The minister has arrived. The motorcade fills the unpaved street. Policemen who were slumbering in the early autumn midday heat stir, straighten, then spring into action, clearing the way with their canes for this most important visitor. Mahesh Sharma, India’s minister of culture, is preceded by a small aide in a purple shirt and followed by a large grey-suited bodyguard.

Sharma has come to “condole” the family of Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old labourer beaten to death by a mob in his small two-storey home in the centre of Bishara village, about an hour’s drive beyond the outskirts of Delhi, India’s capital, last Monday night.

The mob that killed him believed that Akhlaq and his family, who are Muslim, had eaten meat from a cow, an animal considered sacred by the 80% of the Indian population who follow the Hindu faith. Akhlaq and his son were dragged from their beds and beaten with bricks. The father died; the son is fighting for his life in hospital.

Sharma is the local member of parliament as well as a minister. “It was important for me to come. I am the democratic representative,” the 56-year-old former doctor told the Observer. Outside, a media scrum filled the courtyard of the Akhlaqs’ home.

Sharma’s visit is more important than a simple courtesy to his constituents. His Bharatiya Janata party, Hindu nationalists, stormed to power in a landslide victory in May 2014, unceremoniously dispatching Congress, which had ruled India for most of its 68 years as an independent country, to the political margins.

The BJP is led by Narendra Modi, whose appeal is based on his promise to bring economic development and opportunity without sacrificing India’s cultural identity. Exactly what this means has been fiercely debated since Modi’s victory.

Critics of the prime minister, who last month visited the US and received a warm welcome from President Barack Obama and Silicon Valley’s top executives, say that since Modi took power rightwing groups have felt empowered. They point to a series of incidents – including mass conversions, attacks on lorries transporting cows and acts of violence against members of India’s religious minorities – as evidence of a newly tense atmosphere. Political opponents allege, too, that there has been limited condemnation from senior officials. “The silence at the top ... is absolutely stunning,” Abhishek Singhvi, a Congress MP, told reporters following the murder in Bishara.

Sharma has been at the centre of the increasingly bitter debate. Like many senior members of the BJP government, including Modi, he has spent decades in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a conservative revivalist Hindu organisation that is a powerful political and cultural force.

In an interview last month, Sharma said India should be “cleansed” of “polluting” western influences so as to restore “Indian culture”.

Cows are considered sacred by India’s Hindus, who make up about 80% of the population. Photograph: Vanessa Berberian/Getty Images

The debate has also raised questions about the position of India’s many religious minorities. A suggestion by India’s foreign minister last year that the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu epic, be made the “national book” provoked an outcry from Muslims and Christians, 14% and 2.3% of the population of 1.35 billion respectively.

Sharma prompted anger when he said that APJ Abdul Kalam, the scientist who oversaw India’s nuclear programme, was a “great man and nationalist, despite being Muslim”, and that the Qur’an and the Bible were not “central to Indian culture”.

In Bishara on Friday, Sharma refused to discuss his recent statements and was keen to strike a more conciliatory note. “Our values are to live together under the law and in respect of the constitution,” he said. “This sad affair [the murder of Akhlaq] … happened in the heat of the moment. It was the result of a misunderstanding.”

The route from central Delhi to Bishara passes first over the heavily polluted Yamuna river, past a vast new temple and a metro station and on to a recently built expressway slicing through the city’s sprawl. Beyond the huge developments of half-built apartment buildings, the road narrows, ending in a zone of scruffy townships. Bishara, a huddle of hundred or so breeze-block cement and brick homes with intermittent electricity and patchy sanitation, lies among fields that stretch to the horizon.

The events that led to Mohammed Akhlaq’s death are fairly clear. Last weekend the remains of a calf were found outside Bishara. On Monday night someone used the village temple’s loudspeakers to broadcast the allegation that its meat had been eaten.

“I think someone saw a Muslim lady carrying meat in a bag. No one is sure. Anyway, about a thousand people heard the announcement and went to the home [of the Akhlaqs],” said Deerat Singh, whose two sons have been arrested for the attack. “They saw a trail of blood on the ground. Then 60 or 70 people entered the house and pulled him from his bed and beat him to death.”

In most of India, most of the time, killing cows is illegal, but possessing or eating beef is not. A sample of meat found in the Akhlaq’s home has been sent for forensic examination, said local magistrate Rajesh Kumar Yadav, the bureaucrat with responsibility for Bishara. “The investigation is going on. The police is there, covering all angles and dangers. Relations in the village are being normalised and everybody is doing a great effort for this,” said Yadav.

Yet deep tensions and fear remain. When Sharma gathered the villagers in the yard of the temple and called for communal harmony and mutual respect, the reaction was respectful but quietly hostile.

“We handed over our children to the police. But, minister sir, that does not mean you can play with our feelings. We know it was beef that was eaten,” said Jagdish Sisodia, a village elder.

Satish Singh, an activist with a Hindu spiritual foundation who had travelled from Delhi to “show solidarity”, said: “All Hindus are deploring this sad incident. Everyone agrees it should not have happened. But this is a very sensitive matter. For Hindus the murder of a man is not so sensitive as the murder of a cow. We treat the cow as our mother,” he said.

Muslim groups had also been drawn to the village. “If this heinous crime can be done in a democratic system, what is the meaning of democracy?,” asked Hilal Madni, a 39-year-old auditor who had travelled with 60 others from Delhi to “calm the terror in the minds” of the 27 Muslim families in Bishara.

Preceding Sharma by just minutes was Asaduddin Owaisi, a controversial Muslim politician from the south of India. “It is important to be here because of the overall atmosphere created against the Muslims in this country, whether it is allegations of slaughtering cows or being terrorists or we have too many children,” Owaisi said. “What happened in Bishara was not an accident. It was a religious murder.”

Sitting on a narrow, worn rope bed in a corner of the Akhlaqs’ home was Hanif, a brother of the dead man. Like Mohammed, he too was a labourer and described a life of working 14-hour days in often blinding heat for less than 200 rupees (£2) a day.

“All the labourers around here are Muslims. We have no land. We have been here for a hundred years or more but we haven’t had any trouble with our neighbours,” he said.

One reason was that no one ever complained. Bishara and surrounding villages are dominated by Hindus from the land-owning Thakur caste, in the middle range of the tenacious Indian social hierarchy. The Muslims worked their fields.

“Mohammed was a quiet man. Like most of us, he just worked and kept quiet. There are 60 Thakur villages round here, so they can pretty much do what they want and get away with it. Today it was my brother. Tomorrow it could be anyone,” Hanif said.