Gaurakshaks in Rajasthan's Alwar district are broken men. Their spirits are shattered like never before. Earlier, the cow vanguards didn’t think twice before standing up to even the gun-toting cow smugglers despite all the threats. They had all the cojones in the world to go up against this unorganised criminal enterprise as long as the battle was purely limited to offering resistance. But it is no more about that. The fight is now highly asymmetric with an unprecedented vilification campaign unleashed on the folksy villagers, uninitiated in the propaganda of psychological warfare.

“Dilli media” is a a big villain in their eyes so much so that when we visited village Lalawandi in Ramgarh tehsil, where Rakbar Khan was apprehended from, residents simply refused to talk to us. There was no point telling anything to “liars who hear something here and write exactly opposite after going back.” They are incensed with the media for launching a broadside against them. One of the villagers narrated how a news channel team came to shoot a documentary in November and when it was published, it termed all of them rowdies and hoodlums. “They told us to carry whatever weapons we possess and we did. They asked us to raise slogans and we did. We helped them shoot the documentary. We took them everywhere and risked our lives intercepting vehicles illegally taking cows. But they went back and called us 'gundey'. This is how you media people repay us,” one of them complained.

Then there are double standards which outrage them no end. There have been 800-plus cases in just last three years against cow traffickers in Alwar alone and two incidents of lynchings. Still Alwar has been projected as some sort of a hub for cow-related lynchings rather than a den for beef mafia that it evidently is going by police statistics.

If it’s about the graveness of the crime, then why hasn’t an incident like Govindgarh generated the same shock and disgust?

It happened less than 10 days after Rakbar Khan’s death.

It was Shyam Singh, head of a Sikh group in Govindgarh, who saw it first. Blood leaking continuously from a pipe of a house in his neighbourhood, located in Ambedkar colony on Badbada road, evoked his suspicion. He promptly informed the local police station and some villagers. When they threw open the door of the house, it was a crime scene, a sight that scandalised one and all.