We are told that cow vigilantism is on the rise and that this coincides with the electoral rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The so-called gau-rakshaks are said to be feeling empowered after 2014 and that the Hindutva rhetoric deserves majority of the blame. Law and order is a state subject, but this fact has not come in the way of repeatedly asking the Prime Minister to speak out against violence committed in the name of the cow. Modi has renounced vigilantism, not once, but thrice thus far. However, it doesn’t stop. And it won’t stop unless we get to the root of the problem.

Anti-cow-slaughter laws are in force since Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. So then, why is so much fuss being created over the same laws now? What has changed in the last three years? Many commentators point towards the increasing number of news reports about cow vigilantism in the media to prove their point. But this could be a case of selective bias in favour of certain kinds of stories depending on the government in power. What corruption stories are to the Congress, violence from the Hindutva rhetoric is to the BJP.

So far, the mainstream media has laid the blame for the supposedly rising cow vigilantism on the doorsteps of the BJP. But what if policies of the Congress contributed mainly to the mess we find ourselves in today?

Parth Parihar, a PhD student in economics and Hindu Students Council general secretary, writing for the HuffPost, contends that the Congress’ policy of ushering in “the Pink revolution” set the stage for a conflict between Hindus and Muslims. The United Progressive Alliance’s ease of doing meat business policy, aimed at “increasing demand for and easing the cost of production of red meat”, bore fruit and Indian beef exports increased by a whopping 242 per cent between 2009 and 2014 when the world’s average grew by a paltry 34 per cent in comparison.

Parihar laments that just when the world was moving towards embracing vegetarianism and adopting policies to cut down red meat consumption, the UPA government launched its policy “to increase meat consumption from 6g per capita to 50g per capita”. The Congress leaders now claim to be pro-choice in food, taking potshots at the “food fascism” of the BJP, when in reality, they were shamelessly pushing for non-vegetarianism through government policy, though in a quiet and subtle manner.

Parihar writes that the 242 per cent jump in beef exports was facilitated by providing subsidies to the meat processing industry “on the order of 25-60 per cent, meant solely for the transport of meat, pre-cooling facilities, cold storage, brand publicity, quality control, packaging development, brand publicity, etc.” He cites a New York Times report from 2013 by Gardiner Harris explaining how cattle traffickers indulged in blatant cattle theft colluding with slaughterhouses that were mushrooming due to the booming demand facilitated by government’s liberal subsidies.

Gau-rakshaks as we know them today, have been around long before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived on the national scene. They have acted as a check against the cattle smugglers who steal the livestock of poor farmers. It’s no surprise then that as the cattle theft industry boomed under the UPA, so did the gau-rakshaks.

Gau-raksha, then, is a reaction to a problem, not the problem itself. Unless a proper policy is put in place to check cattle theft and smuggling, outraging against cow vigilantism will bear no substantive results.