Lynching of Akbar Khan in Alwar Another Feather in BJP’s Hat

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When the elites and urban middle-class of India, the upper-caste privileged section of the society, was glued to the TV watching the theatrics performed during the no-confidence motion, either appraising Narendra Modi or Rahul Gandhi for their performance, Akbar Khan (28), a Mewati Muslim from Mewat district of Haryana, was lynched by the RSS-sponsored cow terrorists or Gau Rakshaks in Alwar district of Rajasthan, where Vasundhara Raje government has established India’s first Gau Raksha Police Stations. The brutal lynching of Akbar Khan happens shortly after the Supreme Court strictly condemned the lynching spree in the country that’s killing Muslims, Dalits and other marginal communities in the name of cow protection and the apex court asked the state governments to take appropriate steps to combat the freely roaming lynch mobs.

Akbar Khan, who was also known as Rakbar, had bought two cows from Rajasthan and along with another man from his village he was taking the cattle to their village in Haryana at the night when the RSS’ Gau Rakshak goons apprehended them and demanded extortion money. When Akbar Khan and his accomplice pleaded with them they started hitting them and then they lynched Akbar Khan, while the other man managed to escape wounded. Akbar Khan was declared brought dead in the hospital and according to the police, on his way to the hospital, Akbar Khan told them that the Gau Rakshaks accused him of being a cattle smuggler and killed him.

The national television debates raged over the code of conduct of MPs in the parliament and whether it was right for Rahul Gandhi to hug Narendra Modi, but no toady lapdog scribe of the Modi regime dare ask Vasundhara Raje and other BJP chief ministers that why their governments can’t crack the whip on the Gau Rakshaks, even two years after Narendra Modi asked state governments to create a dossier on them and crack down them? None of the mainstream, big-pay-cheque-earning celebrity journalists put the question before the Narendra Modi-led regime that why can’t it simply fight the elections on its “development” promises and stop relying on Hindutva terrorism for votes? No doubt, a government whose Harvard-educated bigot minister loves to felicitate criminal Gau Rakshaks who lynched hapless Muslims, would enjoy the killings throughout the nation as communally-incensed lynchings secure its future political prospects.

It’s not that the problem posed by the Gau Rakshaks or the saffron terrorists can’t be resolved, it’s just that the BJP can’t and won’t do it because these hoodlums are their pawns, who execute its firman and the RSS’ long-term agenda regarding terrorising and subjugating the Muslim population of the country aiming at the aggrandizement of the Hindutva camp. These are the very foot soldiers who are hired in lieu of lucrative monetary and other socio-economic benefits from the backward castes and Dalit communities to fight and die for the RSS’ saffron flag of hatred and fascism; however, these cow terrorists are always led by those who belong to the upper-caste elite feudal background.

Alwar has become a district infested by saffron terrorists due to its political importance as it lies equidistant from both national capital New Delhi and from Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. Earlier in April 2017, Pehlu Khan (55), a dairy owner from Mewat, Haryana, was lynched by a mob of few hundred cow terrorists on the payroll of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal. He was killed in broad daylight on the national highway, while the state remained a mute spectator. Two of his accomplices were injured, however, the police dropped the names of all six accused whom Pehlu Khan named during his dying testimony, from the charge sheet and instead, following the diktat of the Alwar RSS leadership and Gulab Chand Kataria, the Rajasthan Home Minister, they charged the victim and his accomplices under the draconian sections of the cattle smuggling law, which is enforced by the Hindutva fascist camp in Rajasthan to terrorise and persecute the minority community.

Similar cow terror incidents kept happening all over Rajasthan and later, in November 2017, Ummar Mohammad, another Muslim from Mewat area, was shot dead by cow terrorists while his associate was wounded when they were apprehended with cattle on their way to Bharatpur of Rajasthan. Ummar was killed in Fahari village near Govindh Gadh in Alwar district, while his killers remained aloof from the law, the police were busy investigating why Ummar Mohammad was ferrying a cow from Haryana to Rajasthan. With the police of both states being led by and manned by the most reactionary men from patriarchal, upper-caste Hindu and feudal background, led by Hindutva fascist flag bearers, it is now impossible for the Muslim community in these two states to seek justice from the state machinery that’s extremely bigot and prejudiced against them.

Mewat of Haryana is home to the Mewati Muslims or Meo Muslims, who have been raising and rearing cattle for their traditional dairy business for centuries. These Muslims have no scope to move on to other professions and they have to depend on cattle trade to buy and sell bovines for their milk business. During the last four years, since Narendra Modi-led Hindutva fascist government was formed in New Delhi, these Muslims have been worst hit as the BJP swept the assembly polls of both Rajasthan and Haryana by polarising the majority Hindu community, including the backward castes and Dalits against the Muslims and their food habit.

Ever since Pehlu Khan’s lynching, the state machinery of Haryana and Rajasthan targeted the Mewati Muslims and made them scapegoats by randomly choosing and killing men of the community in staged encounters to label them as cattle smugglers. Throughout Rajasthan and Haryana, the RSS’ cow terrorists have built up a huge cattle smuggling industry, which seizes cattle from the hapless poor dairy farmers, especially Muslims, and then put them into cow shelters built by the government or run by the RSS’ affiliated organisations. Then, they ensure that the cows die of starvation so that their skin can be sold to the leather industry of Southeast Asia. Also, most of the milky cows are redistributed to wealthy feudal landlords and leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-led Bhartiya Gau Raksha Dal, a terrorist organisation that flaunts pictures of Assault Kalashnikov rifles on its website. According to a Reuters investigation, the redistribution of milky cows to Hindu upper-caste feudal landlords and local goons affiliated with the saffron camp is a business worth $36 million. That’s indeed a lot of money for the Hindutva fascist camp to consolidate its political fortune.

More than religion and the so-called “religious sentiments” related to cows, the animal that mostly dies starving and due to eating plastic waste on the streets, the Gau Rakshaks, or the cow terrorists are interested in making money through extortions, cow reselling and selling of skin of dead cow to Southeast Asian leather industry. Also, as the farmers are forced to not sell their old cattle to butchers, they are compelled to rear them, even without the means to do it. This forces the farmers either to give away the old cattle for free to the cow shelters run by the Gau Rakshaks or they have to borrow money for their subsistence from the unscrupulous money lenders, who belong to the RSS, at a high rate of interest.

The Alwar assembly constituency is represented in the state legislative assembly by the notorious Gyan Dev Singh Ahuja, a criminal-turned-politician who shot to fame by predicting the number of used condoms and beer bottles trashed in the hostels of Jawaharlal Nehru University. It was no wonder to find a narcissist feudal ganglord like Gyan Dev Singh Ahuja coming out to defend the killers of Akbar Khan soon after the news made to the national media. Gyan Dev Singh Ahuja claimed that the cow terrorists have slapped and handed over the victim, whom he called a “cattle smuggler”, to the police, who according to Ahuja thrashed the victim to show the people that they are taking serious action against them. He demanded a judicial probe into the issue accusing the police, which is controlled by the BJP itself, of killing him.

If we consider his claim to be true, then we will find his own party colleague and Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal is negating it with an alternative narrative. Arjun Ram Meghwal claimed that the Gau Rakshaks, whom even Narendra Modi criticised and condemned during his town hall in 2016, are carrying out these incidents to undermine the prime minister’s “growing popularity”. Meghwal, who happens to be a crucial MP from Rajasthan, has made this statement to blame the opposition for the lynchings taking place all over India, while Gyan Dev Singh Ahuja is claiming that they were RSS’ men who apprehended and handed over Akbar Khan a.k.a. Rakbar to the police accusing him of being a cattle smuggler after “slapping” and the police may have killed him. In either case, the BJP can’t wash off the blood of Akbar Khan from its hands.

Amidst these contradictory narratives, it’s evident that Rajasthan, where the vitriol against the Muslim is so strong that they constantly live under the fear of losing their lives to the Hindutva terrorists, will go to poll later this year on the Hindu-Muslim binary only. It was in Rajasthan that a Muslim migrant worker was hacked and then burned alive to death by a Hindutva terrorist Shambhulal Regar, who is now worshipped as a hero of the majority community by Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal. It’s in Rajasthan that the dominant upper-caste feudal landlords and their accomplices stamp Muslims as Pakistani agents and then incite violence against them by propagating slanders against the community. The state government under Vasundhara Raje has constantly provided fodder to these Hindutva terrorists who are its socio-political pillars in the countryside of the state.

As the Rajasthan assembly election is a few months away and the farmers are agitating against the BJP government’s total apathy towards them, as the input price of farming is shooting up and the real profit from farming is falling drastically, the BJP finds itself in a trouble zone. Except for rhetoric mongering, Narendra Modi and his coterie have done nothing significant for the farmers, but of course, threw them into utmost chaos through the demonetisation drive of November-December 2016. The farmers are also angry as the MSP increased by the Modi government during the last leg of its first term and publicised with much hype isn’t promising any significant gain for them. They are not getting the right price for their crops, forget any minimum profit. According to the Congress, 92 farmers have committed suicide in the state since Vasundhara Raje came to power in 2013. The recent fall in garlic prices caused the suicide of five farmers in Rajasthan and the debt waiver announced by the Rajasthan Government last year is more of a hogwash than of any real welfare for the farmers.

The tribal and Dalit communities in Rajasthan, who live under threat from the dominant castes represented by the BJP and the RSS, have also faced severe hardships during Vasundhara Raje’s reign. While the poor of the state are intensifying militant movements against the unpopular BJP government, which is surviving solely on the support of upper-caste feudal landlords, elite and upper-middle class urban Hindus and comprador capitalist lobby of the state (consisting principally rich men from the minority Jain community that want to enforce vegetarianism on the people of the state), Vasundhara Raje and Narendra Modi will have to rely more on the cow terrorists or Gau Rakshaks, along with lone wolf killers like Shambhulal Regar, to polarise the Hindu voters by vilifying the Muslim community before the state goes to poll. Unless the BJP and the RSS crack the unity of the people, the oppressed and exploited poor of Rajasthan and other BJP-ruled states, they won’t be able to win large margins in the forthcoming assembly election and 2019 Lok Sabha election.

If the RSS and the BJP are given free hand and the Muslims and Dalits keep relying upon a biased administration for justice, more hapless Muslims like Akbar Khan and Pehlu Khan will die. We must remember that it’s upon communal violence and lynchings that the BJP is surviving and its ministers are felicitating culprits of mob lynching to keep its vote bank intact. It’s for the sake of preservation of lives of minority Muslims, for the sake of the  survival and preservation of unity of the poor and for the sake of establishing democracy and equality that the RSS-led Hindutva camp is trying to abolish, the poor people, the victims of such atrocities, the farmers and the workers must be united to resist these cow terrorist thugs, their masters- the corrupt Hindutva fascist politicians, their donors- the big comprador capitalists and foreign corporations.

To resist these evil forces, to prevent another poor dairy farmer like Akbar Khan or Pehlu Khan from being lynched, the unity of the poor must be built by the anti-fascist, progressive and democratic forces. Unless the poor are united and equipped with the correct politics to wage a struggle against the root cause of Hindutva fascism, i.e. the feudal production relations and land holding, and bring forth a revolutionary transformation at the bottom of the pyramid, it will be impossible to purge the venom of communal hatred from the society. For the sake of preserving the lives of hapless people, the majority of the country – the poor masses of workers, peasants and toiled people, must rise up against their common enemies represented by the Hindutva fascist brigade today. Rajasthan must see an end to the reign of tyranny of the Hindutva fascist terrorism and its Gau Rakshaks.