Who exactly is the culprit behind the 'cauliflower farming' meme in Bihar? Why is the BJP's hyping of the issue quite an irony?

Cauliflower returns to haunt Bihar, but whom exactly?

People's Review Minorities

For many, Bihar’s political landscape is murky, for many it’s complex and for many, it’s unfathomable like a cauliflower curry, which tastes different from region to region. Now, the cauliflower has returned to haunt Bihar, after a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister from Assam used it to issue a veiled threat to the Muslim community.

A social media post following the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) decisive victory in Bihar’s recently concluded assembly elections has brought grotesque memories back to the collective memory of its minorities. 

However, the BJP’s gloating over cauliflower farming can also cause major ignominy for its opponents in the state, not because they want to protect the so-called “communal harmony”, and also cause embarrassment for the NDA.

Although Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) [JDU] has secured fewer seats than the BJP for the second consecutive election, the septugenarian leader retains a considerable advantage. 

In New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s government depends on the support of Kumar’s party and the Telugu Desam Party, giving Kumar a stronger hand than before in Bihar.

The opposition alliance (called INDIA), which Kumar himself had initiated, rightly fears that a BJP-led government in Bihar will intensify communal violence and prejudice. Yet most opposition parties deliberately obscure their alliance partners’ past roles in communal politics—a record that once benefited the BJP. This selective amnesia proves revealing.

Only the left parties—the Communist Party of India, the CPI (Marxist) and the CPI (Marxist-Leninist Liberation)—fought principally against the BJP’s communal and anti-Muslim politics during the election. 

Even these parties compromised repeatedly, aligning with Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to defeat the BJP. 

The RJD founder’s cooperation proved necessary, yet it concealed uncomfortable truths. Truths that connect the cauliflower optics with Bihar.

Cauliflower oblique in Bihar polity

After the NDA victory, the saffron camp displayed fierce anti-Muslim glee. 

This included provocative social media posts that alluded to Bihar’s most shameful episode. 

Ashok Singhal, a minister in the Assam BJP government, posted a picture of cauliflower on X (formerly Twitter) with a caption suggesting Bihar had voted for cauliflower cultivation.

This post subtly referenced the horrific Bhagalpur riots of 1989. 

On October 27th 1989, BJP-backed perpetrators murdered 55 men and 61 women in Logain, approximately 20 miles from Bhagalpur. 

With the complicity of a local police officer, they mutilated the bodies and threw them into a pond. 

Later, to destroy evidence, police and Hindutva-incensed extremists exhumed the corpses and buried them in nearby agricultural fields. 

Local Kahar community labourers were then forced to plant cauliflower and mustard over the graves. 

Researchers confirmed that decomposing bodies enriched the winter crops beneath.

Singhal’s post revived this gruesome memory. 

Yet here lies a political irony— the politician responsible for those riots was Kameshwar Yadav, a fierce Hindutva leader whom RJD founder Lalu Prasad Yadav had shielded throughout his rule from prosecution. 

Congress leader and then-MP Bhagwat Jha Azad financed the Muslim defenders during the riots. Azad came from a high caste; the Yadavs, though a backward community, led the massacre for Hindu nationalist forces. 

These connections display the complex matrix of Bihar’s caste and communal politics.

Political amnesia with consequences

The Bhagalpur massacre’s social arithmetic reshaped Bihar’s political equations for decades. 

The Congress party never again won the Bihar elections as the dominant force. 

Meanwhile, Lalu Prasad Yadav—despite his rhetoric about secularism and his bold arrest of Lal Krishna Advani during the Babri Masjid campaign—enabled the genocide’s perpetrators, like Kameshwar Yadav, to escape justice during his rule. 

This duality helped Lalu Prasad to protect his Yadav votebank and also wean away the Muslims from the Congress party by projecting himself as a “messiah” of the community.

Only when Kumar came to power with BJP support did the Bihar government properly investigate the massacre. Under Kumar’s tenure, nearly two decades later, those responsible received punishment.

While Kameshwar Yadav was initially found guilty, in 2017, he was acquitted of charges, for which critics blame the BJP. Kameshwar Yadav died in January 2024.

Now, when it comes to evoking fear using cauliflower as a symbol, Singhal is not alone. 

The BJP has repeatedly posted images of cauliflower when referring to Bhagalpur. 

In May 2025, Karnataka’s BJP X handle posted an AI-generated image showing Union Home Minister Amit Shah holding a cauliflower beside a gravestone marked “Naxalism Rest In Peace”. 

The implication was sinister. Naxalites, like Bhagalpur’s Muslims, face obliteration. 

Similarly, during March’s communal violence in Nagpur, various Hindutva accounts posted cauliflower images celebrating the massacre.

Singhal’s enthusiasm for the motif likely proceeded unthinkingly. He apparently overlooked a crucial fact that’s again unique to Bihar.

Bihar’s main opposition to the BJP, the RJD, was founded by someone implicated in protecting the Bhagalpur perpetrators. 

The RJD draws support not only from Muslims but from the Yadav community—the community whose members perpetrated the Bhagalpur massacre and Lalu Prasad Yadav shielded them from justice.

Singhal and other BJP figures overlooked something else: their alliance’s chief minister, Kumar, was the one who finally investigated and prosecuted those responsible for the Bhagalpur massacre.

In Bihar, optics of cauliflower farming turns into a self-goal for the BJP.

Populism limits

The BJP leadership’s persistent enthusiasm for cauliflower references reveals their ignorance of their own history and Bihar’s politics. By avoiding this embarrassing contradiction rather than confronting the BJP with its own contradictions, the left parties—the CPI, CPI (Marxist), and CPI (Marxist-Leninist Liberation)—unwittingly assist the Hindutva forces with their silence.

Without unveiling the truth to the new generations, the left misses out on an opportunity to defeat vitriolic propaganda.

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