Modi’s belated reckoning with cow vigilantes rings hollow in Gujarat

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally addressed cow vigilante violence on Saturday, August 6th, his words arrived quite late. By then, the damage was done. Dalits in Gujarat had been brutally flogged. Protests erupted across the nation. Yet Modi’s eventual condemnation introduced a troubling distinction that would define the ongoing crisis—some vigilantes were “bad,” others merely misguided. This rhetorical sleight of hand revealed more about his political predicament than any commitment to protecting vulnerable Indians.

The flashpoint came in Una, a town in Gujarat, where upper-caste men assaulted Dalit youths earlier in July. That incident ignited a wider uprising. Dalits across Modi’s home state began questioning their relationship with a government that had long relied on their electoral support. As the movement gained momentum, it inspired similar protests nationwide, particularly threatening Modi’s electoral calculus in Uttar Pradesh, where Dalits comprise a quarter of the electorate.

Silence’s cost

This pattern suggested complicity, whether deliberate or through willful negligence. State officials rarely intervened. Local police often stood idle. The political benefit of such inaction was clear. Communal polarisation energises Modi’s electoral coalition. But polarisation that alienates Dalits carries electoral risk, particularly in Uttar Pradesh.

For days, Modi remained conspicuously quiet. His silence had been instructive. Cow protection campaigns, championed by vigilante groups loosely aligned with his political base, have intensified across multiple states. Traders, farmers, and those who work with cattle faced harassment, extortion, and violence. The targeting was not random. Dalits and Muslims bore the brunt of these campaigns. Yet Modi’s government offered neither protection nor prosecution.

External Pressure and Strategic Speech

American investor concerns and international criticism reportedly prompted Modi’s shift. When The New York Times questioned his government’s tolerance for vigilante violence, the pressure became impossible to ignore. Only then did Modi speak. His formulation was clever: he condemned “rogue” cow vigilantes while defending the concept of cow protection itself. The distinction proved masterful for damage control. It allowed him to denounce violence without repudiating his ideological base.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organisation that mentors Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), swiftly adopted this language. The RSS called upon citizens to identify and expose “bad” vigilantes. Yet the criteria for distinguishing good from bad remained deliberately vague. No systematic prosecution followed. The rhetoric of condemnation preceded neither policy change nor accountability.

History lesson revisited

Modi then ventured into historical territory. He claimed that Muslim rulers once deployed cattle at the front of military formations, knowing Hindu kings would hesitate to slaughter sacred cows. This manufactured history served a specific purpose: it shifted blame for cow vigilante violence from his supporters to Muslims themselves. By invoking this narrative, Modi attempted to rekindle Hindu grievance and further alienate Dalits from Muslim communities.

Historians noted the fabrication immediately. Yet media amplification of Modi’s “condemnation” of vigilante violence drowned out the scrutiny of his historical distortions. The effect was subtle but potent. Modi appeared to take a principled stand while simultaneously stoking communal tensions. This manoeuvre encapsulated his political strategy—claiming moderation while maintaining ideological mobilisation of the Hindutva camp.

Theatrics vs substance

Modi’s subsequent rhetoric soared into the theatrical. He declared that cow vigilantes should shoot him before shooting Dalits. Yet this dramatic flourish was accompanied by no announcement of stricter laws, no directed prosecution of offenders, and no pressure on state governments to enforce existing protections for minorities. The performance masqueraded as commitment.

Dalit leaders in Uttar Pradesh recognise the manoeuvre. They have been watching the events unfold in Gujarat long enough to understand the gap between Modi’s words and his government’s actions. Dalits in that state already face dire conditions. Fewer own irrigated land than in states without BJP governance. Public sector employment for Dalits has been lower in Modi’s model state than elsewhere. The BJP’s Gujarat experiment, by objective measures, had failed Dalit communities economically and socially. No amount of rhetorical sympathy could alter that record.

Credibility crisis

The government’s response to cow vigilante violence ultimately revealed a regime struggling to reconcile its ideological commitments with electoral necessity. Modi could not abandon his core supporters without fracturing his coalition. Yet he could not ignore Dalit alienation without sacrificing parliamentary majorities in India’s most populous state. The “good and bad vigilante” formulation represented his compromise: acknowledgement without accountability, condemnation without consequence.

What emerged from Modi’s August speech was not a genuine reckoning with communal violence but a sophisticated political calculation. The prime minister had recognised that cow vigilantism, left unchecked, threatened his electoral prospects in Uttar Pradesh. His response came not from moral conviction but from electoral arithmetic. For Dalits observing this sequence of events—the violence, the silence, the tardy intervention, the theatrical speeches, the evasion of substance—the message was unmistakable. They remained, as ever, expendable to India’s political leadership. Modi’s late-arriving words changed nothing about that reality.