The brilliant Mukul Kesavan: The trouble with Narendra Modi's theory of Gau Rakshaks

by Guest Mon Aug 08, 2016 1:11 pm

If you haven't seen the video clips of the beatings administered to Dalits in Una in Gujarat, you should take a deep breath and watch out of a sense of civic responsibility. You will see thin, bare-bodied men, wilting with distress, being caned by well-fed youths wearing denims and tee-shirts. It's very nearly impossible to watch. A row of captive Dalits are inspected by men who then take turns to beat them with rods and metal slats. The men doing the beating are curiously impassive, till the moment they hit their victims. Then they lay into them, two-handed, and go down the row, swinging with real enthusiasm. Other men stand around them in a ragged circle, shooting videos of the action with their camera phones. I've never seen anything like this tableau; it's like slave-owners working their property over because they can. The vileness of it is that these freelance sadists aren't just inflicting pain, they are also performing. These men are the young masters of Gujarat's universe: this is the logical terminus of the politics of cow-protection.

Modi didn't mention this specific incident; perhaps he hasn't seen the video. He did, however, illustrate the false gau rakshak's instrumental use of the cow with a story. In the old days when there were battles between badshahs and rajas (read Muslim and Hindu rulers), the badshahs would station a herd of cows ahead of their vanguard on the battle-field. The rajas, constrained by their reverence for the cow, wouldn't attack the badshah's host and the battle would be lost. The implication was that the false gau rakshak was like the bad badshah who played upon the piety of Hindu kings to win his battles.

Modi can't help himself. Even the stories he tells to criticize Hindu vigilantism have Muslims as their villains. The prime minister and the party he represents aren't self-critical about gau raksha; they can't be - it's the fire they are forged in. They can, however, be strategic about it. The lynching of Muslims is one thing; the savaging of Dalits, potentially a part of the Hindu body politic, is quite another. To separate the false cow protector from the true cause of cow protection, to ignore the political economy of cow protection, to turn the conversation from the violence of vigilantism to a constructive awareness of plastic waste, was the work of a moment. Governance comes in many guises; on Saturday the prime minister showed us one aspect of it. He flagged vigilantism... then finessed it.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160808/jsp/opinion/story_101139.jsp#.V6jKsZMrKqA