Citizens' Accountability LedgerWho owned the mess? 25 years, every party, on the record

Case 26 · Rights and dissent

Cow protection. 44 dead, and a record export year

Sept 2015 onward

The state stopped counting

3,974 days since Nobody has been held to account.

Human cost Est
At least 44 people killed and around 280 injured in cow-related violence between May 2015 and December 2018, 36 of the dead Muslim, across more than 100 incidents in 20 states. There is no official count after 2017
Financial cost
₹34,392 cr of buffalo meat exported in 2024-25 — 79.4% of India's entire animal-product export basket — while cow slaughter stays banned across most states

What happened

Cow slaughter is prohibited in most states and enforced in practice by self-appointed vigilantes, while buffalo meat remains one of India's largest agricultural exports. Human Rights Watch documented at least 44 killings between May 2015 and December 2018, and found police stalling investigations or joining in cover-ups.

Claim against record

What the government said

The government draws a legal distinction between cow slaughter, banned by states under their own legislative competence and a constitutional directive, and buffalo meat, a lawful regulated export, and so sees no contradiction between the two. On lynchings it says vigilantism is an ordinary crime for state police to prosecute under existing law, that the Prime Minister has publicly condemned cow vigilantism, and that a Group of Ministers was constituted. On data it maintains the NCRB can only publish under heads defined in statute, and mob lynching was not one.

What the record shows

The state stopped counting

The named cases mostly did not end in accountability. More than a decade after Mohammad Akhlaq was killed at Dadri in September 2015 there has been no conviction; all fourteen surviving accused are on bail, and in October 2025 the state applied to withdraw the prosecution entirely, a plea a fast-track court rejected that December. All six adult accused in Pehlu Khan's killing were acquitted in 2019, the court finding serious shortcomings and gross negligence in the police investigation and ruling the video inadmissible. In Rakbar Khan's case four men were convicted in 2023, but of culpable homicide rather than murder, and given seven years. Eleven men convicted for killing Alimuddin Ansari were bailed on appeal in 2019, and a Union minister had already garlanded eight of them at his residence in July 2018, calling it honouring due process. Then the counting stopped: the NCRB gathered data on mob lynching and cow vigilantism for 2017, never published it, and discontinued collection on the ground that the crimes were not defined.

Contested / alleged

The figure of 44 is a documented floor for May 2015 to December 2018, not a total; because official collection stopped, no comparable count exists for the years since. India's world ranking as a buffalo-meat exporter is stated inconsistently by the government itself, tenth on APEDA's own page and third by volume in a 2025 parliamentary answer.

What accountability should have looked like

A statutory definition of lynching so the crime can be counted, published national data, and ministers who do not honour men convicted of killing.

Ministers and office-holders responsible

Naming who held the portfolio is a matter of public record. It is not by itself a finding of personal responsibility for any death or any rupee.

Sources

T1 primary record · T2 reporting · T3 partisan

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Cite or export this case

Citizens' Accountability Ledger, "Cow protection. 44 dead, and a record export year" (Sept 2015 onward), case-59. https://whoisresponsible.xyz/case/case-59/

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