Madhya Pradesh police book murdered man for cow slaughter before filing case against his attackers

Alleged cow slaughter

His friend who survived Sunday’s beating may be arrested once doctors say he is fit. Four people have been arrested for the assault. 

Tuesday, May 21st 2018 · 10:54 am

Abhishek Dey

A 45-year-old Muslim man died and his friend was severely injured after they were assaulted by a group of men who accused them of cow slaughter, in Madhya Pradesh’s Satna district on Sunday. The police have registered two cases in connection with the incident. The first case was filed against the victims, charging them with cow slaughter. Later, a case of murder and attempt to murder was filed against the alleged assaulters.

The attack occurred early on Sunday when Shiraj Khan (wrongly identified as Riyaz Khan in police records and news reports) and his friend Shakeel, 38, were walking back to their homes in Maihar town of Satna district from a neighbouring village. They were stopped by a group of men in Amgar village – around 15 km away from Maihar – who accused them of killing a cow. The men beat Khan and Shakeel with sticks and wooden planks, the police said.

Khan was a tailor, while Shakeel works in a bicycle repair shop in Maihar. Their families said that the two men had gone to a neighbouring village to recover money that one of Khan’s clients owed him. After the assault, some residents of Amgar village spotted the two injured men and called the police. They were both taken to hospital, where Khan succumbed to his injuries. Shakeel is recuperating in a hospital in Jabalpur. Khan’s is survived by his wife and four children – three daughters and a son, all aged between four and 14 years.

Shakeel will be taken into custody once he is declared fit by doctors, a senior police officer said.

Superintendent of Police (Satna) Rajesh Hingankar said that the police had recovered the carcass of a bull and two packages of meat at the scene of the crime.

Shiraj Khan’s younger brother Imran Khan, however, questioned this claim. For one, he asked how the police were certain, without a forensic test, that the meat was that of a bull. Besides, he demanded to know how the authorities had concluded that Shiraj Khan and Shakeel had killed the bull. He said that it was possible that his brother and Shakeel were passing by and were attacked by the accused who were looking out for Muslim men to target.

Superintendent of Police Hingankar said that a preliminary investigation suggested that Shiraj Khan and Shakeel had slaughtered the bull for meat, and that the police had eyewitness testimony to this effect.

Recent tensions

Maihar, the home town of legendary sarod player Allauddin Khan, is considered a holy place by Hindus because of the presence of the ancient Sharda Devi temple.

The town has a Muslim population of around 14,000, which is less than 10% of the total population, said Nafees Khan, a social worker in Maihar. “The town had no recent history of communal tensions until December 2017,” he said.

On December 8, a group of men who claimed allegiance to Hindutva groups disrupted a celebration in a Muslim colony on Milad-ul-Nabi, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad. Hindutva groups had organised a march in Maihar that day, during which a Bajrang Dal leader was beaten up by some Muslim men. Ten people from both communities were arrested in connection with the violence.

Nafees Khan said that after that incident, Hindutva groups had made it a point to spread messages through WhatsApp groups and at public meetings claiming that Muslims in Satna were illegally slaughtering cows. The Bajrang Dal leader who was beaten up had headed several such meetings, he said.

Four arrested

Shiraj Khan and Shakeel were booked under provisions of the Madhya Pradesh Cow Slaughter Ban Act, 2004, and the Madhya Pradesh Agriculture Cattle Preservation Act, 1959, the police said. In 2012, Madhya Pradesh amended its rules against cow slaughter and raised the maximum punishment from three years imprisonment to seven years imprisonment, with a fine of Rs 5,000.

Four people – Pawan Singh Gond, Vijay Singh Gond, Phool Singh Gond and Narayan Singh Gond – who were identified by Shakeel, were booked for murder and attempt to murder. They have been arrested, the police said.

The case against Shiraj Khan and Shakeel was registered on the basis of a complaint by Pawan Singh Gond, who told the police that some other villagers had attacked the two men after finding them in the act of slaughtering a bull. They then informed Gond and the other accused.

Security strengthened

The cases were registered at Badera Police Station. Officials at this police station, who did not wish to be identified, first told Scroll.in about the sequence in which the cases were registered. Sub-Divisional Officer of Police (Maihar) Arvind Tiwari confirmed that the case related to cow slaughter was registered first, and the other case relating to murder and attempt to murder was registered later.

Security was strengthened in and around Maihar after the incident. Tiwari said that the peace-keeping committee in the region had helped keep the peace. “Both parties belong to different places,” he said. “There is no probability of personal enmity as they did not know each other.

The police said that they are yet to establish whether the arrested men are linked to Hindutva groups.

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How the BJP went from selling development as a holy cow to banking on the cow being holy

For the Bihar campaign, the party went back to its Hindutva roots, using anti-Muslim rhetoric to sell itself to voters

Shoaib Daniyal  · Nov 06, 2015 · 07:30 am

In the electric campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, the Bharatiya Janata Party went to town selling vikaas, development. Wherever Narendra Modi went, he spoke of the wonderful things he was going to do for the lives of ordinary Indians. He sold the youth the dream of the Gujarat Model. Of roads and, most importantly, electricity.  There were a few lapses into religion, such as when Modi hinted darkly at a “pink revolution”, which maintained that certain people were making a lot of money selling Indian beef to foreigners. But on the whole, Modi in 2014 seemed to be the embodiment of change that everyone welcomed.

That was then. The BJP, propped up by the charisma of Modi, was so ahead of a beleaguered Congress that it didn’t need to put much effort into its Lok Sabha campaign. The party’s core Hindutva supporters secure, its talk of development helped reach out to millions of voters who did not necessarily aligned themselves with its religious nationalism.

Bihar 2015 is a different matter. Here the BJP started off as a laggard, given the electoral firepower the alliance of the Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal bought to the battle. Moreover, in Bihar, it was Nitish Kumar of the JD(U) who was associated with development, having bought transformational changes to the state in the past decade. Lastly, Modi himself wasn’t really such a big factor in this election. In 2014, Biharis were voting directly for Modi as prime minister, which wasn’t the case anymore. Besides, a year and a half meant that some of the Modi sheen had worn off.

However, combating OBC-based formations isn’t a new battle for the BJP. Its been doing this every since it became a major player in the Hindi heartland in the late 1980s ­. Remember the rise of Hindutva in India was accompanied by the rise of backward caste politics ­– the famous Mandal-Kamandal twin poles of Hindi heartland politics in the 1990s. For the Bihar polls, therefore, it just went back to its old playbook. Out came the anti-Muslim rhetoric and a politics that appealed to faith.

1) Muslim reservation bogey
The biggest problem the BJP faced was that Grand Alliance of Nitish Kumar's JD(u) and Lalu Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal seemed to have cornered the support of the backward castes. The upper castes were still with the BJP but it wasn’t going to win the election just on that. Matters were made worse by the fact that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s chief Mohan Bhagwat went in and made some comments that appeared to question India’s system of reserving seats in educational institutions and government jobs for people from marginal communities.  The Grand Alliance took this chance to attack the BJP frontally.

Scrambling for a response, the BJP attempted to polarise voters on religious lines. Pitting Bihar’s poorest communities against each other, Prime Minster Modi spoke of a conspiracy by the Grand Alliance to snatch away a part of the reservation benefits from lower castes and hand it over to Muslims:

    “Five percent from the Dalits, five percent from Mahadalits, 5% from Backwards, 5% from Extremely Backwards. There is a conspiracy to take away from their quota to give to another community.”


As it turns out, the Grand Alliance had said nothing of this sort. In fact, reservation along these lines is not even possible constitutionally. But the BJP was banking on innuendo to trump fact. As the campaign progressed, the Election Commission barred a BJP advertisement that tried to repeat this Muslim quota allegation.

2) The Pakistan/terror dog whistle
Dictionary.com describes the phrase “dog whistle” as “a political strategy, statement, slogan, etc., that conveys a controversial, secondary message understood only by those who support the message”. In India, both “Pakistan” and “terror” are used as dog whistles in order to attack Muslims.

Narendra Modi kicked off proceedings by accusing Nitish Kumar of “sheltering terrorists” who were a part of the so-called Darbhanga Module. Apart from the impropriety of accusing an elected chief minster of terrorism, this was an ironic accusation to make since the BJP was also a part of Nitish Kumar’s government at the time when it was accused of supporting terror.

Later on, BJP president Amit Shah chimed in with a, by now de rigueur, Pakistan comment. He claimed that if the BJP lost, fireworks would go off in Pakistan, a not-so-subtle dig at the Muslim support for the Grand Alliance.

Somewhat comically, some BJP leaders also pointed to the fact that the website of the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn was carrying ads for Nitish Kumar as clinching proof of the Pakistani hand behind the Grand Alliances campaign. Of course, ads on Dawn.com are served by Google Ads based on the user’s location and browsing history. They are placed automatically based on the service's guesses about the reader's interests.

 Rajiv Pratap Rudy's tweet, which he consequently deleted.

The BJP also placed ads in local newspapers around the issue of the Grand Alliance engendering terrorism. Like the Muslim quota ads, the Election Commission barred these ads, citing their potential to create communal disharmony.

3) Bihar’s moo-ver and shaker
It didn't seem surprising that the cow made its way into the Bihar election, as an attempt to play up the BJP’s Hindu nationalist side and attract voters.  On October 5, party leader Sushil Modi set the ball rolling by claiming that the BJP would ban cow slaughter in Bihar if it comes to power. Trying to frame the election in theocratic terms, the senior BJP leader said, “The forthcoming Assembly polls in Bihar is going to be a direct contest between those, who justify beef eating and those seeking effective ban on cow slaughter.”

A few days later, the other Modi took up the baton from his namesake. The prime minister attacked Lalu Prasad Yadav for claiming that some Hindus eat beef too. Modi mentioned that he was from the land of Lord Krishna and claimed that Lalu had insulted the Yadav caste with this beef comment.

A BJP ad focussed on the cow was pulled out by the Election Commission as well. The ad had a picture of a woman passionately hugging a milky-white cow with the pro-beef eating statements of a number of Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal leaders posted alongside.

BJP's ad against beef eating.

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