It’s been 131 years since cow riots swept across North India, from Mumbai to Yangon, but cows still have the power to take human lives. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi was preparing to begin his third term in office, cattle traders Guddu Khan and Chand Miya Khan were killed in Chhattisgarh. Riots broke out in Telangana, Odisha and Himachal Pradesh after rumors spread that cows were being illegally slaughtered.
The Madhya Pradesh government, which has not always been keen to enforce its own laws against cow vigilante violence, has been quick to destroy the homes of people accused of possessing beef.
While the rise in cow-warden killings is often linked to the rise of Hindu nationalism, the 1893 riots, and the many that followed, highlight unresolved fissures in Indian society. The cow-warden killings are neither new nor surprising; the self-serving fissure that communal killings might comfort India has masked deep-rooted cultural hatreds.
Needless to say, there is little evidence that violence has accelerated under Modi’s government; official data is patchy, but murders have remained stable since the Gujarat riots of 2002. Just as the name of the prophet has often crystallized extreme violence in many parts of the world, the cow has become the endpoint of rational behavior in India.
The question is, why is this long war of attrition continuing?
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Cow politics
“The split hoof of Gorakshini Sabha [Cow-Protection Society] “Hindu belief is to be found everywhere,” colonial administrator G. E. Manisti reported to his superiors after the Basantpur riots. The Arya Samaj movement, founded in the 1870s by Gujarat-born Brahmin missionary Swami Dayanand Saraswati, spread from the Punjab, claiming to fight the long-standing decline of Hindu civilization. Gorakshini Sabhas sprang up throughout British India, promoting cow protection as a means of re-establishing Hindu spiritual strength.
Historian Shivangi Sharma records that Kuka Sikhs also participated in the cow protection movement in the late 19th century, as a way of fighting British rule. In 1887, a Kuka bard roamed Amritsar, singing, “The impure ones have come from London and built slaughterhouses everywhere. They have killed our Guru. Now we must sacrifice our lives.”
Scholar Julia Hauser writes that between 1889 and 1893, colonial authorities recorded 86 cow-related riots, as local strongmen mobilized to block the shipment of cows to slaughter. She points out that the cow protection movement served to sharpen the boundaries between Hindus and Muslims and challenge imperial authority.
The 1893 riots included an outbreak of violence in Mumbai. According to newspaper accounts from the time:
Temples and mosques were attacked, shops were looted, violent sectarian fighting took place in the streets, and senseless attacks on police and military forces left 80 people dead and hundreds injured.
Mass riots sparked by cow slaughter are, of course, not a colonial invention: As anthropologist Marc Gaboriau has written, the first major riot with a complete historical record occurred in 1713, when a Muslim businessman slaughtered a cow in front of his house in retaliation for Hindus lighting Holi bonfires the previous day.
But technological advances in India in the 19th century gave these riots greater political significance: Yang notes that it was clear to colonial administrators that the printing press, telegraph, and railroads could transform local religious conflicts into broader, pan-Indian political conflicts.
Swadeshi and Gau Raksha
“The Brahmins are roaming the cattle markets armed with large bamboos,” a British official reported to his superiors in January 1906. “Yakub trembles with fear every time he goes to Wai.” But the reason for the communication was not that the officers’ beef supplies were threatened: nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak had set up a fund to buy up cows from the Wai and Pune markets, ensuring that they were not slaughtered.
After the 1893 riots, the colonial government became increasingly active in trying to forestall sectarian violence, especially when it threatened industrial order. Thus, historian Subho Basu writes, troops were sent to Rishra, Bengal, in 1896 to prevent cows from being slaughtered on Eid day.
Even in August 1889, a series of inter-communal incidents, which began with a cow sacrifice by a washerman in Rohtak, were only brought to an end by the deployment of police and infantry. Four people were injured by police firing, two by swords, and one died after being hit with a lathi, but the violence did not spread beyond the immediate geographical borders.
Despite successful efforts to heal the wounds of the 1893 riots, a national movement reignited the cow protection issue until the early twenties.Number century.
The results were soon apparent. The 1917 Shahabad riots in Bihar, which began as an attempt to suppress the Eid-ul-Adha cow sacrifice, escalated into a civil war. According to historian Hitendra Patel, between September 28 and October 7, some 129 villages were plundered and another 14 were murdered. Colonial authorities ultimately convicted 2,457 people for various crimes committed during the riots, but the riots were quelled only after troops were sent in from Kolkata, Meerut, and Allahabad.
Similarly, in Kartarpur, Punjab, massive riots broke out over cow sacrifice during Eid-ul-Adha in 1918, sparked by disputes over land and irrigation rights. Sectarian mobilisation accelerated during this period, and hatred hardened like rock, paving the way for secession.
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Restraining violence
To many Indian observers in 1893, it was clear what was to come. Even though Hindus bought meat from Muslim butchers and both communities took part in Holi and Muharram processions, Nagari Nina newspaper, A report issued from Mirzapur on February 8, 1894, noted that “a rising tide of high religious feeling culminated in the unfortunate riots of last year.” It argued that the activities of the Cow Protection Associations had enabled the rise of figures such as Syed Ahmad Khan of Aligarh who opposed Congress nationalism.
“The interests of Hindus and Muslims are entirely one and the same and it would be the height of folly for any community to be misled by the excessive sympathy of those whose secret object is to prevent their integration.”
Meanwhile, the colonial authorities maintained a scrupulous neutrality towards what they called local fanaticism. To this end, both pragmatism and principle were on the table. The colonial state simply did not have the resources to enforce order through the police, and deploying troops was prohibitively expensive.
Historian Erin Giuliani points out that in 1862, there were just 532 police officers in the entire city of Bhagalpur in Uttar Pradesh, with each officer responsible for a staggering average of 3,740 officers.
“For an outnumbered, overworked and ill-equipped police force, policing petty street crime targeting the poor was an attractive alternative to the more arduous task of pursuing serious crimes,” says scholar Prashant Kidambi.
As in the 19th century, police have largely stood by as sectarian violence has continued to tear India apart over the past decade. As in the case of Yaqub the Butcher, fear and intimidation remain a daily reality for many Muslims.
In 1983, while the embers of the worst sectarian riots since the partition of India were still burning in Nellie, Aligarh, Meerut, Godhra and Moradabad, former prime minister Indira Gandhi addressed a rally in Kurukshetra and quoted the Mahabharata: DalmuthIt was a holy war. Just days earlier, she had claimed that “Hinduism and culture” were in danger.
That message continues to be propagated today, with different spokespeople: the killers then, as now, are young men funded by extortion rings, inspired by pop Hindutva hate culture, and seeking the masculinity they need to secure electoral power in the streets.
Ending the killings will require more than a new type of police and politicians. Like all political issues, it will require a thorough dialogue about what identity means and how Indian society can overcome the failure to negotiate its many deep-rooted differences.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets at @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Editor: Ratan Priya)
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