Refreshing news from India --"the world's greatest democracy, a friend of Israel, and an outpost of $ivilization against barbaric Pakistan":
Lynchings fuel debate on faith and culture
John Lancaster The Washington Post
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Five Indians's fate- A deadly rumor of cow-killing
DULENA, India It began, by most accounts, with a grisly rumor: Five men had been arrested after stealing a cow - revered by Hindus as the mother of all humanity - and skinning it alive just steps from the construction site of a new Hindu temple. Something had to be done.
It was. Inflamed by a day of religious revelry, a mob several thousand strong converged on the small police outpost where the men were being held, dragged them from their cell and beat them to death with clubs and bricks, according to government officials and local residents. Two of the bodies were burned.
The gruesome killings in this small farming community, less than an hour's drive west from New Delhi, have revived an impassioned national debate: Is the life of a cow more sacred than that of a man?
The debate echoes a larger battle over the identity of this vast and ethnically diverse nation of a billion people, pitting the guardians of India's secular pluralistic traditions against ascendant Hindu nationalists who see themselves as protectors of India's dominant faith and culture.
While the authorities have promised a full investigation of the lynchings, which occurred Oct. 15 in the presence of several dozen policemen and a local magistrate, so far the only charges in the case have been lodged against the five dead men, for "cow slaughter." Investigators, meanwhile, have received the results of an autopsy - on the cow.
And for many members of India's powerful Hindu nationalist movement, the killing of the five untouchables, who occupy the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, was an understandable, perhaps even justified, response to an even more serious offense.
"We consider the cow to be the mother of the world, of humanity, so if you've murdered a cow, then you've murdered a mother," said Pitambar Gaur, 35, who heads the local chapter of the World Hindu Council, a prominent Hindu nationalist group.
While expressing sympathy for the five men who died, he described the killings as "logical" under the circumstances, adding, "If this act becomes a deterrent to prevent others from doing this, then I think it was right."
Such statements have infuriated secular liberals, who see the case as the latest example of how Hindu extremists and their political allies - including the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads India's coalition government - are undermining the rule of law and deepening the fissures in Indian society. Politicians from the opposition Congress (I) Party, among others, have accused the police of conspiring with Hindu radicals in the state of Haryana to incite the lynchings, which have received prominent coverage in the Indian news media.
India has a long history of such bloodshed, typically involving clashes between Hindus and members of the country's Muslim minority. In the state of Gujarat last spring, Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims after a Muslim mob attacked a train carrying Hindu activists, killing 60 people. But untouchables, too, have suffered their share of persecution. Although they are Hindus, their place at the bottom of the caste system renders them "impure" in the eyes of many Indians, and therefore suitable only for jobs that higher-caste Hindus shun.
One of those jobs involves skinning cattle. Though slaughtering cows is illegal in India, the government grants licenses to untouchables who collect and sell the hides of cows that die of disease, old age or accidents. The five lynching victims made their living this way, according to relatives.
One of the victims, Virender Singh, 23, lived with his wife, two small children and their extended family in a two-story concrete home in Badshahpur, a village just outside New Delhi.
"You wouldn't find a single fault with my son," his mother, Ramvati, 60, recalled as she squatted in the family's fly-infested courtyard, a pink shawl framing her deeply lined face. "He worked with his hands and ate honestly. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't gamble."
His father, Rattan Singh, said his son and four companions ran into trouble when they were driving to a distant village with a load of about 200 cow hides, which they planned to sell for up to $16 each.
He denied that they had stopped to retrieve a cow, or cow carcass, and accused the police of beating the five men to death after they refused to pay a bribe.
Other relatives of the victims assert that the police beat one of the men to death.
Then, they say, the police sought to hide the evidence of their crime by planting the cow-killing rumor with Hindu extremists before turning over the four other men to the mob. That a lynching of some sort took place was confirmed by local residents as well as Gaur, the Hindu council official, who said he arrived on the scene around midnight to find five corpses in the road and about 500 people milling nearby.
In the days since the killings, a parade of social activists and politicians including the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi, have visited the victims' families to express sympathy and demand justice.
A supervising police officer in Dulena said the five men had been driving through the area when they happened on a cow and took it into the jungle near the construction site to skin it. Their timing could hardly have been worse. Oct. 15 was the final day of Dusshera, a 10-day Hindu religious festival that culminates in an effigy-burning celebration of the slaying of an evil king, Ravana, by the Hindu god Ram. About 50 people were returning from Dusshera festivities when they saw the men skinning the cow, the officer said. Infuriated, they set upon the men, beating them severely with sticks and rocks before bringing them "half-dead" to the station about a half-mile away, the officer said.
Word of the alleged cow-killing spread to neighboring villages and among other festival-goers, the officer said. The crowd began to swell. "They were screaming, 'Cow slaughter! They were killing a cow in front of the temple!'" the officer recounted. "They wanted police to book them."
The police obliged by filing a complaint against the five men, authorities said; the handwritten report is on file at the district police headquarters in Jhajjar, a few kilometers from Dulena. In the meantime, reinforcements arrived from Jhajjar, along with a city magistrate.
"They were trying to tell the crowd, 'We will start the case, don't worry,'" the officer in Dulena said.
But according to the police account, the mob began hurling bricks at the station and trying to pry the grates off the windows. Finally they broke the steel bolts securing the cell door, dragged the men into the street and beat them to death, the police said. Two of the bodies then were tossed onto the burning remnants of a small wooden hut.
The police investigation has made little headway. Local villagers have been uncooperative; many sympathize with the killers.
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