The Rise of a Hindu Vigilante in the Age of WhatsApp and Modi

'On rare occasions, the Indian government—which prides itself on visions of universal digital literacy, online services, and biometrical identity schemes—still conducts certain official communications by radiogram. An operator sitting at a radio transmitter taps out a message, and then a receiver spits out the transmission in another part of the country, generating an instant legal document. And so it was that on December 31, 2015, the superintendent of the jail in Muzaffarnagar District, Uttar Pradesh, received a copy of a radiogram from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, marked “urgent.”

The message concerned a particular inmate named Vivek Premi, a local jeweler’s son who had recently spent his 22nd birthday behind bars. In the summer of 2015, Premi had accosted a 42-year-old Muslim laborer named Mohammed Reyaz in the nearby town of Shamli. Because Reyaz was handling a calf, Premi accused him of plotting to deliver the animal to local butchers. This counted as a grave allegation: Killing cows is sacrilege to many Hindus and is illegal in Uttar Pradesh. To make matters even worse for Reyaz, Premi was a local leader in the Bajrang Dal, a radical Hindu youth militia that has long waged a vigilante crusade against cow slaughter...'

[Contine reading on Wired.]