New York Times
15 October 2014
By NIDA NAJAR
MEWAT, India — In villages nestled among freshly razed
wheat fields, a group of activists, spurred on by rumors, is hunting killers.
They hear that these hunters are rounding up their prey by the thousands,
snatching them at midnight from ponds and roadsides. They prod them onto stolen
cars with heated iron rods, the whispers say, and butcher them.
The victims of these attacks are cows, deeply revered
by many Hindus, and the perpetrators of these alleged assaults are mostly
Muslims, making the fight a flash point between India’s largest religious
groups on the eve of state elections. […]
