The minister had arrived. A motorcade filled the unpaved street. Policemen who were slumbering in the early autumn midday heat stirred, straightened, then sprung into action, clearing the way with their canes for a most-important visitor.
Indian Minister of Culture Mahesh Sharma was preceded by a small aide in a purple shirt and followed by a large gray-suited bodyguard.
Sharma had come to “condole” the family of Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old laborer beaten to death on Monday last week by a mob in his small two-story home in the center of Bishara village, about an hour’s drive beyond the outskirts of India’s capital, New Delhi.
The mob that killed him believed that Akhlaq and his family, who are Muslim, had eaten meat from a cow, an animal considered sacred by the 80 percent of the Indian population who follow the Hindu faith. Akhlaq and his son were dragged from their beds and beaten with bricks. The father died; the son is fighting for his life in hospital.
Sharma is a local member of parliament as well as a minister.
“It was important for me to come. I am the democratic representative,” the 56-year-old former doctor told the Observer.
Outside, a media scrum filled the courtyard of the Akhlaqs’ home.
Sharma’s visit was more important than a simple courtesy to his constituents. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Hindu nationalists, stormed to power in a landslide victory in May last year, unceremoniously dispatching the Congress Party, which had ruled India for most of its 68 years as an independent nation, to the political margins.
The BJP is led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose appeal is based on his promise to bring economic development and opportunity without sacrificing India’s cultural identity. Exactly what this means has been fiercely debated since Modi’s victory.
Critics of the prime minister, who last month visited the US, receiving a warm welcome from US President Barack Obama and Silicon Valley’s top executives, say that since Modi took power, right-wing groups have felt empowered. They point to a series of incidents — including mass conversions, attacks on trucks transporting cows and acts of violence against members of India’s religious minorities — as evidence of a newly tense atmosphere. Political opponents allege, too, that there has been limited condemnation from senior officials.
“The silence at the top ... is absolutely stunning,” Congress lawmaker Abhishek Singhvi told reporters of the murder in Bishara.
Sharma has been at the center of an increasingly bitter debate. Like many senior members of the BJP government, including Modi, he has spent decades in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a conservative revivalist Hindu organization, which is a powerful political and cultural force. In an interview last month, Sharma said India should be “cleansed” of “polluting” Western influences so as to restore “Indian culture.”
The debate has also raised questions about the position of India’s many religious minorities. A suggestion by the Indian minister of foreign affairs last year that the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu epic, be made the “national book” provoked an outcry from Muslims and Christians, 14 percent and 2.3 percent of the 1.35 billion population respectively.
Sharma prompted anger when he said that A.P.J Abdul Kalam, the scientist who oversaw India’s nuclear program, was a “great man and nationalist, despite being Muslim,” and that the Koran and the Bible were not “central to Indian culture.”
In Bishara on Friday, Sharma refused to discuss his recent statements and was keen to strike a more conciliatory note.
“Our values are to live together under the law and in respect of the constitution,” he said. “This sad affair [the murder of Akhlaq] ... happened in the heat of the moment. It was the result of a misunderstanding.”
The route from the capital to Bishara passes first over the heavily polluted Yamuna River, past a vast new temple and a metro station, and on to a recently built expressway, slicing through the city’s sprawl. Then the road narrows, ending in a zone of scruffy townships. Bishara, a huddle of 100 or so breeze-block cement and brick homes, lies among fields that stretch to the horizon.
The events that led to Mohammed Akhlaq’s death are fairly clear. The weekend before the attack, the remains of a calf were found outside Bishara. On Monday night last week, someone used the village temple’s loudspeakers to broadcast that its meat had been eaten.
“I think someone saw a Muslim lady carrying meat in a bag. No one is sure. Anyway, about 1,000 people heard the announcement and went to the [Akhlaqs] home,” said Deerat Singh, whose two sons have been arrested for the attack. “They saw a trail of blood on the ground. Then 60 or 70 people entered the house and pulled him from his bed and beat him to death.”
In most of India, most of the time, killing cows is illegal, but possessing or eating beef is not. A sample of meat found in the Akhlaq’s home has been sent for forensic examination, said local magistrate Rajesh Kumar Yadav, the bureaucrat with responsibility for Bishara.
“The investigation is going on. Relations in the village are being normalized and everybody is doing a great effort for this,” Yadav said.
Yet deep tensions and fear remain. When Sharma gathered the villagers in the yard of the temple and called for communal harmony and mutual respect, the reaction was respectful, but quietly hostile.
“We handed over our children to the police, but, minister sir, that does not mean you can play with our feelings. We know it was beef that was eaten,” village elder Jagdish Sisodia said.
Satish Singh, a member of a Hindu spiritual foundation who traveled from New Delhi to “show solidarity,” said: “All Hindus are deploring this sad incident. Everyone agrees it should not have happened, but this is a very sensitive matter.”
“For Hindus, the murder of a man is not so sensitive as the murder of a cow. We treat the cow as our mother,” he said.
Muslim groups were also been drawn to the village.
“If this heinous crime can be done in a democratic system, what is the meaning of democracy?” said Hilal Madni, a 39-year-old auditor, who had traveled with 60 others from New Delhi to “calm the terror in the minds” of the 27 Muslim families in Bishara.
Preceding Sharma by just minutes was Asaduddin Owaisi, a Muslim politician from the south of India.
“It is important to be here because of the overall atmosphere created against the Muslims in this country, whether it is allegations of slaughtering cows or being terrorists, or we have too many children,” Owaisi said. “What happened in Bishara was not an accident. It was a religious murder.”
Sitting on a narrow, worn rope bed in a corner of the Akhlaqs’ home was Hanif, a brother of the dead man. Like Mohammed, he is a laborer and described a life of working 14-hour days in often blinding heat for less than 200 rupees (US$3) a day.
“All the laborers around here are Muslims. We have no land. We have been here for 100 years or more, but we have not had any trouble with our neighbors,” he said.
One reason was that no one ever complained. Bishara and surrounding villages are dominated by Hindus from the land-owning Thakur caste, in the middle range of the tenacious Indian social hierarchy. The Muslims worked their fields.
“Mohammed was a quiet man. Like most of us, he just worked and kept quiet. There are 60 Thakur villages ’round here, so they can pretty much do what they want and get away with it. Today, it was my brother. Tomorrow, it could be anyone,” Hanif said.
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