It Was Never About the Cow

This article is drawn from an in-depth Nous conversation between journalist Kunal Purohit and host Bushra Khanum— please go through the full video for more context and detail than a single article can capture.

Every year, a few weeks before Bakra Eid (Eid-ul-Adha), a familiar script begins to play out across Indian cities. This year, it unfolded with a peculiar cruelty in a housing society in Mira Road, on the outskirts of Mumbai. Residents objected — loudly, publicly, with cameras rolling — to Muslim families keeping goats ahead of the festival's sacrifice. Then someone showed up carrying a pig, arguing that if goats could be brought in for Bakra Eid, Hindus should be allowed to bring in pigs too. What followed was recitations of the Hanuman Chalisa, chants of "Jai Shri Ram," a police chase down a residential lane, and eventually, the quiet removal of goats from a society that had allowed the same ritual, without incident, for decades. It was filmed. It was shared. It was, by every available measure, meant to be seen.

The Mira Road episode could easily be dismissed as a local flare-up — one more entry in the long ledger of communal friction that gets filed away and forgotten by the next news cycle. But in conversation with Nous Network, award-winning journalist and author Kunal Purohit — whose book H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars examines how music, poetry and popular culture are being used to mainstream communal hate — argued that treating these incidents as isolated events is precisely the mistake that allows them to keep happening. What is unfolding around Bakra Eid, he said, is not really about goats, or pigs, or even about animal sacrifice at all.

"It was never about the cow. It was always about Muslims and their festivals — and how to dehumanize them."

A Currency That Needs New Targets

Purohit's central argument is structural, not incidental: Hindutva, as a political project, needs to stay relevant, and relevance requires a constantly refreshed supply of enemies. What is love jihad today becomes land jihad tomorrow; what is "corona jihad" during a pandemic becomes "UPSC jihad" when Muslim candidates succeed in civil service exams; what is a cow-protection campaign this month becomes a goat-sacrifice campaign the next. The targets rotate. The underlying message does not.

"Hindutva's currency needs relevance, and relevance needs new targets. A few days ago it was love jihad in Maharashtra. Today it's the goat. Tomorrow it will be something else. The topics change — the core messaging stays the same: how much can you make religious minorities invisible, how much can you subjugate them."

That messaging, Purohit explained, finds no better staging ground than a community's festivals — the moments when a society is most visibly, most collectively present in public life. Everyday hate speech and hate crime can establish a baseline of hostility, but it is during festivals that the deeper project — the erasure of visibility and representation — finds its clearest expression. He traced the same pattern across three consecutive religious calendars: attacks and disruptions outside churches in seven or eight states during Christmas; the targeting of sehri and iftar gatherings during Ramzan; and now, for the third time running, an assault on the rituals of Bakra Eid.

From WhatsApp Forwards to Prime-Time Normalcy

To understand how a housing society in Mira Road arrived at a point where bringing in a pig to intimidate neighbours draws public applause rather than public shame, Purohit walked back through more than a decade of what he called a "slow dripping tap" of propaganda — not a single dramatic event, but a patient, cumulative campaign.

He recalled the years following 2014, when WhatsApp forwards and quiet Facebook posts began seeding a specific characterization of Muslims: that they were a threat to your daughter, your home, your neighbourhood. What began as private, half-hidden messaging has, in his telling, become open political rhetoric — spoken today not by anonymous forwards but by the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, chief ministers, and prime-time news anchors.

"That era feels distant now — when we used to get hidden messages on WhatsApp saying Muslims are like this or like that. Because today it is said openly, from the Prime Minister to the Home Minister to different Chief Ministers to our news anchors. That is the same language now."

Pop culture, he argued, played its own quiet role — cinema that portrayed love jihad as a recruitment pipeline for terrorism, framing romantic relationships as national security threats. The cumulative effect, Purohit said, was a re-education of the eye: an ordinary Muslim delivery worker, an ordinary Muslim cab driver, an ordinary Muslim man offering namaz in an empty field, stopped registering as a fellow human being and started registering as a latent danger.

He offered a chilling case in point: a Muslim man beaten in an open field in Uttarakhand during Ramzan for offering prayers, while his attackers filmed themselves shouting that he had no right to pray on "a Brahmin's land." Ten years ago, Purohit argued, an incident like the Mira Road pig episode would have provoked broad revulsion — including from religious Hindus insisting this was not their faith. Today, it draws support.

"If this had happened in 2012, or 2013, or even 2014, a large section of Hindu society would have recoiled from it — they would have said, this is not who we are, our religion does not permit this. But in 2026, after twelve years of this work, when a Hindu man walks toward a Muslim society carrying a pig, people are supporting it. People are saying, this is fine — this should happen. You haven't just normalized hate. You've changed the discourse itself, so that today the question people ask isn't 'why is this happening' — it's 'why are they even doing the sacrifice in the first place.'"

Punishment for Peace, Reward for Poison

Perhaps the most uncomfortable thread in the conversation concerned incentives — who gets promoted, and for what. Purohit pointed to Maharashtra's Nitesh Rane, a cabinet minister who, in his telling, built his political career on rallies where he called Muslims "green snakes," threatened to enter mosques, and warned police officers that a Hindutva government would not tolerate action against Hindus. Far from facing consequence, Rane was elevated to a cabinet post after the 2024 election — a portfolio held under a Home Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, who Purohit noted is himself openly aligned with Hindutva politics.

"This isn't impunity. Impunity would suggest nothing happens to you. What we have is a reward system. If you practise the politics of religion and polarization, you get rewarded — sometimes with an MLA or MP ticket, sometimes with a cabinet post. And once the top leadership signals that sowing hatred between two communities earns you a promotion, every ordinary party worker learns the lesson: the fastest route to political relevance runs through Hindu-Muslim hatred."

Purohit traced this "reward model" back to 2022, when the BJP-Shiv Sena faction under Eknath Shinde came to power in Maharashtra after the collapse of the Uddhav Thackeray-led coalition. In the aftermath, he said, BJP legislators began appearing at rallies organized by previously unknown, often unregistered Hindutva outfits, campaigning village by village on the message that Hindus were under threat from "land jihad" and "love jihad." When the BJP-led alliance swept the 2024 state election with an overwhelming mandate, Purohit argued, party leadership read it as a validation — proof that the electorate rewarded the politics of polarization.

He drew a direct parallel to West Bengal, where BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari — since defecting from the Trinamool Congress — has built a campaign warning that "Bangladeshi" and Rohingya Muslims are altering the state's demography, at one point invoking Israel's military campaign in Gaza as a model ("the lesson Israel taught Gaza is the lesson 100 crore Hindus will have to teach together") and suggesting, without evidence, that government medicines were being adulterated to suppress Hindu birth rates.

"When a man who uses language like that is made Chief Minister by his party, that is not impunity — that is a reward. And it sends the exact same signal down the chain."

Breaking What Was Shared

One of the conversation's sharpest turns came when the discussion moved from spectacle to substance — from the pig in Mira Road to what Purohit called the "underlying message" beneath it. Festivals in India, he noted, have historically been sites of syncretism: goats bought from Hindu herders and sold to Muslim families for Bakra Eid; villages where Eid, Holi and Diwali were marked by both communities together; decades-old local customs, like the one in Mumbai's Ghatkopar area — where residents said goats had been kept in the same society since 1997 — that quietly bound neighbours across religious lines.

Destroying that coexistence, Purohit argued, is not a side effect of Hindutva politics but its precondition.

"As long as coexistence exists, propaganda won't sell. If you're a Hindu living among Muslims, or a Muslim living among Hindus — if you grew up together, went to school together, went to college together, and these are your good friends — you won't believe the propaganda that says they're suddenly a threat to you. So breaking that coexistence becomes essential to making the propaganda believable. That's why both communities' festivals are targeted — to deepen the polarization a little further each time."

He extended the same lens to the West Bengal cow slaughter debate, pointing to a stark internal contradiction: a 1950 law, amended under the current state government, protects cows as "gau mata" only up to the age of fourteen — after which, once they stop producing milk or fall ill, they may legally be slaughtered or sold. Muslim organizations, Purohit noted, responded not with confrontation but with a striking gesture — pledging not to purchase cows for sacrifice at all, and repeatedly offering to support formally declaring the cow India's national animal in exchange for an end to the targeting. The offer, he said, changed nothing.

"That itself exposes the hypocrisy. It's as if you use your parents for as long as they're useful, and then, once they can no longer serve that purpose, you discard them — even while calling them 'mother.' But the identity of who is doing the slaughtering is the only thing that actually matters here. There is no other problem."

The Corporate Sphere, the Classroom, and the Quiet Arithmetic of Visibility

The strategy of erasure, Purohit argued, is not confined to the street. He pointed to a much-discussed incident at Tata Consultancy Services, in which allegations of "love jihad" within the company were amplified online — not primarily, he suggested, to punish an individual, but to plant a broader message: that even a highly educated Muslim professional inside one of India's largest corporations cannot be trusted, and that hiring Muslims carries an inherent risk. He connected this to informal hiring discrimination Muslim professionals already report, and to the "UPSC jihad" narrative that questioned why Muslim candidates were succeeding in civil service exams, and to a case in Jammu & Kashmir where a medical college with a large Muslim student body was shut down entirely.

"No matter the sphere — corporate, educational, civic — the underlying idea is the same: reduce Muslim representation and visibility as much as possible, wherever it appears. Festivals are simply the most visible arena in which to do that, because they're the moment an entire community shows up together, in public, celebrating something. That visibility is exactly what's being targeted."

Governance as Grievance Resolution — Not Grievance Manufacture

Host Bushra Khanum pressed Purohit on a pointed question: if constitutional office-holders are the ones legitimizing this politics, what does that say about the institutions meant to prevent it? Her framing was direct — that ministers touring housing societies to demand goats be removed, or activists like Kirit Somaiya inserting themselves into local disputes, represent an abdication of the basic function of governance.

"Governance means grievance resolution. Governance means conflict resolution — not conflict creation, not conflict escalation. What we're watching is people in power manufacturing conflict rather than resolving it."

Bushra Khanum illustrated the point with a case from Mira Bhayandar itself: an ordinary landlord-tenant rent dispute between a Hindu shop owner and a Muslim tenant, resolved without incident once police intervened — until members of the Bajrang Dal and VHP arrived afterward, filmed the shopkeeper on camera, and reframed the entire dispute as "land jihad," a Muslim man illegally occupying a Hindu's property. Purohit connected the episode directly back to his central thesis: Hindutva organizations, running short of organic grievances to mobilize around, increasingly manufacture communal framing out of banal, everyday disputes that have nothing to do with religion at all.

"Ask yourself — are there no Hindus who occupy someone else's shop, or end up in a property dispute? Of course there are. But only one gets labelled 'jihad.' That's the tell. When you run out of real issues, you invent them, and you go looking for a religious colour to paint on everything."

Normalization, Fatigue, and the Economics of Distraction

Both host and guest returned repeatedly to a difficult observation: that repetition has produced not outrage but exhaustion. Purohit drew a comparison between the public response to the 2015 lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq — which triggered nationwide protest, media coverage and political statements — and the near-total absence of comparable reaction to killings today.

"Now there's practically a queue of Akhlaqs. It has become so normal that a death barely makes a headline anymore. I think the same thing is happening with Muslims in India that happens with coverage of Gaza — for the first few days you can't bear to watch the videos, and then, at some point, you scroll past. That normalization is propaganda's real victory."

He also flagged where he expects the rhetoric to intensify next: economic distress. As inflation rises and youth unemployment deepens — with exam processes stalled and both government and private-sector hiring shrinking — Purohit warned that the political incentive to redirect frustration toward Muslims, framed as "outsiders" consuming resources that rightfully belong to others, will only grow. He pointed to Union Home Minister Amit Shah's remarks on shifting "demography," and West Bengal's contested Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, as early signs of where that redirection is already headed.

"This is not a fringe phenomenon. People sitting in government are the ones saying outsiders are coming and taking everything that's yours. That means these attempts at polarization are only going to increase — which is exactly why both Hindu and Muslim society need to stay alert, and why we need to keep asking the fundamental questions. Because the moment we stop asking, those in power will keep distracting us — and that's precisely what has been happening."

What Now?

Asked what a constructive path forward might look like, Purohit resisted easy answers but offered several concrete threads.

First, he argued that religious Hindus who understand their own faith need to say, publicly and repeatedly, that this politics has nothing to do with Hindu dharma.

"Practise your politics if you must — but don't give it the name of Hindu dharma. That distinction needs to be spoken out loud, by people within the tradition itself, because the poison has been mixed in with such precision that undoing it will be very difficult unless the whole of society comes together — and right now, we are not seeing that happen."

Second, he called for civil society to actively rebuild spaces of dialogue between communities — spaces he said Hindutva organizations have deliberately filled precisely because those organizations do not want dialogue; they want confrontation.

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Third, on the question of how Muslim communities themselves should respond, Purohit was careful and measured. He noted that, over twelve years of sustained provocation, Muslim protest in India has been marked overwhelmingly by restraint rather than violence — a fact he believes deserves more public acknowledgment than it receives. He argued for better civic articulation from within the community: not amplifying the most combative voices that television often prefers for the sake of ratings, but empowering people capable of genuine dialogue across communal lines.

"I think Muslim society has shown remarkable patience over these twelve years. We haven't seen many occasions where their protest turned violent, or where violence followed their protest. What's needed now is articulation — and civil society sitting both communities down together to work through what divides them — because that space for dialogue has almost entirely disappeared, and Hindutva organizations have filled it instead."

What emerges from this conversation is not a story about goats, or pigs, or even about one housing society in Mira Road. It is a story about how a political project sustains itself — by needing, continuously, a new occasion for humiliation, and by finding its most effective stage not in confrontation on ordinary days, but in the very festivals meant to be moments of collective joy. The question the conversation leaves behind is not really about Bakra Eid at all. It is about how much longer a society can watch its neighbours be made strangers to each other, one festival at a time, before it decides that the coexistence being dismantled was worth defending.