Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Rumors of Cow Killings (India)




New York Times
15 October 2014


By NIDA NAJAR

MEWAT, India — In villages nestled among freshly razed wheat fields, a group of activists, spurred on by rumors, is hunting killers. They hear that these hunters are rounding up their prey by the thousands, snatching them at midnight from ponds and roadsides. They prod them onto stolen cars with heated iron rods, the whispers say, and butcher them.

The victims of these attacks are cows, deeply revered by many Hindus, and the perpetrators of these alleged assaults are mostly Muslims, making the fight a flash point between India’s largest religious groups on the eve of state elections. […]