Cow vigilantes and the pathology of violence

How sacred symbols become tools of oppression, laying bare a mindset that justifies communal violence under the guise of protecting religious values.

Members of Citizens for Peace, Justice, and Democracy protest against rising mob violence and cow vigilantism in Chennai on July 1, 2017. | Photo Credit: S.R. Raghunathan

A Hindu boy belonging to a privileged caste, Aryan Mishra, who was a student of Class XII, was “mistaken” to be part of a group of cow smugglers and shot in the head by Gau Rakshaks, a vigilante gang of cow protectors, while travelling in an SUV with friends in Faridabad, Haryana. When The Print journalist Sagrika Kissu met the father of the deceased boy, he said the criminals at a local jail in Faridabad regretted mistaking a “Brahmin” for a “Muslim”.

The frankness of the killers does not leave the question to imagination that this vigilante action was dramatically, desperately executed because the criminals thought they were chasing a Muslim. The confession clarifies this was considered an unfortunate accident where reality betrayed logic. If the victim was a Muslim, and if he had been wrongly killed, the sense of regret would have been clearly missing. Because the chilling logic of these cow vigilantes is, even if this Muslim did not do it, Muslims as such are capable of doing it, and hence are potentially responsible for what they consider a moral crime. This is the true communal nature of this sickness.

Imagine people of a community who consider themselves human and Hindu living by the delirium of finding an old Muslim man on a train carrying buffalo meat for his daughter guilty of an act he did not commit, but they desperately wished he did. They go to the extent of harming him on mere suspicion.

Oppressive sense of responsibility

It is not, mind you, the passion to protect the cow that is crucial and fundamental here, although it may appear to be so. It is the state of mind the self-styled protector lives by that tells us of the actual nature of this pathology. Once someone declares himself to be a cow protector, he is no longer human and Hindu like others. He invents for himself an oppressive sense of responsibility, where he will live under a state of nervous vigilance, preying upon any Muslim who he thinks might be transporting a cow. He transfers the oppression he lives under into the Muslim’s body. The violence that consumes his mind will consume his victim. This is the deadly psychological movement that engulfs such vigilantes.

Behind such instrumental violence is an instrumental mind. Such criminals do not realise how much they suffer this violence they unleash upon others, daily within themselves. But who puts that violence inside them? That should be the main concern behind political action.

The self-styled gang of cow protectors marks the sacred territory of a community using the body of the cow to draw the line in blood. Historical, legal, and political aspects have been summoned enough in the last few years to address the status of the cow. I want to solely focus here on the psychological aspect, which has a larger communal dimension but is always played out specifically through a criminal fringe that is allowed to exist. This fringe acts in the name of the community to protect its sacred icon.

But the law of this protection is pure violence. It acts as territorial law. This law of sacred territory declares the Muslim as the untouchable in relation to the cow. This exceptional situation that enables the law of territorial violence fits what Ambedkar wrote in his 1935 essay, “Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto”, that in order to maintain the social order (which, in this case, is also the sacred order), “lawlessness is lawful”. The psychological aspect determines the state of this law.

There exists the potential (and imaginary) Muslim figure that must smuggle the cow at some point or is always waiting for a chance to do it. Since this is a sacred crime, or a crime against the sacred, any violence that seeks to protect the sacred social order is justifiable. Even a purported crime in the vigilantes’ pathological fantasy is enough provocation.

Breaking the law before it is broken

Since the vigilante is waiting for the crime of cow smuggling to happen, there are times when he can wait no more and must take the law into his own hands even before a crime is committed. In fact, in an act of reversal, the cow vigilante must break the law before it is broken. And the vigilante alone must have the sovereign power to break it.

The deceased boy’s father told Kissu that when the criminals confessed that they were expecting a Muslim to be the purported cow smuggler, he asked one of them, “Why would you kill a Muslim? Only because of a cow?” Whether he has read Gandhi or not, the boy’s father shares the sensibility of Gandhi who wrote in Young India in May 1921: “I would not kill a human being for protecting a cow.”

The vigilante’s psyche would not be able to grasp the ethical nature of the question asked by the father, or Gandhi’s moral injunction for that matter. The vigilante does not want to kill a Muslim to protect the cow. The cow is the vigilante’s communal cause and excuse to kill the man he must hate. Such is the morally deplorable nature of hate-politics. Ethics has no place in the mind besieged by the propaganda of violence.

In a prayer meeting in Delhi on July 25, 1947, Gandhi said: “I have been long pledged to serve the cow but how can my religion also be the religion of the rest of the Indians? It will mean coercion against those Indians who are not Hindus.” The dis/connection between this statement and today’s cow vigilantism is this: The vigilante wants to impose his religion on others because religion has been reduced to a tool of oppression. The sacred is turned into an instrumental symbol of coercion to fulfil the vigilante’s bloodthirsty wishes.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.