by Barkha Dutt
Otherwise for miles around us we saw nobody. Two empty earthen pots sat on the rocky barren land with flies and insects swarming above, a portent of the desolation and disease we were about to witness. Word was now coming in that almost a hundred children in the village were unwell, several of them critically ill. The population of the village was scattered across an expanse of steep hills. There was no way to make an assessment of the facts without trekking up the heights. The area was so remote that no doctor or government official had ever bothered to make the journey. When the villagers needed medical help they had to first walk downhill for several miles and then look for hired transport to get to even a primary health centre. It was a shocking abdication of responsibility by the Indian state. Yet, it wasn’t a situation that was going to change for the better anytime soon as the absence of healthcare for millions was not an issue on which elections were won or lost.
We were told the nearest home was five kilometres away. Up these slopes, it meant an easy two to three hours of walking. We walked slowly, our progress encumbered by the unforgiving heat of an overhead sun and a narrow trail obstructed by brambles and thorns. The mood was grim, no one felt like talking much. Then the stillness was broken by the distant sound of women crying. The sound came from a solitary thatched hut on the crest of a small hill. As we made our way towards it, from behind the tall blades of grass a man appeared, his arms wrapped around a small child draped in a white sheet. It was his five-year-old son. Jana Ram had already walked twenty kilometres that afternoon when we met him. In the morning he had carried his fever-ridden son Kesar down the hill to the nearest hospital. The journey proved to be too arduous and testing, and Kesar died on the way. Jana Ram was walking back up these hard, dry hills to bury his dead son when he encountered us.
I stood there feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt about the relative comforts of my own life, the protective cushion of class that had cosseted me and kept me ignorant and unaware of what this moment felt like to a father. Jana Ram walked quietly towards us, taking small steps, his hand trembling just a bit. He didn’t say anything when he saw us, unexpected strangers standing on the hillside. Wordlessly, he took off the sheet that had been used as a shroud for Kesar, he wanted us all to see what his son’s face looked like. The boy’s mouth was open as if his final moment had been a gasp for air. I remember noticing his curling eyelashes. Another villager walked quietly behind Jana Ram. Together, the two men placed the child on a patch of grass and gently washed his face with a few drops of water. Then, turn by turn, they began digging up the stones and mud to create a small burial place. Kesar was too young to be cremated.
This bereavement, I thought, was because of the criminal negligence of the state—the failure of India to provide for her people, the horrifying inequalities of our society, the tyranny of poverty and the absence of anyone who really gave a damn. It seemed less like a medical accident and more like culpable homicide. But because Jana Ram and his family expected no different from a life they had internalized as their destiny, there was stoicism even in this moment of staggering sorrow. And there was hardly any visible anger.
At Jana Ram’s home, Kesar’s mother and the other women of the village sat on the rough ground, there was no cement or concrete floor, their heads in their arms, sobbing softly. In the centre, a few stones were placed together over small pieces of charcoal, usually used to heat water for cooking. Today, there were no vessels on the fire because there was no food at home. Most households here did not have enough money to feed their children, making even an ordinary viral fever life-threatening.
What did you feed Kesar for nourishment, I asked Jana Ram. He pointed to a corner where a woman sat hunched over an old ‘atta chakki’—a hand mill used for grinding wheat into flour. On a good day, Jana Ram said, a meal was what the tribals here called ‘rabri’—ground maize thinned with water so that it would last longer and feed more mouths. Hardly the best food for a sick child, he added quietly. ‘I wanted to give him more healthy food, but I have no money for it. I couldn’t even give him milk or dahi. This is the most we had. What could I do?’ And on bad days, said Lakharam, the villager who had helped Jana Ram dig the grave for his son, we fall back on these, he said, pointing to the leaves of bushes growing in the wild outside the hut. The villagers told me it was not uncommon for people to eat the leaves.
In the official records, Kesar’s death, like that of the other children in the village, was going to be blamed on fever and disease, as if to suggest that it was beyond the administration’s control. But when one ‘roti’ is split between six children, when watery maize is considered a good day’s meal, when wild leaves are still used as a substitute for food in twenty-first-century India, and there is no access to doctors or medicines—then the truth is that Kesar starved to death in an uncaring, unequal society.
EPILOGUE
MOHAMMAD AKHLAQ, A village blacksmith, had a dream. He wanted his son Mohammad Sartaj to join the Indian Air Force and serve his country. Initially Sartaj thought he should run a small business—it would make his family more economically secure. Memories of poverty and his father’s constant struggle to put food on the table haunted him.
He remembered how, as a child, he would spend day after day fanning the burning coal on which his father would heat strips of metal and hammer and shape them into scythes and sickles for the residents of Bisada, their village in the Dadri tehsil of western Uttar Pradesh, where they had lived their entire lives. Yet, no matter how hard they worked, it never seemed to be enough. Sartaj would sometimes cry when he thought about the despair and bleakness of their lives.
Their plight was thrown into stark relief when you considered that their village was just fifty kilometres away from Delhi, the national capital with its myriad possibilities of a better life. And so, Sartaj, the blacksmith’s son, would dream of how he could make things better for his family and for himself. Whenever he discussed the future with his father, Akhlaq, a patriot, would insist that he join the Indian armed forces. After finishing school from the Rana Sangram Singh Inter College, Sartaj became a technician in the air force.
This story would have been just another unremarkable tale of a poor Indian family which believed it could get ahead through education and hard work, except for one savage encounter with the chilling reality of twenty-first-century India that would catapult both father and son into the national and international headlines.
On 28 September 2015, even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was wrapping up a high-profile visit to Silicon Valley, back in Dadri, a murderous mob stormed into Akhlaq’s house, dragged him and his younger son Danish out of bed and assaulted them with bricks and hockey sticks. A sewing machine, which Akhlaq had bought his wife and daughters so they could earn an income from some tailoring work, was picked up and hurled at Danish’s head, cracking his skull. He would undergo prolonged brain surgery before he returned to full consciousness. By the time the police got there, Akhlaq, the fifty-two-year-old head of the household, was dead.
In the United States, the prime minister was unveiling the promise of a ‘Digital India’ to a crowd of prosperous émigrés and Americans. Led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, millions of Indians changed their profile pictures to the vibrant colours of the Indian flag to express their support. ‘The twenty-first century will belong to India,’ Modi announced. Yet, at home, his words were belied, as a sectarian murder, rooted in regressive religious phobias, took an innocent life.
Ironically, even as Modi was expanding on how technology could be used to develop his nation, India was confronting the darker, more sinister side of technology—social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Google and WhatsApp were often becoming the medium of choice to spread murderous rumours and messages of hate.
But in Dadri, what would become an exhortation to murder came the old-fashioned way: an announcement was made from the village temple that a cow had been killed and its meat had been stored in Akhlaq’s house. The family pleaded with the frenzied mob. They sai
d they had not slaughtered a cow, the meat in their fridge was mutton. But their protestations were dismissed and the murderers lynched Akhlaq. Turning the victims into the accused, the first response of the local administration was to send the meat to a forensics laboratory for testing—as if it mattered whether the meat was mutton, chicken or beef, as if we lived in an India where manslaughter was less important than cow slaughter.
Just a few days after the barbaric murder of his father, Sartaj spoke to me in an extensive interview that should have humbled and shamed every Indian who watched it. At the time his brother was still in the intensive care unit, yet when Sartaj emerged from inside the hospital to talk to me—wearing a simple checked green-and-white cotton shirt and a white skullcap—he betrayed neither anger nor bitterness. Speaking with much more dignity than any politician I had heard on the tragedy, Sartaj told me, ‘I never thought something like this could happen to us. Because I am with the air force, I am serving my country, I thought I could complete my posting in Chennai in the belief that my family is safe, that the villagers would look after them. My family and I never had a conflict—not even an argument with anyone in the village—all these years. On Eid, we used to call all our Hindu neighbours home or send them boxes packed with food… Yeh mere liye bahut sadme ki baat hai ki main desh ki seva karta hoon or mere parivar ke saath aisa hota hai (It has caused me deep anguish that even though I serve my nation they would do this to my family).’
All I could say to Sartaj was, ‘Every Indian, each one of us, should feel deep shame right now. We have all failed you in some way.’
His father’s last, desperate call for help had in fact been to his Hindu best friend, Manoj Sisodia. ‘It was around 10.30 that night when I got a call from my bhai (brother) Akhlaq. He said, “Some people have reached my house to kill me, please call the police, please somehow save my life,”’ Sisodia told me. ‘I had not recharged the card on my mobile phone, so I ran to my neighbour’s, called the cops and then ran to my friend’s house. I was there within ten minutes. But I was too late. His battered and bloodied body was abandoned on the road, there was blood gushing from his head. I was broken to see him like this. It was pitch-dark, but by now a crowd of a thousand people had gathered outside his house. I just sat by myself in one corner.’ Forget riots or violence, he had never known a Hindu–Muslim divide in his village in forty years, Manoj told me. ‘Not just Akhlaq, I have many Muslim friends here. We are so close that if I am ill or unable to go out, their children go and buy me vegetables and rations. I can only say that come what may, whatever anyone says, I will stand in support of Akhlaq’s family in this hour of crisis.’
Those of us who denounce Akhlaq’s murder cling to the story of that last phone call as proof that all is not lost in our country, that the barbarians have not yet swept all before them. We see it as a sign that humanity and decency can still triumph over forces of division and communal hatred, that the rumour of a dead cow cannot destroy relationships that were decades old.
But perhaps we held on to this hope only to make ourselves feel better. In the next days there was not much to feel optimistic about. The families of the young men who were arrested for the murder of Akhlaq used the women of the village to front their battle. The media—seen by them as biased—was the prime target. Cameras had already been attacked and stones were hurled at press cars. Holding sticks, the women ensured that the media was kept at a distance of three kilometres from the village. When my producer Noman Siddiqui tried to make his way in without a camera he was stopped at the human barricades and body searched. He heard the women chant, ‘Lathi mar de, lathi mar de (Hit him with the stick, hit him with the stick)’, and complain about the ‘injustice’ of Akhlaq’s family ‘walking away with 45 lakh in financial assistance’.
In his moment of loss, instead of rage, which is probably what you and I would have felt, Sartaj showed remarkable grace and the big heart to call for calm. He told me a handful of troublemakers should not be allowed to wrest the story of India from its people—who, he still believed, after all that had happened to him—were generally good. But it was his words to India’s politicians that were the most powerful. ‘Yeh mudda siyasat ka nahin, hamdardi ka hai,’ he told me. (This is not a moment for playing politics, it’s a moment to show empathy). They can come and meet us if they wish, but can they please leave their political agendas behind?’
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The Dadri lynching has exposed the all too familiar fault lines, raised all the same questions about identity politics, the layers of Hindutva, the failure of secular parties and the place of minorities in today’s India—revealing how tenuous the notion of a ‘modern’ India remains. One of the accused, Vishal Rana, is the son of a local BJP leader Sanjay Rana. BJP legislator Sangeet Som—already facing charges for his role in the riots in Uttar Pradesh in 2013—addressed a village sabha vowing help for the accused and warning the Samajwadi Party government against protecting ‘cow-killers’. BJP parliamentarian Yogi Adityanath sent his ‘Hindu Yuva Vahini’ to Dadri where they promised all help, including guns (tan-man-dhan-gun) to protect Hindus if they were harassed. Mahesh Sharma, the central government’s culture minister and Member of Parliament from the area described the murder as an accident, as some sort of village misunderstanding, as distinct from a conspiracy to kill. His evidence included the fact that the mob had not laid a finger on Sartaj’s seventeen-year-old sister, as if that somehow proved they retained an innate decency and were not bloodthirsty louts.
Once again the ruling Samajwadi Party was exposed for its failure to maintain law and order and keep minorities safe, just as it had failed during the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013. During the riots, the party’s rabble rouser, cabinet minister Azam Khan, had suspended four police officers for arresting seven Muslim men in connection with a murder. It was the sort of polarizing decision that only served to create the impression that the BJP and the SP—supposedly staunch enemies—were guilty of the same thing. One sought to consolidate the Hindu vote; the other was trying to cement the Muslim vote. Now Azam Khan, who was rapidly becoming the Muslim equivalent of Sangeet Som, threatened to take the lynching in Dadri to the United Nations. He was sharply criticized for his antics, but just like with the BJP, the question that needed to be asked was: why wasn’t the SP reining him in?
Not to be left behind, the Congress jumped in, promising a day-long fast to protest the Dadri lynching even as its leaders tried to take credit for the cow slaughter ban in twenty-four Indian states. Its party leaders added that they were even ready to consider national legislation against cow slaughter.
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Dadri was a clear indication that beneath the surface glow of liberalization and progress, the deep-seated troubles of India persist. Among the worst of these is the so-called ‘beef politics.’ In his book, Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, Prabhu Bapu chronicles how the cow became part of the narrative of nationalism in the 1920s. What started off as an anti-colonial protest against the beef being supplied to British troops soon became central to the debate around Hindu identity. ‘The evocation of the nation as “mother” was symbolized by the cow, turning cow killing into “matricide”’, he writes. In his lifetime Mahatma Gandhi deplored the politics that surrounded the cow and cow slaughter. He wrote and spoke on the issue many times. During a prayer discourse he delivered on 25 July 1947, the Mahatma said, ‘In India no law can be made to ban cow-slaughter. I do not doubt that Hindus are forbidden the slaughter of cows. I have 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 Hindu.’ But Gandhi’s efforts did not put an end to the politicization of the issue.
In 1966 thousands of sadhus wielding trishuls and spears marched on Parliament against cow slaughter. The police opened fire and the agitators retreated, but not before torching a large number of vehicles. In the mid-1970s spiritual leader Acharya Vinoba Bhave threatened to go on a fast unto death if the cent
re did not introduce a national ban on cow slaughter.
There have been spirited and robust challenges to the political shibboleth that Muslims introduced beef-eating to India, most prominently by historian D. N. Jha who in his treatise, The Myth of the Holy Cow, writes that cows were sacrificed and beef commonly consumed by Vedic Aryans. Jha, a Maithili Brahmin, received multiple threats for arguing that the eating of beef was common in ancient India. Dalit scholars like Kancha Iliah said demands for banning cow slaughter were ‘brahminic’ and exclusionary towards Hindus from lower castes. In his book, Buffalo Nationalism, Iliah wrote: ‘no one asks why the cow alone should remain a constitutionally protected animal under the directive principles of state policy’. He pointed out the hypocrisy of the Hindu elite that thought nothing of wearing leather shoes but could kill a Dalit for skinning a dead cow.
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Historically, the holy cow has long been an excuse for unholy, profane politics. But the expectation was that the mantra of an aspirational India—the economic dreams of a new generation—would have finally made cow politics irrelevant.
Instead, the Dadri murder—which should have caused only disquiet and shame—seems to have unleashed a torrent of hatred and intolerance. In the twenty days after the killing of Akhlaq, two more men were murdered over rumours that they were ferrying cows for slaughter. Noman in Himachal Pradesh and Zahid Ahmed Bhat, barely twenty years old, from Kashmir, joined the list of innocent men murdered by hate-spewing cow vigilantes. ‘Beef politics’ is no longer confined to the ‘cow-belt’; it seems to have spread like a forest fire through parts of India, from Kashmir to Kerala, areas that were not even remotely vulnerable in the past.
The lynching of Akhlaq and soon after Noman and Zahid confronted the Narendra Modi government with persistent, tough questions, whether from writers returning literary honours or even from some of Modi’s own supporters. It is true that the Samajwadi Party government in Uttar Pradesh bore the primary responsibility for law and order where Akhlaq’s lynching was concerned. But it was just as true that the country needed both unequivocal condemnation and a healing touch from its leader.
