On 12 March 2024, in a first for Uttar Pradesh, a trial court in Hapur awarded life imprisonment in a case of cow protection-related lynching of a Muslim man. Six years earlier, in June 2018, Qasim Qureshi was lynched to death, and Samiuddin was brutally assaulted, by a Hindu group in the Bajhera Khurd village, under the false accusation of cow-slaughter. The additional district and sessions court judge Shweta Dixit sentenced 10 men to life sentences and fined them ₹59,000 each, under charges of murder, attempt to murder, rioting and promoting religious enmity. The conviction in this case is significant because while illegal vigilante crimes are coalitionary projects between state and non-state actors, the price paid is solely by the non-state actors.
The steep rise in cow vigilantism in India has occurred on the back of the state’s interest in the campaign to protect cattle from slaughter. The subsequent violence has blurred the boundaries between vigilantes and the state and has gained legal legitimacy. Governments in Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh have amended their cow slaughter prevention laws and set up special task forces to enforce them. These have allowed cow vigilantes to operate freely, with the state’s sanction and the police’s cognisance. As a result, judicial processes that punish cow protectionists for their anti-Muslim violence have been rare occurrences.
The Uttar Pradesh court’s conviction is just the fifth one in cow protection-related lynchings in India: three others are in Jharkhand and one in Rajasthan. Of these, only the courts in Jharkhand have pronounced maximum life sentences in the 2016 lynching of Mazlum Ansari and Imteyaz Khan and the 2017 lynching of Alimuddin Ansari.
