Five to seven people beat man to death on suspicion of cow smuggling, police say

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Suspected vigilantes killed a Muslim man transporting two cows in India on Saturday, just over a year after a similar attack highlighted the growing influence of pro-Hindu fringe groups.

Police in the north-western state of Rajasthan said a group of five to seven people surrounded the man, identified only as Akbar, as he led the cows to his village in nearby Haryana state and thrashed him to death on suspicion of smuggling the animals.

“We are investigating the incident and will make arrests soon,” said Shyam Singh, a police official in Alwar district.

Indian ‘cow protectors’ jailed for life over murder of Muslim man Read more

The incident took place soon after midnight, triggered by the suspicions of a few nearby villagers that the 28-year-old man was smuggling the cows, Singh said. Akbar belonged to the farming community in adjacent Haryana.

Many Hindus regard the cow as sacred, but India’s Muslim minority trades cattle for slaughter and consumption.

Cow vigilantism has surged in India since Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party came to power in 2014, despite the fact that most of the country’s 29 states have banned the killing of cows for meat.

Police said they took the badly beaten man to a nearby hospital, where he was declared dead. “En route, the victim identified himself as Akbar and said he was accompanied by another friend who managed to escape,” said Anil Kumar Beniwal, a district police official.

Beniwal said police had identified four or five suspects and expected to make arrests later on Saturday.

“The strictest possible action shall be taken against the perpetrators,” Rajasthan’s chief minister, Vasundhara Raje, a member of Modi’s BJP, said on Twitter.

The state’s home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, said there was “no real need for a new law against cow vigilantism”.

Rights groups and Muslims say government officials, including Modi, have been slow to condemn the attacks and that police action against perpetrators has been inadequate.

Asaduddin Owaisi, an Indian Muslim leader and MP, tweeted that “a cow in India has a fundamental right to life” but a “Muslim can be killed for they have no fundamental right”. He said the last four years of Modi’s government were “lynch rule”.

Pehlu Khan, another cattle farmer, was lynched by a mob as he rode home from a market with two cows and two calves in the back of his truck in the same district in April 2017.

The incident prompted concerns that under Modi, pro-Hindu fringe groups such as the cow vigilantes were operating as private militias and fearlessly flouting the law.

India’s highest court asked the federal government this week to consider enacting a law to deal with mob violence, fuelled mostly by rumours that the victims either belonged to members of child kidnapping gangs or that they slaughtered cows and ate beef.