Yet a month before the election, Modi was, in fact, making speeches about the dastardly “Pink Revolution” that Singh’s government was unleashing across India:

When you slaughter an animal, then the color of its meat is pink. This is what they call a “Pink Revolution.” [The central government] said with pride that, last year, India has earned the most from exporting meat. Across the countryside, our animals are getting slaughtered. Our livestock is getting stolen from our villages and taken to Bangladesh. Across India too, there are massive slaughterhouses in operation. And that’s not all. The Delhi sarkar will not give out subsidies to farmers or to Yadavs keeping cows but will give out subsidies to people who slaughter cows, who slaughter animals, who are destroying our rivers of milk, as long as they set up [slaughterhouses].

Across India, the BJP’s victory seemed to embolden “cow protection” vigilantes, bands of men who claim to be motivated by their reverence for the animal. In the wake of “the Modi wave,” BJP-ruled states enacted legislation tightening existing anti-beef laws, clamping down on cattle sales and even the possession of beef.

Soon after seven Dalits (from India’s formerly marginalized castes) were flogged and humiliated for skinning a dead cow—a primary occupation for some of the victims—in Modi’s home state of Gujarat last year, the prime minister announced that he would rather be attacked himself than see violence against his Dalit brethren. With its plaintive note of self-sacrifice, his appeal was practically Gandhian.

But lynching is not ordinary, spontaneous violence, inflicted on the most conveniently available party. It is, historically, a ritual that explicitly enforces the outcaste status of its victims. It “combines the fellowship of a hunt with the honor of serving the alleged needs of the community,” as Fitzhugh Brundage wrote in his book, Lynching In The New South. Lynching’s particular vocabulary—the social air to its undertaking, the near-ceremonial bloodshed, the display of the mutilated body in triumph—belongs to the category of crime committed by men against those they see as property. As a punishment, it is a work of collective fiction: a gang of imagined victims wreaking vengeance on an imagined criminal in an inversion of the truth.

The rising prevalence of this medieval spectacle in India today is not just a symptom of ancient pathologies. It is the most spectacular outlet yet for Modi's dog-whistle politics and the BJP’s Hindu-nationalist project. After his election victory, some of his critics noted that, even if he assumed a more statesmanlike demeanor, his party’s ethos would remain rooted in a form of social polarization that would help expand its Hindu base—and command its loyalty—at the expense of religious and inter-caste co-existence. Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at Brown University, has written that the BJP has too many voters who may be put off by large-scale rioting (historically a feature of social conflict in India). Instead, he predicted, social consolidation through violent means would be more easily managed by turning a blind eye to smaller-scale conflict, underwritten by the state’s own inaction and seeming bias. Sure enough, in the aftermath of these beef lynchings, police investigations have moved glacially; victims’ families are sometimes threatened with counter-charges of cow slaughter; political condemnation has been absent or lukewarm, if not outright tendentious. Assailed by criticism from the Indian parliament of the lynchings, a senior minister in Modi’s government said on July 21 that while there was “no justification” for the violence, opposition party workers advocating for beef-eating would have to understand that “by doing this they do as much damage to the country as the gau rakshak [or cow protector] on a train.”