Every year, once a year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemns lynchings committed in the name of cow protection. Every year, his condemnation is stronger. Responding to the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri in 2015, the prime minister had offered platitudes for Hindu-Muslim harmony.

In 2016, after seven Dalits were beaten up by cow vigilantes, the Prime Minister, for the first time, directly named and condemned self-styled ‘gau rakshaks’. Seventy to 80 percent gau rakshaks, he said, were anti-social elements.

This year, after a series of killings of Muslims with the false bogey of ‘beef’, the Prime Minister spoke again. Speaking at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad yesterday, Modi said killing in the name of cow protection was not acceptable. Reminding people of Gandhi and Vinobha Bhave, Modi made a Gandhian appeal for non-violence. After all, Gandhi and Vinobha both believed in cow-protection as well as non-violence.

The Prime Minister’s appeal came a day after individuals and came together through social media to organise a multi–city protest called ‘Not In My Name’. When the prime minister spoke the next day against the lynchings, protestors felt vindicated. They had achieved something.

It didn’t even take a day for them to be proved wrong. Soon, news came from Jharkhand that yet another Muslim was murdered, the assault justified with that one-word license to kill — beef.

The ‘Not In My Name’ protests are not going to stop these incidents. The Prime Minister will repeat his annual admonition of cow vigilantes next year, but this business of saying ‘Beef!’ and getting any Muslim lynched at will is now beyond anyone’s hands to control. The lynchings now are taking place not by professional gau rakshaks but just about anyone who has a problem with a Muslim — over a seating dispute in a train for instance.

A closer look at the PM’s speech shows he made a distinction between non-violent cow protection and killings-in-the-name-of-cow-protection.
It would be ok if the ‘Not In My Name’ protests were merely futile. One has to speak up and speak out even if one doesn’t succeed, they argue. Silence is complicity. Fair enough. The problem is that the protests were actually counter-productive. A closer look at the PM’s speech shows he made a distinction between non-violent cow protection and killings-in-the-name-of-cow-protection. He spoke at length on the issue of cow protection, spinning a yarn.

He said that a cow mistakenly killed a new-born child of his neighbour. The only child of two poor masons was born after many years of marriage. The repentant cow stood before the family’s house and didn’t eat or drink anything, giving up its own life.
The net result is that cow protection is again centre-stage as one of the primary issues of Indian politics, circa 2017.

Modi did not name MS Golwalkar was the man behind a huge cow-protection movement in the 1960s.

Golwalkar told ‘Milkman of India’ Verghese Kurian, “What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not a fool, I’m not a fanatic. I’m just cold-blooded about this. I want to use the cow to bring out our Indianness…” Golwalkar was clear in what he was trying to achieve. He was trying to unite Hindus with the issue of cow protection, using a powerful religious and cultural symbol that widens the Partition-marred cleft between Hindus and Muslims.

In other words, anything that brings Cow Protection centre-stage in politics actually helps the Hindutva cause. It helps further use cow protection as a means of uniting Hindus against Muslims — the sort of polarisation that has become routine in helping the BJP win elections.

Sadly, even protesting against the lynchings in the name of cow protection helps Hindutva, and thus only increases the political cover that cow vigilantes receive, never mind the Prime Minister’s annual condemnation.

The BJP is clear in that it does not even seek Muslim votes. In fact, it seeks to exclude Muslims from political power. It is unable to find a single Muslim to give an election ticket to in most elections. However, the BJP does seek Dalit votes, increasingly so. Their choice of a Dalit politician from the RSS fold, Ram Nath Kovind, is proof.

This is how Hindutva could have been politically weakened, and without politically weakening Hindutva, Muslims cannot be saved from its violent edge.

India’s left–liberals could have organised a ‘Not In My Name’ protest for Ashish Meghraj. If 15-year-old Junaid Khan was killed in a train for being Muslim, 25 year old Meghraj was killed in Saharanpur last month because he was Dalit. Just as Junaid Khan was not the first Indian to be killed for his religious identity, Ashish Meghraj was not the first Indian killed for his caste.

Had our left-liberals organised a ‘Not In My Name’ multi-city, multi-media protest for Meghraj, his name would have become as well-known as that of Khan or Akhlaq and Pehlu Khan, amongst those who seek justice. This would have caused some real political damage to the Hindutva project of uniting Hindus against Muslims — using such symbols as the holy cow.

This is how Hindutva could have been politically weakened, and without politically weakening Hindutva, Muslims cannot be saved from its violent edge.

[Abridged form of  article by Shivam Vij of Huffpost]

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