USA TODAY

MEWAT, India — Shaukat Qureshi will never forget the day when police raided his roadside food stall here in northern India.

“They picked out meat pieces from my biryani,” Qureshi, 17, said of a much-loved local dish of rice, meat and vegetables. “They packed the pieces in plastic bags and took them away.”

The recent raid on Qureshi and his fellow vendors’ stalls was the first in the region following the passage of a local law to protect cows, sacred animals among Hindus, who make up 80% of India’s more than 1.2 billion citizens.

Imposing a maximum prison sentence of 10 years for slaughtering a cow and five years for selling the meat, the state of Haryana’s legislation is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s crackdown on beef consumption.

Since his election in 2014, Modi has stressed the importance of Hinduism to India’s identity. But his critics charge that he is improperly mixing religion and government in a secular country.

After a crowd lynched a Muslim man last year in Dadri, east of Delhi, for allegedly eating beef that his family later claimed was mutton, Modi took days to express his condolences, furthering the perception that he is willing to turn a blind eye to Hindu radicals.

In Mewat, a majority Muslim district, the recently formed Cow Protection Task Force heard rumors that street vendors were cooking their biryani with beef. Qureshi insisted he used only chicken and buffalo, which are not banned.

Months later, the police lab has yet to publish findings from the seizures on whether the rice dishes contained the outlawed meat.

Shabnam Hashmi, an activist at Act Now for Harmony & Democracy, a New Delhi-based human rights group, said the raids unfairly target non-Hindus amid an increasingly Hindu nationalist climate in India fostered by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its affiliated Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a private volunteer organization criticized for its paramilitary characteristics.

“This police unit is part of a design to target minorities and to convert India into a Hindu state,” she said.

Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Vijay Chauthaiwale, who is also an active RSS member, said the central government had nothing to do with the state law. “That is a local level policy,” he said, adding that he supported the law. “Personally, I am fine with these controls.”

Bharti Arora, the head of the task force, said the law addresses cow smuggling that funds organized crime and terrorism. She denied the law targets Muslims. Rather, Haryana is a transit route for smugglers heading to neighboring Bangladesh, a largely Muslim country, she said.

“This is not a Hindu-Muslim problem — even Hindus are into the smuggling of cows,” Arora said.

When the police catch a trafficked cow, the driver faces charges and the cow goes to a sanctuary known as gaushala, like the farm Prithvi Pal Arya runs in Gazipur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He shelters 1,000 cows.

These sanctuaries are part of a cow rescuing infrastructure set up by Hindu activists in northern India. “The punishment for slaughtering a cow should be the same as for killing a man,” Arya said.

The task force also works with informants called gau rakshaks — or “cow protectors” — vigilantes who are increasingly criticized for their militancy.

Arvind Swami of Varanasi, an ancient holy city on the Ganges, is a gau rakshak who hunts smugglers and operates bovine sanctuaries across northern India.

When Swami hears about cow smugglers on the highway, he dons his bulletproof jacket, grabs a gun and drives off in pursuit. He said that he has rescued 130 cows in his career.

Human rights activist Hashmi said gau rakshaks have been around for decades. But since Modi was elected, the right-wing activists have become emboldened, she said.

“The hatred has reached a level that you can even make an announcement from a temple and a crowd will go and attack,” Hashmi said.

Mohammad Sartaj, 32, the son of Akhlaq Sartaj, the man lynched in Dadri last year, said: “It looks like cow slaughter is more criminalized than human slaughter.” He added that his younger brother sustained severe head injuries in the attack.

Authorities are still investigating the alleged murder, which includes the son of a local Bharatiya Janata Party politician as a prime suspect. While the Sartaj family challenged the results of a lab test that said they possessed beef, a local court ordered the police not only to investigate the lynching but also the allegations of cow slaughter.

Prior Supreme Court verdicts on the beef ban have been inconsistent. In 2005, the court upheld a ban on cow slaughter in the Gujarat. But in September the judges stopped a temporary prohibition of beef sales in Mumbai.

“Isn’t it a human right to decide what you want to eat?” Mohammad Sartaj asked.