So it's before the sun rises early in the morning and this is when these cows pee. These guys are here with buckets trying to catch that piss because they think these cows are very holy and that the urine itself contains... Medicinal qualities.
He's going. Cows are so sacred in India that their urine and feces are key ingredients in a multi-billion dollar industry of holistic products. So this is cow urine. Distilled urine. Urine for cow, but medicine for human.
This is for pain, actually. Arthritis, muscular pain. It is a liniment. So what's this? These are organic incense.
Incense? What is it made out of? It contains cow dung.
This is cow dung? It causes diseases. Asthma, lung problems. problems, coughing, but these are organic. Sure, in like the most organic way possible.
Do you think that the cows are holy? Cows actually not a animal for Indians. Cows are mother. When you say Indians, you mean Hindus? Hindus, yeah.
There are nearly one billion Hindus in India, and as tensions rise between them and minority populations, it's the cow which has become the center of an at times violent movement. I'm a couple hours outside of Delhi in a small town called Mirut and I'm about to meet up with a group of self-fashioned cow protectors. I'm going to ride along with them as they patrol the streets to try to stop illegal cow smokers. Why is it so important for you as a Hindu to protect these cows?
In Hinduism, cows are considered as mothers. They are Muslims who are against our beliefs. And we don't tolerate people who are against our beliefs. That's why we arrest them. Hey, see them!
A police officer has just arrived. This group of cow protectors is setting up kind of a checkpoint here. This...
Whoa, Informal checkpoints guarded by local Hindi citizens have been springing up across the country. And from what we saw, appear to exist with full cooperation of local authorities. Are you here to help us or to help us? Whatever you want to help us with, we'll help you.
The problem is what happens after they catch people who they think intend to slaughter cows. A 20-year-old youth was lynched by a mob for his alleged role in cattle smuggling. There's another lynching in Jharkhand.
One person has been lynched over possession of beef. The victims of these reported cases are predominantly Muslim, who suffer everything from beatings to murder. The first time I caught a cowherd, I thought someone was going to cut my mother.
I saved my mother and punished the sinner. When you see someone slaughtering a cow, what do you feel? If you did this, I would like to cut your hands.
But if I cut your hands, what difference does it make between you and me? I can only punish you because I don't want to be treated like you. We have to kill this entire generation of Indians.
And if I start cutting heads with my hands and heads, then there will be massacres here. Nothing will be left here. Hail Mother India!
Hail Mother India! In many parts of the country, just the suspicion of eating beef can get you killed. A 50-year-old man was beaten to death after rumors spread in the area that the family had eaten beef.
In the case of Mohammad Akhlaq, a farmer who was killed by a Hindu mob in 2015, not only did police investigate his murder, but also his alleged beef consumption. We spoke to Mohammad Akhlaq's brother about what happened. There is no evidence.
The mob, they were Hindus? Yes. Is it more valuable than the life of a human being? One report found that 97% of all cow vigilante murders in the last decade have taken place after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014. To understand what's different about this recent spate of violence, we spoke to Dr. Shashi Tharoor, a Hindu historian and author who served as a United Nations Under Secretary General and who is now an opposition member of India's parliament. India has had communal or religious violence throughout its history.
Is it worse now? There have been periodic eruptions, and certainly the worst was the partition of India in 1947, when the British carved Pakistan out of the stooped shoulders of India, and that witnessed a genocide that led to about a million people dying. Obviously there's been nothing else like that since, but what was very important was that the state stood behind the secular principle. That everybody is equal and that religion will not determine your rights in this country.
But for the first time we have a government which comes from an ideological background that actually calls into question their commitment to the equality principle of the constitution. That party is the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a right-wing party with close ties to Hindu nationalism. Calling out the BJP's religious extremism has made Dr. Tharoor a political target. He's now caught up in a national scandal of his own.
We completely reject the charge against Shri Shashi Tharoor. This is coming from the factory of lies of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. As secularism wanes, many BJP leaders aren't shy about sharing their Hindu nationalist beliefs.
We are very keen that this country should remain overwhelmingly Hindu. Majority country. Where there is Islam, there is terrorism. If India is attacked, if someone attacks India, we will not let them live in this country. A No BJP politician has been more brazen than Yogi Adityanath, an Islamophobic Hindu monk who won election to lead India's most populous state.
Hindus and Muslims are just. Both can't be together. Two cultures can never be together.
This conflict will happen. It will definitely happen. There is this perception that the Muslims came, they conquered our heroes, and they ruled over us. There is the perception on the part of many that it's time.
For the Hindus to win the big battles against the Muslims, they've actually started rewriting some textbooks so that battles that were lost by Hindu heroes are now described as victories instead of defeats. The BJP's leaders consider every Muslim ruler in India to be foreign, even though they ceased to be foreign the moment they came to this country, married Indians, and assimilated here. So to call these people foreigners is bigotry plain and simple. Not only does the BJP command a majority in the national parliament and in critical state governments, Their political dominance is bolstered by an organization of Hindu foot soldiers, the RSS.
This is the annual meeting of the Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh, or RSS. They sort of look like a military organization, but they're not. The political wing of the RSS right now dominates Indian politics.
The RSS was formed in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, with the purpose of creating a Hindu unity. Early leaders such as M.S. Goldwalker admired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement for steps taken to ensure, quote, the purity of the race and its culture.
Watch out, Brown! Hey! With as many as six million members across the country, the RSS is said to be the largest voluntary paramilitary organization in the world, though their leadership denies this categorization. The ruling party, the BJP, was formed from the RSS. Three of the highest ranking officers of the BJP, including the Prime Minister, were former members of the RSS.
So the ideology behind this organization, its reason for existing, the idea that Mother India is a Hindu nation, is baked into the very concept of what the BJP is trying to do as a political party. A-O, A-O, A-O. Partha! As Hindu supremacy becomes institutionalized from the ground up, critics of the BJP and its Hindu agenda are being silenced. We spoke to Akar Patel, a journalist and the head of Amnesty International India.
Is there freedom of press in India? Yes and no. We are free to write and say what we want as long as the government likes it. If it doesn't like it, it could come and vandalize your newspaper, it could put you in jail, it could send its goons to beat you up, and very little would follow in terms of the process of law.
Gauri Lankesh, a newspaper publisher who is highly critical of the BJP and Hindu nationalism, was murdered by motorcycle-riding assailants outside the country. ...inside her home in Bangalore just a couple weeks prior to this interview. Why do you think she was killed? We've had similar murders of people who have resisted Hindutva. I would say that is what got her into trouble.
The problem in India is not at the moment politics, it's just majoritarian violence, a sort of fascism really. Do you think that India is a Hindu nation? Yes, yes, yes.
All over the world is suffering from the Muslim attacks and Jihadism. We did not oppose any community. We did not oppose.
But they will follow our rules. We are the Madagascar People's Republic! To see what the BJP plans to do to stop the violence, we spoke to Ram Madhav, a high-ranking BJP official. The messaging that the BJP is unabashedly a Hindu party Has that helped push the agenda, push the popularity forward?
BJP is a party wedded to Indian nationalism. But it is not any religion-specific identity. The Muslim minority in this country are oftentimes harassed, beaten up, and in some cases killed under the aegis of protecting cows, protecting culture, and protecting Hinduism. We all work together. like one family, one community.
In one community, there are problems occasionally. They will be dealt with strongly. If you're a party of inclusion, why is Yogi Adityanath one of your main spokespeople?
Mr. Yogi Adityanath is the chief minister of India's biggest state. If he propagates violence against any community, tomorrow he will not be there in that chair. I have objections to him saying that if one Hindu is killed, a hundred Muslims should be killed.
He never said it. It's a complete misrepresentation of facts about him. The appearance of the BJP being a Hindu nationalist party, the idea that cow protectors, vigilante groups are killing people, the idea that textbooks are being changed, all of these things to an outside observer reeks of authoritarianism, even fascism. You are an outsider, you have misread it. No, no, I'm seeing it with my eyes, I'm hearing it with my ears.
So you have not seen India correctly? Your eyes are misleading, please correct your eyes. Sadly, it is a sort of cultural backlash we're seeing in many countries around the world.
Make America Great Again is very much like what the BJP is trying to do in India. It's making Hindu India great again. You've got the same phenomenon with the Hungarian right, the Jobbik movement.
You've got the same with Marine Le Pen in France and the National Front. You've got the Brexit vote, which is in very many respects an anti-immigrant vote. So it's all saying, let's push out the foreigners, let's push out the people who are not like us, and let's...
return to a purer version of what our countries were all about because those were the good old days. Sounds like fascism. I'm afraid in many respects that's precisely what it reminds some of us of. I mean, frankly, I never thought we'd see a time when people could say, gosh, in India it's safer to be a cow than a Muslim. We must win back this battle because it's a battle for India's soul.