The Telegraph, August 8, 2016
Modi and vigilantism - The good
gau rakshak
Mukul Kesavan
The prime minister's 'town hall' meeting was intended to showcase the
way in which Narendra Modi had brought governance to the people through
initiatives like MyGov and apps that allowed citizens to communicate
digitally with the Prime Minister's Office. It was Modi's prime time
commercial for himself. Above the prime minister, as part of the stage
setting was an electronic screen that juxtaposed Modi's photograph with
the MyGov logo; the aura of sole proprietorship that is the prime
minister's signature political style was neatly (if unintentionally)
captured by that graphic.
The event's news-making moment was Modi's criticism of vigilante
gau rakshaks.
These men, said the prime minister, were bad people who were wicked by
night but who, come daylight, donned the mantle of cow-protection. He
asked state governments to compile dossiers on these so-called gau
rakshak groups. In passing, the prime minister gave his listeners a
short glossary of terms that would help them distinguish between real
cow-protectors and these impersonators.
Gau-bhakts and gau sewaks were genuinely committed to the care and nurture of cows while the scoundrels who styled themselves
gau rakshaks used the piety of that designation to harass others.
This was a potentially important moment. From the time Mohammad
Akhlaque was lynched in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly eating beef to the
leisurely caning of a Dalit family in Gujarat for skinning a dead cow,
Modi had treated vigilante atrocities as white noise, as static to be
tuned out. Earlier in his speech he had seemed to double down on this
Olympian position when he complained about an editorial tendency to
blame the prime minister for everything. Bad things that happened in
panchayati
and municipal jurisdictions were blamed on him. Failings that were
properly the responsibility of state governments were laid at the prime
minister's door. This was wrong; it weakened the system by not holding
the proper tier of government to account for its failings.
This passive-aggressive lament about being blamed for things that
were below his pay grade didn't suggest that Modi was going to unbend
enough to notice cow-vigilantism, but he did. It made him so angry, he
said. People were setting up shop, he said, in the name of
cow-protection. Many more cows died from eating plastic waste than were
slaughtered. The prime minister told us a story about the time he had
organized a cattle camp in Gujarat and found two buckets of plastic
waste in a cow's stomach. The real problem was plastic waste...
Except that the real problem isn't plastic waste. Modi got it right
the first time. The real problem is people setting up political shop in
the name of
gau raksha. People like Modi. People like ministers
in his cabinet, Haryana's chief minister, MPs and MLAs, sangh parivar
associates, who, through the general election campaign of 2014, in the
aftermath of the lynchings of 2015 and in the run-up to the provincial
elections in Bihar, spoke darkly of a 'pink revolution' in north India,
created ferocious anti-cow-slaughter laws, blamed dead men and their
families for provoking righteous Hindu wrath and used the cow for a
single political end, Hindu consolidation.
The political shop in question is a pan-Indian behemoth. The
sangh parivar
built the cow-protection brand; the lumpen who use it as their calling
card are its franchisees. In its time in office, Modi's party has given
gau raksha
State sanction and approval. It has created a penumbra of impunity for
those who would take the law into their own hands. The equivocation, the
apologetics and the victim-blaming that we saw after a sequence of
lynchings last year, coupled with Modi's epic silence, encouraged bigots
lower down the political food chain to give their inner beast free
rein.
This isn't metaphorically meant; Bharatiya Janata Party state
governments have put systems in place that have helped institutionalize
vigilantism. They have turned cow-protection into a protection racket.
Two national newspapers, the
Hindustan Times and the Indian
Express, carried stories detailing the way in which administrative
innovations in Punjab (where the BJP runs a coalition government along
with the Akalis) cleared the ground for the organized extortion of
cattle traders by
gau rakshaks.
The root of the problem is the Gau Sewa Commission formed in Punjab
in January 2015. The commission made a no-objection certificate from a
deputy commissioner mandatory for those wishing to transport cattle,
another layer of
sarkari paper that has proved remarkably hard
to get. Not only does this lead, inevitably, to bribery and
rent-seeking, it creates a circumstance where Gau Raksha Dals and Shiv
Sainiks prey on trucks and force cattle traders to pay them off. These
vigilantes are now confident enough to charge trucker unions nearly four
lakhs for a licence that allows their trucks free passage for six
months. More ominously, the Express reports that the main victims of
vigilante assault are Sikh drivers and migrant labourers.
Punjab's Shiv Sena president recognizes the existence of the
extortion racket but, like the prime minister, claims that the fault
lies with false
gau rakshaks. "The real gau sewaks raid dairy
farms where cows are starving," he says. "Extortionists target trucks to
make money." The 'false
gau rakshak' is rhetorical sleight of hand, a form of misdirection. The false gau rakshak is simply the true
gau sewak who happens to get caught beating people up, for profit or for pleasure.
If you haven't seen the video clips of the beatings administered to
Dalits in Una in Gujarat, you should take a deep breath and watch out of
a sense of civic responsibility. You will see thin, bare-bodied men,
wilting with distress, being caned by well-fed youths wearing denims and
tee-shirts. It's very nearly impossible to watch. A row of captive
Dalits are inspected by men who then take turns to beat them with rods
and metal slats. The men doing the beating are curiously impassive, till
the moment they hit their victims. Then they lay into them, two-handed,
and go down the row, swinging with real enthusiasm. Other men stand
around them in a ragged circle, shooting videos of the action with their
camera phones. I've never seen anything like this tableau; it's like
slave-owners working their property over because they can. The vileness
of it is that these freelance sadists aren't just inflicting pain, they
are also performing. These men are the young masters of Gujarat's
universe: this is the logical terminus of the politics of
cow-protection.
Modi didn't mention this specific incident; perhaps he hasn't seen the video. He did, however, illustrate the false
gau rakshak's instrumental use of the cow with a story. In the old days when there were battles between badshahs and
rajas (read Muslim and Hindu rulers), the badshahs would station a herd of cows ahead of their vanguard on the battle-field. The
rajas,
constrained by their reverence for the cow, wouldn't attack the
badshah's host and the battle would be lost. The implication was that
the false
gau rakshak was like the bad badshah who played upon the piety of Hindu kings to win his battles.
Modi can't help himself. Even the stories he tells to criticize Hindu
vigilantism have Muslims as their villains. The prime minister and the
party he represents aren't self-critical about
gau raksha; they
can't be - it's the fire they are forged in. They can, however, be
strategic about it. The lynching of Muslims is one thing; the savaging
of Dalits, potentially a part of the Hindu body politic, is quite
another. To separate the false cow protector from the true cause of cow
protection, to ignore the political economy of cow protection, to turn
the conversation from the violence of vigilantism to a constructive
awareness of plastic waste, was the work of a moment. Governance comes
in many guises; on Saturday the prime minister showed us one aspect of
it. He flagged vigilantism... then finessed it.
Feeling the pinch: Customers trying out slippers at a store in
Kolhapur’s Chappal Gali. (Source: Express photo by Pavan Khengre)
