This election season, we have seen a range of lazy pieces of journalism around the Indian elections regarding a supposed pandemic of ‘cow vigilantism’ or ‘Muslim lynching’ in the country over the past five years. Everyone ranging from foreign media correspondents who can’t speak a single Indian language and base their reportage on conversations with their equally monolingual and sheltered Indian English-media counterparts at Lodhi Road receptions, to Netflix and stand-up comedians whose jokes at the expense of their old-fashioned Indian parents have worn out and who have now needed to reinvent themselves as political activists, have had their say.

Not a Majority-Minority Issue But a Law and Order Issue

To give voice to a slightly more nuanced view of the topic, allow me to put forth a different angle from which to view the issue. India doesn't have a ‘cow vigilante’ problem or ‘Muslim lynching’ problem, it has a mob justice and meat mafia problem. It is not a majority-minority issue, but rather a law and order issue. And this issue and its symptoms victimises the rural poor across India, be they Muslim or Hindu.

All Indians, in the absence of a trustworthy police and justice system, protect their private property in one way or another. Rich people ally with the police, petit bourgeois members of regional parties such as the Samajwadi Party (SP), Maharastra Navnirman Sena (MNS), or All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) ally with bahubalis (political strongmen), while the poorer Indians are afraid to even enter a police station – lest they don’t come out – or worse, they are simply not served by a police force that is willing or able to deliver them safety or justice.

It is futile to criticize the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister as being the face of a problem that has deep systemic, socio-economic roots. Instead of gnashing one's teeth over the existence of the problems, one should focus that energy on addressing it at its root cause. Activity is no substitute for achievement.

Yes, there are problems with our society and politics, there always have been, and quite possibly, there always will be some or the other challenge that we need to deal with as a nation. But moaning about the symptoms do not magically cure a patient, addressing the disease does.

Identifying the Root Causes

The religious angle is just a superficial reading of the symptoms. The root cause is a state apparatus that does not serve poor people the way it serves the rich. If we spent as much energy addressing the disease as we have been moaning about the symptoms, we wouldn't even have this issue.

There have been cases when a mob of poor farmers stoned a school bus with children inside because their goat was run over. Does it matter that the children were Hindu and the farmers were Muslim? Or that goats have a significant religious or cultural value in their community?

Not necessarily.

The media, in its infinite wisdom, decided to not give such an incident a ‘communal colour’. Likewise, perhaps we can do the same when the communities are reversed and the animal is slightly different? Then, having taken a step back, one can analyse the issue dispassionately.

Some media reports say that four out of five ‘cow lynching’ victims are members of a single community. If that is indeed the case, it is not so much a reflection of some tribal, centuries-old, grassroots-level hatred for that community, as it is a reflection of the fact that cattle smuggling gangs almost exclusively recruit members from that community, and, they happen to hold a virtual monopoly on the red meat trade in India.

Both cattle owners and cattle thieves are the victims. They are victims of dehumanising and degrading rural poverty, of the brutal business and political interests of those who control a cut-throat meat industry, and of a colonial-era police that is focused on imposing order at any cost instead of serving the community.

Mob Justice - The Cow Protection Squad

Now, if one is to condemn mob justice in all its forms, which by all means, one should, and wants to do something about it rather than merely pontificate in a TV studio about the immorality of its existence, one must understand the factors behind it and address them in a systemic manner.

The typical 'cow protection squad’ is generally a village neighbourhood-watch-group, made up of poor subsistence farmers (or rural, subaltern proletarians, as some may wish to call them), in very specific districts of rural India (often within regions where the illegal slaughterhouse industry is concentrated), who have created these patrols to save their cattle from theft.

Why do they put life and limb at the risk of being shot at by violent gangs or being arrested by the police for taking the law into their own hands?

It's because of two reasons. Firstly, cattle is considered as non-human family members, not unlike how people in the West or wealthy urban Indians view their cats or dogs, and secondly, cattle is also a form of productive investment and a wealth generator in the rural economy. As an economically rational being, a typical farmer sees that a cow or bull is worth more alive than as meat in the freezer (not that people in villages had a regular enough power supply until recently to even own freezers).

The cattle ploughs the field, offers organic fertiliser, and provides a fairly substantial amount of protein to the farmer's family through milk, yoghurt, and also fat, in the form of ghee. All of these benefits help farmers retain a level of self-sufficiency in a rural economy where otherwise unscrupulous moneylenders and companies try to trap them into debt in order to switch to 'modern' farming with tractors and chemical fertilisers, or where commercially available dairy products are beyond their reach.

But don't take it from me. Unlike some other English-speaking media commentators in India, I do not claim to speak on behalf of poor farmers or minorities. I believe in letting them speak for themselves. So, take it from the leaders of a cow-protection group run by the Muslim community, endorsed and encouraged by community elders and religious clerics, such as that of Ramgarh, a Congress bastion on the border of Rajasthan and Haryana, featured in this video: