Of Beef and Lynching

Humra Quraishi

Tell me how many more will get lynched, murdered, slaughtered on the beef alibi! It’s just too shocking and disgusting to see how the goon brigades are calling the shots. Quite obviously they have the Hindutva backing and the go-ahead nods. The situation gets just too lethal as the political cum state machinery is under the control of the Right-Wing rulers of the day.

Lynching and humiliating Muslims on the beef alibi is increasing by the day. Last week an elderly Muslim gentleman was hounded and humiliated by three men inside a running train in Maharashtra, on the alibi that he was carrying beef in a packet, though later, on investigation, it turned out to be not beef. And one cannot miss the underlying fact that the three accused men were on their way for police recruitment! One can imagine the havoc they’d created if they had passed through those formal tests…This brings me to offload: Are there any lectures and talks and guidance sessions for cops on this basic factor–Not to target minority groups and communities and individuals on the myths and misconception spreading around…made to spread out and around?

Communal poisoning is unleashed on a daily basis by those in power. Quite obviously it will have a trickle-down effect. In the last one fortnight the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, has been coming out with anti-Muslim statements and getting away with all those blatantly communal unleashes! Shocking to hear the chief minister of a state come out with such statements but then he is a BJP politician! So, his utterances and speeches along the expected lines, in these dark turbulent times!

And though this week two stark incidents of lynch killings in Haryana, along the beef alibi but little hue and cry. A Muslim migrant worker from West Bengal, Sabir, was lynched to death and another worker, Asiruddin, was seriously wounded, after the two were attacked by the Hindutva lot in Haryana’s Charkha Dadri, on the alibi that they had eaten beef. And then a Hindu student, Aryan Mishra, was killed in Faridabad by the so-called cow vigilante group members, on suspicion that he was a cow smuggler! He was mistaken to be Muslim!

See, how this communal madness is spreading out and peaking in the last ten years. Killing hundreds of innocents on the alibis along the communal strain! Communal attacks that took off from the barbaric lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri have continued to spread out. Towards the outlying locales and villages of Delhi, Rajasthan, and Haryana. Towards the interiors of Jharkhand, where a few years back, at least two Muslim cattle traders were killed and their bodies hung from trees! One of the victims was a 13-year-old boy. Yes, he was killed out there in the open, yet we sat all too quietly! No cries, not even from any of the Minority Commissions or the Child Rights forums! I wonder why this silence!

One horrifying incident after another took place in these years. In the autumn of 2016, in district Faridabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, two young Muslim men were not just thrashed but forced to eat cow dung and drink cow urine! Mind you, this incident didn’t take place in some jungle land but barely 20 kilometres away from the capital city.

A few years back it was painful to see the plight of the four young Kashmiri students studying in Rajasthan’s Mewar/Chittorgarh region. They were made to stand as though they had committed theft or some heinous crime. All that they did was buy 300 grams of mutton from the local market. That was enough to trigger off rumours that it was beef, followed by the expected attacks on them! Mind you, this was not an isolated incident but one of the so many reported ones…

The summer of 2017 saw the blatant killing of 16-year-old Mohammad Junaid on a train taking him and his brothers to their village in Haryana’s Ballabhgarh district. Killed in public view, by fellow train passengers, before ‘beef eater’ comments were hurled on his fractured skull.

Today there is a systematic communal propaganda that only Muslims and Dalits and Christians relish beef or mutton! To relay that these communities kill and devour! Mind you, this propaganda that Muslims go devouring meaty chunks or sit stuffing meatballs has been gaining ground, to portray the Musalmaan as ‘adamkhoors’/Cannibals!

Just go inside any meat store or shop, and butchers will tell you this exact fact–that is, the Indian Muslims are NOT the biggest buyers and consumers of meat in India. The meat industry is controlled by non- Muslims. I’m not talking of small-time ‘qasais’ but of the well-established suppliers /owners of this industry. And if one were to talk to butchers and meat suppliers and dairy-owners from across the country they would detail that age-old theory: if you force a man to go hungry he will either die and perish or snarl back! What, with hundreds sitting jobless there is every possibility of hunger-related deaths going up the graph. Also, the crime rate is sure to go up as frustration and hunger levels are mounting. The ‘beef scare’ alibi has been also impacting the socio-economic patterns. In recent years, when I’d attended marriage festivities of two middle-class Muslim families, there was no trace of a single meat dish. Pure vegetarian fare. Why? The hosts were taking all possible precautions. “Who will prove to the goondas that it’s mutton or chicken? Didn’t want anyone from the Hindutva brigades to disrupt the shaadi.”So this is the sorry state of affairs! Double standards here too! Right-Wing politicians from the North East can talk very openly about their beef eating and beef cooking traditions but hapless daily wagers and students and even the elderly are attacked if not killed on mere suspicion of carrying or cooking beef!

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Vol 57, No. 13, Sep 22 - 28, 2024