HUSSAINPUR, India — The Hyundai hatchback barreled down the country road past darkened fields. A white SUV followed in hot pursuit, shattering the pre-dawn quiet with its screaming siren.
The three young Muslim men in the first car were desperately trying to outrun one of the most notorious Hindu vigilantes in north India when they lost control, veered into a vegetable truck, and came to a screeching halt. Now, they were in the clutches of Monu Manesar.
The three men were immediately pulled out of their wrecked vehicle by Manesar’s gun-toting gang, then interrogated and beaten, according to surveillance footage and witness accounts. But the events of that fateful morning were recorded and then flaunted by another, unusual source: Manesar’s own Facebook page.
The violence on display was carried out in the name of protecting cows.
Since 2020, the self-styled “cow protection” squad led by Manesar had repeatedly live-streamed its late-night missions to intercept drivers suspected of transporting and slaughtering cows — a job often done by Muslims in India. Manesar would film himself exchanging gunfire with moving cattle trucks and ramming them with his SUV. He chased cow transporters on foot and beat them on camera. In return, his fans on YouTube and Facebook left comments full of heart emojis, praising him for doing the work of God.
For a century, vigilantes in north India have worked discreetly in a legal gray zone to protect cows, an animal worshiped by Hindus. But these enforcers have become more extreme and flamboyant in the past decade, thanks to American social media companies that reward them with online followings, and officials from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who offer them political protection and champion their militant brand of Hindu nationalism.
The emerging phenomenon of cow vigilante streamers exemplifies how the BJP and allied right-wing groups have used U.S. social media platforms — including YouTube, a Google subsidiary, and Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta — to polarize India, rally their political base, and assert Hindu dominance, sometimes brutally, in one of the world’s most digitally connected countries. This effort is part of a broader campaign by Hindu nationalists aligned with Modi to use technology to advance their ideology and consolidate their control.
Despite repeated warnings from Indian activists, Silicon Valley companies gave Manesar a platform to broadcast violence — and propelled his rise to fame.
Last October, Manesar received a “Silver Creator” award from YouTube for reaching 100,000 subscribers and posed with his plaque next to a cow. A cycle of soaring viewership and increasing violence followed.
In January and February, according to complaints filed with police and the courts, Manesar and his followers were involved in several shootings and killings.
In April, Instagram granted Manesar’s account a “verified” badge reserved for public figures and celebrities.
In July, Manesar was widely accused of inciting a sectarian riot that left six dead outside New Delhi, the nation’s capital, after he taunted Muslims in a WhatsApp video.
In a call with The Washington Post, Manesar said several weeks ago that he was “staying underground” and avoiding the media. He declined to comment on the allegations against him. Speaking with Indian media earlier this year, he denied any criminal wrongdoing in connection with the series of violent incidents.
A YouTube spokesman said the platform terminated Manesar’s channel four months ago following a review of his videos. Meta said that in general the company removes from its platforms accounts that repeatedly violate a ban on violent content.
Earlier this year, The Post began tracking Manesar’s social media and downloaded 25 gigabytes of his videos before YouTube closed the account amid a probe of his network by police in Rajasthan state. A review of these videos and other posts published by Manesar’s supporters, along with interviews with his associates and their victims and an examination of hundreds of pages of police documents and court filings, tells the story of a gang leader who terrorized minority Muslim communities in two Indian states.
One of Manesar’s most chilling videos was published on Jan. 28. Shortly before 5 a.m., his Facebook page went live with a video showing the three Muslim men — Nafis, Shokeen, and Waris, all known by single names — being led away from their wrecked Hyundai. In the 21-minute stream, Manesar asks the men, their faces bloodied, for their names and hometowns. The three are pressed to the ground while Manesar and his gang stand over them like trophy hunters, clutching rifles and smiling for photos.
Around sunrise, Waris’s older brother Imran received an anonymous call demanding a payment of 100,000 rupees ($1,200) to set Waris free, Imran recalled.
He said no and hung up. Unlike younger Muslims in the region who feared Manesar, Imran, 32, never used much social media. He never followed Manesar’s videos boasting of shootings and beatings.
He never anticipated that Waris would be dead by noon.
Rise of the vigilante streamer
Since ancient times, Hindus have revered the cow as the embodiment of a multitude of gods, the Mother whose milk sustains life and Earth itself. Today in north India, most states strictly prohibit cattle slaughter, and cracking down on the black market in cows — through whatever means necessary — is a rallying cry for Hindu nationalist organizations and their political wing, the BJP.
In the last decade, the ascent of the BJP coincided with the arrival of U.S. social media services, setting the stage for vigilante streamers. The Post reviewed more than 140 accounts of cow protectors on Facebook, who often uploaded bucolic videos of injured or abandoned cows being nurtured and fed. But roughly 30 percent of the accounts resembled a hardcore, extrajudicial version of “Cops,” replete with posts of car chases, arrests, and beatings.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the Washington-based founder of HindutvaWatch, which monitors far-right Indian social media, said violent cow vigilante videos began to surface in 2018 but skyrocketed during the pandemic, when online video consumption boomed. “We also observed that the more violent the content, the more reach and engagement it would get,” Naik said. “For the most part, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have provided them an unrestricted space.”
The YouTube cache reviewed by The Post contained 10 violent videos that Manesar posted between 2020 and 2022. His social media reach, however, was much wider because he maintained several accounts on different social media platforms and his associates also disseminated videos in which he featured.
YouTube spokesman Jack Malon said that the company suspended Manesar’s ability to make money off ads on his channel in February after Indian police made serious allegations against him, and that the channel was terminated in late May after repeated violations of the company’s harassment policy. Asked why YouTube did not act sooner, Malon said it uses a combination of software and human review to identify problematic videos, but “our systems sometimes don’t detect potential violations.” If they had, he said, Manesar “would have been ineligible to receive a Creator Award.”
Meta spokeswoman Erin McPike said, “We have clear rules prohibiting particularly violent or graphic material on our platform. We removed content that broke those rules and disabled accounts for repeated violations.” Several Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with Manesar were taken down by the company this year. McPike said Manesar’s verified Instagram account was “restored in error and has since been disabled.” X, formerly known as Twitter, declined to comment, saying it was too busy.
Human rights activists say they sounded warnings about Manesar long before the companies took action.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of the civil rights group Equality Labs, said she warned YouTube and Meta “as early as 2021 and 2022” through internal reporting mechanisms that Manesar’s accounts were hateful and posed a risk to society. She said the companies told her they would look into the accounts, but no action was taken. Representatives from YouTube and Meta also told her they worried — that removing hateful influencers would physically endanger the firms’ employees in India.
Ritumbra Manuvie, director of the London Story, a Hague-based group that investigates online propaganda that fuels hate crimes, said she has flagged hundreds of hateful Indian influencers to Meta using its internal reporting mechanism,…
This article includes illustrations by Shubhadeep Mukherjee for The Washington Post; Enrico Fabian for The Washington Post; Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty Images; and a video screenshot from the Instagram account of Monu Manesar.
Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
