifice our lives.”
Eighty-six cow-linked riots, scholar Julia Hauser has written, were recorded by colonial authorities between 1889 and 1893, as local notables mobilised to block shipments of cattle to slaughterhouses. The cow protection movement, she notes, served to simultaneously sharpen the boundaries between Hindus and Muslims, and to oppose imperial authority.
Among the 1893 riots was an explosion of violence in Mumbai. According to one contemporary newspaper account, saw the “destruction of
temples and mosques, and the looting of shops, to the accompaniment of fierce faction fights in the streets, varied with senseless assaults on the police and the military.” Eighty people were killed, and hundreds injured.
Large-scale violence caused by cow slaughter wasn’t, of course, an invention of the colonial era. The first major riot of which there is a full historical record, anthropologist Marc Gaborieau has written, broke out in 1713. It was triggered after a Muslim businessman slaughtered a cow in front of his house in retaliation for a Hindu lighting a Holi bonfire the previous day.
The technological transformation of India in the 19th century, however, gave such riots a larger political significance. To colonial administrators, Yang notes, it was apparent that the printing press, the telegraph, and the railways enabled local religious feuds to feed into wider, pan-India political contestation.
Swadeshi and Gau Raksha
“All the Brahmans are armed with big bamboos, walking about the cattle market,” a British bureaucrat reported to his superiors in January 1906, “Yakub is frightened out of his life every day he goes to Wai.” The threat to the officers’ beef supplies, though, wasn’t the reason for the communication. The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak had created a fund to buy up cattle from markets in Wai and Pune, ensuring they were not available for slaughter.
Following the violence of 1893, the colonial state became increasingly aggressive in its efforts to preempt communal violence, especially when it threatened industrial order. Thus, historian Subho Basu writes, troops were deployed in Bengal’s Rishra in 1896 to prevent the slaughter of a cow on Eid.
In August 1889, similarly, a cycle of communal incidents started with the sacrifice of a cow by a washerman in Rohtak, and ended only after the deployment of police and infantry. Four people were injured in police fire, two by sword wounds, and one killed by a blow from a lathi—but the violence did not grow outside its immediate geographical limits.
Despite successful efforts to heal the wounds of 1893 riots, the national movement stoked the cow-protection issue again through the early 20th century.
The consequences would soon become evident. The riots of 1917 in Bihar’s Shahabad started with efforts to suppress the sacrifice of cattle in Eid al-Adha and acquired the dimensions of a civil war. From 28 September to 7 October, historian Hitendra Patel writes, some 129 villages were looted and 14 more saw killings. Eventually, the colonial authorities sentenced 2,457 people for various crimes committed during the riots, which were only contained after forces were sent in from Kolkata, Meerut and Allahabad.
In Punjab’s Kartarpur, similarly, large-scale violence broke out over cattle sacrifice on Eid-al-adha in 1918 It was fuelled by disputes over land and irrigation rights. The communal mobilisation of this period accelerated, and the bitterness congealed into a rock, paving the road to Partition.
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The control of violence
To many contemporary Indian observers in 1893, what lay ahead was evident. Even though Hindus bought meat from Muslim butchers and both communities participated in Holi and Muharram processions, the Nagari Ninad newspaper, published from Mirzapur noted on 8 February 1894, “the growth of high religious feeling culminated in the unfortunate riots of last year.” The activities of cow-protection societies, it argued, had enabled the rise of figures like Syed Ahmad Khan of Aligarh, who opposed the nationalism of the Congress.
“The interests of the Hindus and Musalmans are entirely identical, and it is the height of folly on the part of any community to allow itself to be deceived by an exhibition of excessive sympathy on the part of men, whose secret object is to prevent union between them.”
For their part, colonial authorities maintained a studied neutrality in the face of what they described as native fanaticism. For this end, pragmatism and principle were both arguments. The colonial state simply lacked the resources to impose order through its police, and the deployment of the military involved enormous expense.
Historian Erin Giuliani notes that there were just 532 police officers for all of Bhagalpur, Uttar Pradesh, in 1862—each one responsible, on average, for a staggering 3,740 people.
“For a numerically challenged, over-worked and poorly-equipped force,” scholar Prashant Kidambi notes, “petty street offences involving the poor provided an attractive alternative to the more strenuous task of chasing up serious crimes.”
Like in the 19th century, the police have largely stood aside through the last decade as communal violence has continued to tear India apart. Just as it was for Yakub the butcher, terror and intimidation remain the everyday reality of many Muslims.
In 1983—the embers of India’s worst communal riots since Partition still glowing in Nellie, Aligarh, Meerut, Godhra and Moradabad—former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi addressed a rally in Kurukshetra. The prime minister, invoking the Mahabharata, warned of a dharmyudh, a holy war. A few days earlier, she had claimed “Hindu religion and culture” were in danger.
That message continues to spread through society today, just with different spokespersons. Then, as now, the killers are young, masculinity-seeking men, funded by extortion rackets, inspired by pop-Hindutva hate-culture—and critical for securing power over the streets during elections.
Ending the killings will need more than a new kind of police or politicians: Like all political problems, it necessitates a searching conversation on what identity means, and how Indian society could overcome its failure to negotiate its many, deep differences.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Interesting article. I’d love to see a detailed analysis of religious riots by year since independence,
I wonder why cows are important in Hinduism. Ganesh’s vehicle is a mouse, but we don’t se anybody fretting about killing mice. What religious text then makes the cow so much more potent in its ability to cause violence among men?
Modi is the problem. His Hindi-Hindutva and Islamophobia ideology has been loud and clear.
The day Muslims stop killing the cows and animals , this problem will end. Till then, Harsh punishments are needed for Muslims like death penalty for killing of cows.