Punish Dadri killers, don’t add fuel to fire
Mohammed Ikhlaq’s killing, following rumours that he had consumed beef at his home in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, must be condemned in the strongest terms. There can be absolutely no justification for an incident like this in a civilised society — for a bloodthirsty mob to enter a man's house, attack his family and beat him to death ostensibly because it did not approve of his food preferences. The Government of Uttar Pradesh has ordered a magisterial investigation and 10 individuals have been booked. Instead of politicians heading to the attack site for some
TRP-generating tragedy tourism, they must focus on having a time-bound and thorough investigation, putting together a water-tight case and ensuring that the guilty are punished. As of now, there are several loopholes in the story. For example: Who started the beef rumourIJ How did it spread so quicklyIJ Why did the temple priest reportedly have to make an announcement about the carcass found near the transformerIJ Who asked him to make that announcementIJ Once these questions are resolved, a clearer picture will emerge. That said, it is important to acknowledge that such cases do not happen in a vacuum. The Dadri killing has played out within a toxic atmosphere, produced from a mix of long years of lawlessness and communal politics. For decades now, Uttar Pradesh has been one of the worst governed States of the country.
law and order has been in perennial decline, irrespective of the party at the helm. Occasionally, regime change has brought some positive developments, but mostly it has meant that new goondas have replaced old ones. The situation has been particularly bad since the return to power of the Samajwadi Party under Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav. A small but telling example of this is the recent refusal of some e-commerce companies to make expensive deliveries in parts of Uttar Pradesh after several cases of delivery boys being attacked or their goods being stolen. The other factor here is the communal atmosphere created by the Uttar Pradesh polity. Cutting across party lines, State politicians, who ironically tom-tom their secular credentials, have repeatedly and cynically played up the religion card (as also the caste card) to secure votes. And that is why today Uttar Pradesh is a tinderbox that goes up in flames at the slightest provocation. This time it was the rumour of a cow being slaughtered; last year, it was the distribution of laddoos after a community puja that sparked violence; before that, a few torn and half-burnt pages found by the railway tracks led to riots, after rumour spread that the Quran had been desecrated. And let's not forget that the massive 2013 Muzaffarnagar riot broke out over a ‘secular' issue like eve-teasing.
lately, it has become fashionable to blame the BJP and its supposedly communal brand of politics for every unfortunate incident in the country. Yet those decrying the imagined rise of Hindu majoritarianism or worse still, Hindu fundamentalism in the aftermath of the Dadri attack, conveniently forget that law and order is a State subject. They also forget that cow slaughter has historically been a sensitive issue and has been the cause of many terrible riots long before the BJP was even formed.