‘Cow is my mother’: India’s cow-related lynching incidents are on the rise. Is the BJP to blame?
- About 90 per cent of cow-related incidents in 2010-2017 were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP took power in May 2014
- Legal analysts also point to poor policing and failure to enforce laws, along with endorsement of such attacks by high-ranking political figures
In the latest such incident, a BJP lawmaker is shown on video making a controversial statement about the number of people killed by cow vigilantes.
“We have so far killed five people,” Gyan Dev Ahuja says in the video that went viral at the end of August, referring to the lynching of two men, Pehlu Khan and Rakbar Khan, by cow vigilantes in 2017 and 2018.
The BJP has tried to distance itself from Ahuja’s remarks, saying that those were “his own views”, and maintained that it was unfair to say that hate crimes have intensified under Modi, given a lack of government data to back the claim.
On other occasions, party leaders have said that while such killings are unfortunate, there was no need for a new separate federal law to deal with the problem.
According to data journalism website IndiaSpend, 28 people were killed in cow-related violence between 2010 and 2017. Of those, about 90 per cent were reported after Modi took office in May 2014, and about half occurred in states with governments dominated by BJP.
It is often difficult to ascertain the exact number of such killings as India’s laws do not make a distinction between cases of murder and lynchings, so lynching cases are not reflected in official crime statistics.