Maaf karna, sahab. Mujhse galti ho gayi.”
That remark by a Rajasthan policeman who stopped for tea and dropped cows off at a shelter and took three hours to bring dairy farmer Rakbar Khan, a victim of lynching, from Alwar to a hospital, brought a sense of deja vu.
How many times have we heard that dialogue on real-life based crime shows on television? Every criminal when caught says, “Forgive me, sir. I made a mistake.” To which the investigating officer inevitably replies, “Yeh galti nahin, gunah hai. Iski koi maafi nahin mil sakti. Ab latko phaansi pur ya sado zindagi bhar is jail mein (This is no mistake. It is a crime. You can never be forgiven for it. Now you will hang for this or at least rot in this jail for the rest of your life).”
Here the man admitting to his guilt—Assistant Sub-Inspector Mohan Singh—obviously knew he would not be hanged or jailed for life for he added, “Pardon me or punish me. It is quite simple and straightforward (what must be done).” He has been suspended as punishment, but with top cops describing it as an “error of judgment”, it is a foregone conclusion that he will eventually be pardoned. But what about Rakbar Khan, whose only crime—in the eyes of his killers—was that he was a “Muslim” dairy farmer and depended on selling milk for his livelihood?
Soon after his killing, an RSS leader exhorted people to stop eating beef and promised that the lynchings in the name of the cow would stop automatically. But the issue now has gone beyond mere cow vigilantism and it is clear that it is only and only about “being Muslim”.
For, in a country where more than 71 per cent of people over the age of 15 (according to the 2014 baseline sample registration survey by the Registrar General of India) are non-vegetarians, it is ridiculous to presume that only Muslims eat beef. According to the National Sample Survey Office more than 80 million Indians consume beef, of which Hindus account for 12.5 million, the rest belonging to various other communities, including Muslims and Christians.
Moreover, according to 2015 figures, India has been the largest exporter of beef since 2014 and has been outpacing Brazil in that department steadily over the past few years.
Contributing quite a bit to these exports is Al-Dua, among the leading exporters of halal meat to Arab nations. According to the Registrar of Companies, one of its promoters was Sangeet Som, an anti-beef crusader from Uttar Pradesh, named in the Muzaffarnagar riots, who later ended up as a BJP MLA. Then, again, Goa allows beef consumption as does the Northeast—both Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju and Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu have openly admitted to their food preferences which includes beef. Yet none of the vigilantes—who are simply criminals sure of escaping the law because of the benign attitudes of policemen like Mohan Singh and their local leaders—target these people simply because they are not Muslim.
So Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, who abandoned his cows—he kept his buffaloes, though—as soon as lynchings in the name of the cow began in India is wrong in his abject surrender to these criminals by exhorting his fellow Muslims to give up dairy farming to escape the lynchings.
The situation in this country is such today that even if every Muslim would give up eating beef (there is no pressure on the 12.5 million Hindus who do so) or even dairy farming , vigilantes and criminals would still find some or the other reason to attack the community—like if they fall in love with a Hindu girl as happened this week in a Ghaziabad court where a young Muslim man wanted to register his marriage to his Hindu sweetheart. But when a Muslim man is terrorised into not even looking at a Hindu woman, the criminals could then target them, for sharing the same spaces as them.
For this is now no longer about just marginalising Muslims. It has gone way beyond that. It is about demonising the other community, driving fear into them, forcing them out of sight and eventually out of the country.
That is also the reason why Rahul Gandhi was demonised for saying something he never did. The Congress president has undertaken some quiet interactions of his own and met some Muslim intellectuals in New Delhi, where no journalists were present. An Urdu newspaper reported he had told them the Congress was a party for Muslims. That report was contradicted by virtually everyone present at the meeting, yet ministers attempted to demonise both Rahul Gandhi and Muslims without bothering to verify the truth of the report.
Their target was not so much Rahul Gandhi or the Congress party as the Muslims of this country, who would be targeted even if they were all well-established professionals who had greatly contributed to nation-building, not nation-breaking. Moreover, the garlanding and felicitation of convicted criminals who killed Muslims also sends out a wrong signal to other vigilantes. So whether a Muslim eats beef or not or marries a Hindu girl he will always be demonised.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
Email: sujata.anandan@gmail.com