Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

After the shock of 1857, the British strategy was obvious: devise ways to keep Hindus and Muslims in conflict. The arrival of more British troops to boost the British component in the armed forces in India led to an unexpected complication. When numbers rose from 20,000 in 1857 to more than 60,000 in the next two decades, the provision of beef for British troops became a priority. This became a sensitive issue because of the rapid increase in gauraksha or cow protection organizations across north India which, in the early twentieth century, were patronized even by national leaders like Mahatma Gandhi. The British establishment kept itself insulated from Hindu anger by allowing official underlings to point fingers at Muslim butchers who actually performed the physical act of slaughtering the cows. This led to numerous Hindu–Muslim riots. Exhaustive correspondence between British officials, quoted by senior Gandhian scholar Dharampal—who spent months in the India Office Library and the British Museum in London studying British records on the subject—shows the Raj deliberately provoked Hindus against Muslims, sowing the seeds of their divide and rule policy. In 2002, Dharampal and his colleague T. M. Mukundan published their research. The title of the book says it all: The British Origin of Cow Slaughter in India. The book is replete with instances of Muslim leaders, editors, social workers joining cow protection groups as a mark of solidarity with the Hindus. But the British...