Who killed cattle transporters Chand, Saddam and Guddu in Chhattisgarh?
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Dark Clouds Gather Again
Hate Violence Explodes After the Election Results
Harsh Mander
Ten years of Narendra Modi’s leadership since 2014 witnessed the steady metamorphosis of India into a republic of hate and fear. Lynching, genocidal hate speech and bulldozers became the chilling leitmotifs of the regime. Hate became a normalised staple of social intercourse and of state engagement with its Muslim citizens. Fear for them became an essential element of daily living.
The humbling of Modi and his party in the midsummer general elections of 2024 therefore brought with it an almost dizzying sense of relief and hope. For a brief interlude, we believed that the country had left firmly behind the nightmare of the last ten years. After all, the people of India had delivered an unambiguous message, that the politics of hate did not compensate for failures of the state to improve the daily lives of working people, with jobs and affordable food, fuel and healthcare, schools and fair examinations. Besides, Modi alone could not form a government; he depended on the support of parties that opposed the RSS ideology of denying equal citizenship to India’s Muslims.
But within days of the election results, these new shoots of reprieve and hope were smashed. It is as though the ideologues of the RSS both within and outside government wanted to compress in just the first four weeks of the new government a rapid-fire repetition of all the stoked fear and hate in the first Modi decade. In not even a month after the announcement of the outcomes of the elections, the country has been wrenched with a series of brutal hate attacks, mainly targeting Muslims but also on occasion Christians. The bulldozers have also made a rattling reappearance as they lawlessly target the properties mainly of Muslims.
The nightmare has commenced again. A nightmare in a loop.
The first of the post-election hate killings was the gruesome lynching of three men near Raipur in Chhattisgarh just three days after the results were announced.
The men, 35 years old Chand Miya Khan, Guddu Khan, 23, and Saddam Qureshi, 23, were cattle traders from Saharanpur and Shamli districts in western Uttar Pradesh. They purchased buffaloes in a village in Mahasamand near Raipur to transport to Odisha. From reports it appears that vigilantes had strewn nails on the Mahanadi bridge that punctured the tyres of their truck. Once the truck halted, a group of men descended on the cattle traders in the dead of the night. Qureshi desperately called his relatives after the mob attacked them, in agony as his limbs had been broken. He left on his phone in his pocket and for 47 excruciating minutes, his family could hear him and his colleagues pleading for their life as they cried out with agony.
Before the men finally lost consciousness, they begged their attackers for water to drink, which the mob triumphally denied them. This is a recurring pattern that we in the journeys of the Karwan e Mohabbat have encountered in most cases of lynching. Perhaps it is the massive loss of blood that drives men after they have been beaten almost to death to implore their attackers each time for water. And each time, they are denied.
The vigilantes then threw them from the bridge on to the rocks in the bed of the river Mahanadi far below.
Many other incidents of hate violence followed. A day later, a cleric Maulana Farooq was killed by his tenant Tiwari in a village in Pratapgarh in UP. Less than a week later, in a busy market in Aligarh in UP, on the night of 18 June, a 35-year-old casual worker Mohd Fareed was lynched by a mob. A video shows that around 15 men, some with lathis, corner and beat to death Fareed, who pleads with the mob to spare him. The same day, in Nahan in Himachal Pradesh, the police stood by as a mob of activists from the ABVP and the local traders’ association looted a garment shop owned by one Javed, who had migrated from UP. The provocation, according to the mob, was a picture of animal sacrifice posted by Javed as his WhatsApp status. The police later confirmed that the animal he had sacrificed on the festival of Eid al Adha was a buffalo, not a cow, and the slaughter of buffaloes is not banned in the state. Just four days later, on June 22, this time in Gujarat, a young man of 23, Salman Vohra, newlywed with a pregnant wife, was beaten to death on the sidelines of a local cricket match. The provocation was that Muslim cricketers were playing better than their non-Muslim colleagues. Next the target was a young Christian woman, 22-year-old Bindu Sodhi, in a village again in Chhattisgarh. Recently converted to Christianity, a mob descended on her mother, her siblings and her when they were sowing paddy saplings in their fields. Seven Christian families in a neighbouring village were also attacked. Then, as the month ended, my colleagues of the Karwan e Mohabbat from Jharkhand reported yet another hate killing of an imam in a village in Hazaribagh district.
The message from the newly installed government to the people of India is unambiguous. For them, emphatically nothing has changed. Their ideological project of targeting Muslims citizens with lawless hate violence – both civilian and directly by the state - will continue, unleashed with even greater resolve.
Why the election results had also stirred optimism was the expectation that a rejuvenated opposition would stand tall at last in open and robust defence of India’s Muslim citizens, when they face hate violence and state discrimination. But as the first month of the new Parliament ends these hopes, too, remain substantially unrealised, at least so far.
The political opposition has indeed found its voice as it resoundingly picks up the gauntlet both in parliament and outside it, in combatting for jobs, farmers, fair examinations and the repair of the economy. However, its leaders have not joined hands and raised their clenched fists in resolute battle to restore and uphold the right to equal citizenship of Indian Muslims, their rights to safety, equality, justice and – in the last resort – to fraternity.
The portents therefore for Modi’s third term are still not so hopeful. The clouds of hate and fear that had begun to clear on June 4 are fast gathering again. This is a time of critical test for the political opposition, of the mettle of their political and moral courage to defend the soul of India’s constitution.
But even more on test are we, the people of India.
