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The summer of 2017 and Ramzaan of 2017 — the month of fasting for the Muslim community — was more than tough for the Muslims of North India. Worries accelerated as hundreds of Muslim men sat not just jobless but also in fear of the Hindutva goon brigades. And as I had travelled through the interiors of Haryana’s Mewat region what stood out was sheer poverty and together with that the scare of the police.
Meos living in Haryana’s Mewat belt told me that the beef excuse was used to hound and harass the Meos. With parched lands, semi-closed dairies, shut eateries, Meos had recounted, “Our children arrested, thrown in jails …we beaten with rods if we protest. Are we animals? Are we living some enemy country? Today we can be killed on cooked-up charges of cooking beef or selling beef-biryani! Our forefathers fought the angrez for the country’s Independence but see our condition!”
And just a few days before the Eid-ul-Fitr of 2017, sixteen year old Mohammad Junaid was killed by passengers, right inside a compartment of the train taking him and his brothers to their home in a village in Haryana’s Ballabhgarh. Yes, he was murdered, with ‘beef-eater’ taunts thrown on his fractured skull, with a skull cap atop it.
Haryana’s Mewat belt was definitely no exception. Tense situation had prevailed in the rural stretches of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, where Muslim clans sat apprehensive. News reports poured in about Muslim men thrashed and abused and humiliated, even hung from trees, by Hindutva goons, on the beef alibi. One incident after another started coming to light, right from the day Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri, on mere suspicion of storing beef in his home.
Those killing and hounding of Muslims carried offshoots. A majority of the Muslims in North India, including I, did not ‘celebrate’ any of the two Eids in 2017 — Eid -ul- Fitr and Eid- ul-Adha. One could say that Muslims did observe Eid, and with that they offered namaaz in the various mosques and visited relatives, but there were no celebrations. Many Muslims went about with black bands on their arms, disillusioned and traumatized with the biased system and the communal politics heaped on them.
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