On a Monday night in September 2015, in a little town outside New Delhi,
an angry mob showed up to the house of man named Mohammad Akhlaq.
The mob hit Akhlaq's elderly mother. They severely injured his son and then, they found Akhlaq.
They dragged him on to the street and they beat him with bricks until he immediately died.
The reason Akhlaq was killed, the anger from this mob
came from a rumor, a rumor that he was carrying beef.
"56 year old Muslim man was beaten to death by an allegedly Hindu mob."
An investigation was immediately launched.
Not only into Akhlaq's murder, but also into whether or not he truly was carrying beef.
18 suspects were identified, but now, four years later,
the trial hasn't even begun yet. In fact, the accused are out on bail,
which has led to fear among the victim's family and community.
Earlier this year, one of the accused was invited to sit in the front row of a political rally.
He later claimed that 16 of the accused were in the audience that day.
Aklhaq's murder isn't an isolated incident.
Here in a town in eastern India, two Muslim
cattle traders, one of them just 13, we're driving to a fair to
sell their cows when they were stopped by a group of men, who beat them and hanged
them from a tree where, they both died. Over the last seven years hundreds of
Indians have been attacked, many killed. This violence has affected some Hindus
and other minorities, but the majority of the victims are Muslims.
All these incidents plotted on the map have one thing in common: they're all directly tied to cows.
But these attacks like this weren't always this prevalent.
In 2012, there was just one such attack in all of India.
The next year there were just two.
But then in 2014, something changed.
Look at the rise every year since.
And if you look closer at what's actually happening
on the ground, you can start to see exactly why these violent attacks are on the rise.
"Showing violence by so-called cow vigilantes in India."
"Self-appointed guardians of cows, which are sacred to Hindus claim they're being
illegally slaughtered. Not afraid to use violence to stop them."
There are millions of stray cows in India.
These cows don't belong to anyone.
They are usually past the age where they can be productive on farms and so
they're just set free to roam the country and you see them everywhere.
Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism and the majority of India's 1.3 billion people identify as Hindu.
Cows are generally revered by Hindus, many of whom abstain from eating beef,
but many Indians practice religions that don't share that same belief.
While transporting and trading cows isn't always illegal in the country,
slaughtering cows is banned in most of India's states. In some parts of the
country, especially those in the northern region, the police go on raids looking
for people who are breaking these cow protection laws, but in recent years,
it's not just the police cracking down.
These are cow vigilantes.
"Once again, the beef brigade has taken law in its own hands in this country."
"This is one of several viral video showing violence by so-called cow vigilantes in India."
"A resident of Haryana's Mewat district was transporting two cows in
his vehicle when he was beaten to death."
They're almost always groups of young men piling into SUVs to patrol the highways at night.
They'll take whatever weapons they have. Rifles or like small handmade guns. Then, they'll raid the highways
looking for any vehicle. Sometimes they'll have police around with them.
Sometimes they will be on the phone with the police. That's Snigdha Poonam.
She's a national affairs writer with The Hindustan Times in Delhi.
And I've been one of these vehicles with them for a
midnight raid and everyone has to stop,
even if it's like a group of young people driving late at night, they have
to stop and these cow protectors can do with them as they please.
If these vigilantes hear about someone
who's in possession of a cow or is carrying beef, sometimes they will turn
them over to the police, but more and more, they've been using violence on their own.
Often they make videos and then, that starts passing around on Facebook and Whatsapp.
Many cow vigilante's have ties with Hindu militant groups that specifically
target Muslims and other religious minorities. According to a Human Rights Watch report,
between 2015 and 2018, of the 44 cow-related deaths, 36 of them were Muslim.
To understand why these attacks have surged during this time you have to
look at the rise of one of India's biggest political parties.
"It's interesting to take a look at why and how this has become
such a massive landslide in terms of seats has been unprecedented. 70 seats for the BJP."
In 2014, India's Hindu nationalist party called Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP won
the national elections and that made the leader of the party, Narendra Modi, the Prime minister of India.
His political platform has long been this idea of
Hindu nationalism and a big focus of his speeches has been the protection of cows.
One of the things that Narendra Modi did while campaigning was talk
about cows and how cows needed to be saved or worshipped or celebrated.
Let's look at this map again, which shows how cow violence increased after 2014,
but now look at the attacks of 2017 and 2018. You can see that most of them are
clustered around this one area. This is Uttar Pradesh or UP.
With over 200 million people, this is India's most populous state
and in 2017, the Modi government appointed this man to be the leader of the state, Yogi Adityanath.
Earlier this year at an election rally, Yogi referred to Muslims as quote a
"green virus." In fact, it was at one of his political rallies where one of Akhlaq's
accused murderers was invited to sit on the front row.
After being appointed, Yogi directed the police to scrutinize the slaughterhouses
in his state, shutting down any that didn't have the proper paperwork.
They shuttered thousands of meat shops and closed hundreds of slaughterhouses that
they claimed were illegal putting many Muslims in Uttar Pradesh out of business.
And with Yogi in power, cow vigilantes were quickly emboldened.
In fact soon after he was appointed, three meat shops were set on fire by a mob.
That year cow related violence spiked in UP
and the impact of the Yogi's policies didn't end there.
I traveled south from the capital of UP, where Yogi's office sits, to a city on the banks of the Ganges.
I'm in a part of Uttar Pradesh, which is a huge leather producer and just a few
months ago the government gave a notice to this factory that they needed to stop all operations.
They used water pollution as the excuse because leather production
uses water and can pollute rivers and things like that so this factory worked really
hard to install pumps and filters and even after they provided all of the
information and jumped through all those hoops, the government still hasn't given
them permission to open up the factory again and so it's sits completely shut down, frozen in time.
All of these workers, the owners, everyone here is Muslim and this has been an
industry that Muslims in Uttar Pradesh have worked in for many many years
and it's now completely halted.
I'm associated with the industry for the last 50 years. I have never seen such bad days.
Since he came into power in 2017, Yogi has allocated government
funding to build shelters for stray cows around his state. I went to visit one of
these shelters to meet with the head of a local cow protection organization.
As someone who has dedicated his life to peaceful and lawful cow protection,
he was excited when Yogi announced his plan to construct many more cow shelters.
The place is not actually protecting or supporting cows. It's a lot that exists here
for the cows to be in, but these cows are starving, you can see their ribs.
They don't have enough food. They don't have enough shade.
The state government has used the setting up of a lot of
these cow shelters as a political
showcase of their commitment to Hindu ideals, but when you come look at them
you realize this isn't about protecting cows. This is about fueling an ideology.
Akhlaq was killed by a mob because of a rumor that he had beef in his
possession, but the murder investigation revealed that the meat he was carrying was not beef.
It was mutton.
Akhlaq's brothers suspect that the murder has less to do with cows and beef
and more to do with the fact that he was a Muslim who had money.
It's not about cows. It's how they feel that the Muslims have risen.
They are buying more land. They are buying better houses
or they are earning more. They are rising and how that upsets their social position.
After a series of horrific cow related incidents in 2017,
thousands took to the street in protest prompting Prime minister Modi to break
his silence and finally condemn violence in the name of cows.
Then, in 2018, the Indian Supreme Court passed a series of directives urging state governments
to take the problem more seriously, to properly prosecute these cases.
Some state governments have tried to raise awareness to curb the rumors that incite
this violence, but no official action has been taken by the national government.
Meanwhile, Modi just won another nationwide election and Yogi remains in power.
And India, this country that is rooted in the ideals of secularism and diversity
has become more and more dangerous for millions of its Muslim citizens.