The Khan family has neither received state assurance, nor is there any indication that the government is serious about cracking down on cow vigilantism in the country.

In fact, India Today sting operation proved that gau rakshaks are neither simply ideologically convinced dedicated protectors of cows, nor are they all vegetarian. Cow vigilantes have exposed their brutal methods for mercenary purposes only, and it looks like the smaller groups are actually training these paramilitary forces to strike ferociously and target particularly Muslim-looking individuals.

In the light of these two radically different treatment meted out to the victims of cow vigilantism and its perpetrators, we need to understand why Sadhvi Kamal wants to decorate gau rakshak Bipin Yadav as a Bhagat Singh reincarnate. The idea is to equate the cow protection zeitgeist with nation-building and nationalism, in the narrow sectarian definition, and put the vigilantes on a pedestal as the revolutionary leaders of Indian freedom struggle.

However, Sadhvi Kamal couldn’t be more wrong in making the false equivalence. Because comparing Pehlu Khan’s murderers to Bhagat Singh is the worst insult to the Marxist, communist, atheist freedom fighter, a revolutionary leader so matchless that he gave Mahatma Gandhi a run for his moral and emotional sway on the pre-independence India.

It’s been 86 years since Bhagat Singh, along with Rajguru and Sukhdev, were hanged in Lahore by the British colonial government. Bhagat Singh, barely 23 years old, never sought clemency from the British masters, even though the whole of India was rooting for him.

According to Bhagat Singh’s letter to the Punjab Governor, sent right before he was hanged, the young leader was as defiant as ever. Hewrote:

“They may be purely British capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. They may be carrying on their insidious exploitation through mixed or even on purely Indian bureaucratic apparatus. All these things make no difference.

No matter, if your government tries and succeeds in winning over the leaders of the upper strata of the Indian society through petty concessions and compromises and thereby cause a temporary demoralisation in the main body of the forces.

No matter if the leaders to whom personally we are much indebted for the sympathy and feelings they expressed for us, but nevertheless we cannot overlook the fact that they did become so callous as to ignore and not to make a mention in the peace negotiation of even the homeless, friendless and penniless of female workers who are alleged to be belonging to the vanguard and whom the leaders consider to be enemies of their utopian non-violent cult which has already become a thing of the past; the heroines who had ungrudgingly sacrificed or offered for sacrifice their husbands, brothers, and all that were nearest and dearest to them, including themselves, whom your government has declared to be outlaws.”

It is obvious that Bhagat Singh was strongly against the caste and sectarianism-ridden religiosity among Indians themselves, and the collusion of the capitalists with religious extremists to exploit the poor and the marginalised. Bhagat Singh would not only have scoffed at cow vigilantism and its targeted attacks on minorities, he’d have been dubbed an anti-national for his firm views of regressive forces of narrow nationalism.

Like Tagore, MN Roy and Ambedkar, Bhagat Singh’s nationalism was an anticolonial response that nevertheless was about solidarities across caste, class and religious divides for true independence. Comparing the ignorant zeitgeists with Bhagat Singh betrays Sangh’s and its affiliates’ desperation to appropriate those very icons of freedom movement who had made the RSS and the Sangh Parivar an obsolete and ostracised camp during the freedom struggle.

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/pehlu-khan-bhagat-singh-alwar-gau-rakshaks/story/1/16791.html