Sep 04, 2024 09:18 PM IST
The need is for the political mainstream to visibly dissociate with such vigilantism and allow the law to prevail, instead of looking for quick political gains
A sense of impunity is now entrenched among the so-called cow vigilantes, evident from the fact that a gang chased a car it suspected of ferrying “cow smugglers” for 50 kilometres on Haryana’s roads before shooting a teen occupant of the vehicle. The boy’s Hindu identity, revealed later, has become a focal point of anger over the incident, but that only obscures the larger problem — the mainlining of communal tensions and fanning of violence, all in the animal’s name. Lynching and assaults attributed to suspected consumption or storage of beef or smuggling of cattle for slaughter are only a symptom of this. Each incident encourages copycat organised vigilante gangs and opportunistic “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors), more so when the State seems unwilling or unable to curb this, despite repeated instructions from the Supreme Court. Just days before the teen’s killing, a migrant scrap dealer was lynched in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri on suspicion of having eaten beef. And, on Monday, an elderly man was assaulted by a crowd on a train in Maharashtra for carrying cattle meat.
The recent resurrection has unmistakably political footprints, from individual politicians celebrating convicts in beef-lynching cases to many political careers getting launched in the hinterland on the promises of more such extra-judicial action. The need is for the political mainstream to visibly dissociate with such vigilantism and allow the law to prevail, instead of looking for quick political gains. They need only turn to the example of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has repeatedly asserted that there can be no tolerance for violence in the cow’s name.
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