Someone in the crowd shot the video: Arms tied behind his back, Mohammed Riyaz sways before Vivek Premi, a muscular bearded young man with a leather belt wrapped around his fist. It is an overcast afternoon in June 2015 in Shamli, a provincial town in western Uttar Pradesh. Down by Shiv Chowk, the white metal grillwork of wrought iron Oms and swastikas around the Shiv-ling on the street corner offers a striking backdrop for the action to follow.



For a moment, Premi appears lost, a hunter confounded by his prey. Then his arm coils, the belt swings through the air and strikes Riyaz across his chest, across his legs, about his head; all that can be heard is the sound of leather hitting flesh and Premi’s hoarse shouting, “This is cow slaughter, cow slaughter, cow slaughter, cow slaughter. This is cow slaughter.”



Within hours, the footage was everywhere: local newsrooms put it on their front pages; Gau Raksha (cow-protection) WhatsApp groups across the country circulated it amongst their friends, it racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.



In the year that followed, the video of a Hindu flogging a Muslim in a town square would imbue Premi’s young life with power, diminish Riyaz to helplessness, and put a riot-prone, communally-sensitive region on edge. It would reveal the newest route to Rajneeti or politics – that time honoured destination for the young and ambitious in small-town India.

But at that moment, Premi recalled as we drove through his hometown last week, he was consumed by the desire to make an example of Riyaz.