I first read the lynching incident way back in Sep 2015, which has now become infamous Dadri lynching. The incident was so sad that the man was lynched based on the rumors that he had eaten beef.
So what?
I know, if you are in USA beef is an American staple diet; trust me it’s high in cholesterol, you need to cut on that. Just a suggestion or if it was Mayor Mike Bloomberg, he would heavily tax on it, which is outrageous, who wants a nanny state, right? Even if that saves your life in the long run. Lets get back to our story, turns out this man from Dadri (I try not to use the real names, it’s subject that matters); a parent of an active soldier, was made to run in the village streets while a mob chased him with machetes. The senior man ran for his life behind a bunch of teenagers; could you think that a senior could out run a bunch of teenagers with adrenaline. That senior out ran them, it was the last hope he had, else death. Anyways the peasant ran to his home, locked himself up in the bedroom. Commotion erupted in the living room, the family members scurried around the crowd begging to save his life.
What couldn’t they immediately call for the police help?
You might think these poor villagers did not have phones, they did! as a matter of fact every individual has phone in India, actually India has the highest number of cellphones in the world. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg visited Prime Minister Narendra Modi multiple times, to provide a free internet to all his citizens. Good deal hah! not so fast, in return Mark gets to control what content the nation views. See the game here. Well that did not happen and Mark returned home empty handed, actually the first thing he ate after landing on American soil; A double cheese Hamburger. So they had called for the cops but they were standing outside the home as the tiny home itself was filled with mobs. The wife begged and pleaded the leader to spare her husband; it was immaterial what his offense was. Nonetheless his son demanded what was the offense?
“You filthy humans, you eat beef”, said a burly mustache and darted towards the kitchen and opened his fridge to produce the beef.
Aah! the beef, dear Americans pardon those mobsters for calling beef eaters as filthy humans. Well lets talk about this beef a little, there two flavors of beef in India. No it’s not Angus and regular beef; that’s debate you fight in America. Here it’s cow beef and Water buffalo beef.
What’s the difference?
Big difference. Cow in India is a sacred animal, so sacred you worship her everyday. That buffalo, the dark cousin of cow, not so sacred, you can butcher it and eat it, at your will. Mind you, buffalo provides more milk to the nation than cows. If only they evolved using Fair and Lovely to become fair like cows, Sigh! So this Cow Beef is banned in India since independence, see the Brits left the land and cows roamed the streets at freewill. A foreign delegate comes to the capital of India; Delhi, the entire population is shooed off the streets for the entourage to pass by and suddenly it comes to halt. Then President, Barack Obama once asked, “Aaah! Why did we stop?“. The Indian high command sputtered, “Saaar! it’s the cows they are crossing the streets and one is just resting on the road, they will have them moved and we will get going.”
Buffaloes dare not come on the streets, they would be beaten like hell. You say, “I get it, this man was eating Cow beef“, no he was not, it was a buffalo beef, but this wonderful WhatsApp we have now had spread the word that he was eating otherwise, even , more sinister a calf meat. You know how fast the news spreads on WhatsApp right, it goes viral within seconds and then the cow vigilantes gather and dart towards the culprit. So here we are attacking this father whose teenage girls were huddled in the corner for the fear of being raped. Son pleaded that the beef in the fridge was buffalo beef, if only he could reach his older brother who was deployed on the treacherous Indo-Pak border; defending these cow vigilantes from the terrorist attacks. This soldier does not carry a cellphone for security reasons, in short he was nowhere to be reached. The mob chants grew louder,
“Kill that man, who abuses an innocent cow.“,
few reprimanded the family members and rest broke open the doors of the bedroom. Father was mercilessly beaten to death while his entire family looked on!
The mob moved on warning the remaining family,
“Dare you eat this beef, you will meet the same fate“,
actually the mother darted to eat the meat; it was suicidal, her children held her back.
Mob moved out, police moved in.
“What happened here?” asked the inspector.
“Sir, they killed my father for eating this beef, it’s buffalo beef”, cried his son.
“Send that meat for forensics”, ordered the Inspector, you see his priority.
Indeed the forensics report had come back as buffalo meat, really nobody eats cow meat in India. Actually cows have become such a nuisance on the streets, they have been left to die eating plastic bags and trash. The day cow stops bearing milk they are left on the streets, nobody dares take any action. Not to digress, but there are few organizations who shelter these abandoned cows.
Finally the military son was informed, whose bosses were appalled to hear the story and sent him home to attend his grieving family. He being the elder son torched the dead body for cremation and did the final rights.
Media asked him, “Soldier how do you feel that you serve our nation and here a bunch of mobsters kill your father”.
He simply says, “I forgive them”, and finally moves the entire family from that town where his generation had lived.
Since that incident scores have been lynched over the past few years, it was not always cow related though, some times it’s religion, other times it’s journalists/writers, I was loosing track of these incidents until the last one that literally hit home.
My hometown Karnataka, a software engineer, who had just returned from Middle-East on vacation, gave-away few chocolates to street kids, who devoured with joy. The bunch of vigilantes go to work, sent a Whats-app message among their friends, with this engineer’s picture attached saying that, he is a child-lifter. Really that’s a popular word in India a Child-Lifter. The mob got to work and this highly educated engineer was not given any chance to defend his actions and dragged on the streets and beaten to death.
Since most of these mob vigilantes are affiliated with one or the other political parties, the police keeps looking for them but can never identify the perpetrators, conveniently, even though all of the act is circulating on the same WhatsApp among rest of the world, I mean, I sit here in USA and get to see these videos within an hour of the incident.
Argument has been that WhatsApp has to stop these false propaganda, Facebook parent company of WhatsApp has been under fire for selling out users information to Cambridge Analytica, which has compromised the election results in USA and India alike. The technology can only go so far as in case of WhatsApp, the privacy of the user is protected by not revealing the information to anybody except the intended party, in this case the vigilante groups messages cannot be seen by law authorities or the WhatsApp organization itself. Facebook has put in place a lot of checks and balances in case of English language, but would take a lot of time to decipher the hundreds of Indian vernacular languages.
For argument sake let’s say a person ate beef or abducted a child, what right and authority does the mob have to punish him or her. Yes there were women killed based of fake messages of child-lifting. If anybody suspects that somebody is doing wrong, inform the authorities, let police handle it. Well in America this has gone too far, too. A black child sells lemonade and a lady calls cops on that child. Yet she did not take law into her own hands, at least for now.
My final plea is that we as humans need to care for other humans, justifiably to animals too. I cannot fathom that a bunch of people use there bare hands and kill another human in a gruesome manner while rest of the people watch it or video tape it. The person begs for water during his last moments and beating continues, until he goes silent!
isoodlee 