Rumors of Cow Killings in India Deepen Rift Between Hindus and Muslims

MEWAT, India — In villages nestled among freshly razed wheat fields, a group of activists, spurred on by rumors, is hunting killers. They hear that these hunters are rounding up their prey by the thousands, snatching them at midnight from ponds and roadsides. They prod them onto stolen cars with heated iron rods, the whispers say, and butcher them.

The victims of these attacks are cows, deeply revered by many Hindus, and the perpetrators of these alleged assaults are mostly Muslims, making the fight a flash point between India’s largest religious groups on the eve of state elections.

Activism over the protection of cows is a centuries-old tradition in India, expressed in the law with most states banning cow slaughter. Muslim Mughal emperors put in place laws to protect cows in the 16th century to promote religious harmony.

In the colonial period, Indian freedom fighters took up cow protection, partly to rebel against their imperial beef-eating rulers.


But during elections, which will come to this state, Haryana, and to Maharashtra on Wednesday, the fight to protect cows and the rumors about their mistreatment have ramped up. There are no reliable estimates of cow killings, so it is difficult to say whether they have increased, never mind to determine the religion of the perpetrators. But that has not stopped right-wing political parties, which have whipped up their base by demanding stricter enforcement of laws against killing cows, and some say that local activists working in tandem with those parties are exploiting religious divides for electoral gain.