Holy Cow Container, India, 2012. Flickr/ Rod Waddington. Some rights reserved.This is the fifth article in a series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.
Food cultures have become a battleground for authoritarian populism. Moral panics around food have fanned violence with impunity. Gastronomic Islamophobia is becoming commonplace because it rests on framing the relationship between the self, state, food, nature, and rural society. Any resistance to it must be equally comprehensive.
Listening out for a license to kill
“There are two sides to this”, said Gulab Chand Kataria, the Home Minister of Rajasthan. He was responding to the mob lynching of Pehlu Khan, a 55 year old man who had purchased some dairy cows in Alwar, in the north-west Indian state of Rajasthan. Khan and others were transporting the cows to Jaisinghpur in neighbouring Haryana in a truck, when a mob stopped them and, with cellphones out to record the dispensation of justice, beat him to death with iron rods and bricks. No arrests have been made.
