Name: India’s cow vigilantes are targeting Muslims
Uploaded: 2022-07-25T16:11:14.000Z
Duration: 14 min 58 s
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On a Monday night in September 2015, in a little town outside New Delhi,

an angry mob showed up to the house of man named Mohammad Akhlaq.

Adverbs of manner

The mob hit Akhlaq's elderly mother. They severely injured his son and then, they found Akhlaq.

They dragged him on to the street and they beat him with bricks until he immediately died.

The reason Akhlaq was killed, the anger from this mob

came from a rumor, a rumor that he was carrying beef.

"56 year old Muslim man was beaten to death by an allegedly Hindu mob."

An investigation was immediately launched.

Not only into Akhlaq's murder, but also into whether or not he truly was carrying beef.

18 suspects were identified, but now, four years later,

the trial hasn't even begun yet. In fact, the accused are out on bail,

which has led to fear among the victim's family and community.

Earlier this year, one of the accused was invited to sit in the front row of a political rally.

He later claimed that 16 of the accused were in the audience that day.

Aklhaq's murder isn't an isolated incident.

Here in a town in eastern India, two Muslim

cattle traders, one of them   just 13, we're driving to a fair to

sell their cows when they were stopped by a group of men, who beat them and hanged

them from a tree where, they both died. Over the last seven years hundreds of

Indians have been attacked, many killed. This violence has affected some Hindus

and other minorities, but the majority of the victims are Muslims.

All these incidents plotted on the map have one thing in common: they're all directly tied to cows.

But these attacks like this weren't always this prevalent.

In 2012, there was just one such attack in all of India.

And if you look closer at what's actually happening

on the ground, you can start to see exactly why these violent attacks are on the rise.

"Showing violence by so-called cow vigilantes in India."

"Self-appointed guardians of cows, which are sacred to Hindus claim they're being

illegally slaughtered. Not afraid to use violence to stop them."

There are millions of stray cows in India.

They are usually past the age where they can be productive on farms and so

they're just set free to roam the country and you see them everywhere.

Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and the majority of India's 1.3 billion people identify as Hindu.

Cows are generally revered by Hindus, many of whom abstain from eating beef,

but many Indians practice religions that don't share that same belief.

While transporting and trading cows isn't always illegal in the country,

slaughtering cows is banned in most of India's states. In some parts of the

country, especially those in the northern region, the police go on raids looking

for people who are breaking these cow protection laws, but in recent years,

"Once again, the beef brigade has taken law in its own hands in this country."

"This is one of several viral video showing violence by so-called cow vigilantes in India."

"A resident of Haryana's Mewat district was transporting two cows in

his vehicle when he was beaten to death."

They're almost always groups of young men piling into SUVs to patrol the highways at night.

They'll take whatever weapons they have. Rifles or like small handmade guns. Then, they'll raid the highways

looking for any vehicle. Sometimes they'll have police around with them.

Sometimes they will be on the phone with the police. That's Snigdha Poonam.

She's a national affairs writer with The Hindustan Times in Delhi.

And I've been one of these vehicles with them for a

even if it's like a group of young people driving late at night, they have

to stop and these cow protectors can do with them as they please.

who's in possession of a cow or is carrying beef, sometimes they will turn

them over to the police, but more and more, they've been using violence on their own.

Often they make videos and then, that starts passing around on Facebook and Whatsapp.

Many cow vigilante's have ties with Hindu militant groups that specifically

target Muslims and other religious minorities. According to a Human Rights Watch report,

between 2015 and 2018, of the 44 cow-related deaths, 36 of them were Muslim.

To understand why these attacks have surged during this time you have to

look at the rise of one of India's biggest political parties.

"It's interesting to take a look at why and how this has become

such a massive landslide in terms of seats has been unprecedented. 70 seats for the BJP."

In 2014, India's Hindu nationalist party called Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP won

the national elections and that made the leader of the party, Narendra Modi, the Prime minister of India.

His political platform has long been this idea of

Hindu nationalism and a big focus of his speeches has been the protection of cows.

One of the things that Narendra Modi did while campaigning was talk

about cows and how cows needed to be saved or worshipped or celebrated.

Let's look at this map again, which shows how cow violence increased after 2014,

but now look at the attacks of 2017 and 2018. You can see that most of them are

clustered around this one area. This is Uttar Pradesh or UP.

With over 200 million people, this is India's most populous state

and in 2017, the Modi government appointed this man to be the leader of the state, Yogi Adityanath.

Earlier this year at an election rally, Yogi referred to Muslims as quote a

"green virus." In fact, it was at one of his political rallies where one of Akhlaq's

accused murderers was invited to sit on the front row.

After being appointed, Yogi directed the police to scrutinize the slaughterhouses

in his state, shutting down any that didn't have the proper paperwork.

They shuttered thousands of meat shops and closed hundreds of slaughterhouses that

they claimed were illegal putting many Muslims in Uttar Pradesh out of business.

And with Yogi in power, cow vigilantes were quickly emboldened.

In fact soon after he was appointed, three meat shops were set on fire by a mob.

That year cow related violence spiked in UP

and the impact of the Yogi's policies didn't end there.

I traveled south from the capital of UP, where Yogi's office sits, to a city on the banks of the Ganges.

I'm in a part of Uttar Pradesh, which is a huge leather producer and just a few

months ago the government gave a notice to this factory that they needed to stop all operations.

They used water pollution as the excuse because leather production

uses water and can pollute rivers and things like that so this factory worked really

hard to install pumps and filters and even after they provided all of the

information and jumped through all those hoops, the government still hasn't given

them permission to open up the factory again and so it's sits completely shut down, frozen in time.

All of these workers, the owners, everyone here is Muslim and this has been an