The Scream | Mohammad Ali
Lying on the therapist’s brown leather couch , next to a tissue box, I find myself returning to a dark memory. I am in an unfamiliar drawing room, sipping tea, my reporter’s notebook on the table before me. The house is old yet neat; a small altar for the Hindu god Ganesha is on one wall, on another hangs framed pictures of Deen Dayal Upadhyay and Lal Krishna Advani, prominent leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s foremost Hindu supremacist organization. At home in the village of Bisahda, adjoining the industrial town of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, S. sits across from me.
I am here to inquire about a crime S. has committed, though he does not see the matter that way and neither does the Indian state, which has not punished him. What he does know is my Muslim name, just a word removed from Mohammad Akhlaq, the fifty-two-year-old man he and a mob of Hindu vigilantes lynched a few months earlier, on the night of September 28, 2015, less than fifty meters from where we are sitting. Several of his associates surround him as I try to strike up a conversation.
Adrenaline rushes through my body, it senses danger before my mind catches up. Just as quickly, my reporter’s instincts kick in; I calm myself down and commence the interview. I ask S. what Akhlaq did that he had to be killed. Could he tell me the story from the beginning? After a few moments of silence, he informs me that Akhlaq’s crime was “cow-slaughter.” Akhlaq had killed an animal held holy by Hindus across India. An example had to be made out of him so that other Muslims understand how serious Hindus were—how serious Indians were—about defending the Holy Cow. People had to learn that Akhlaq’s actions were anti-national.
