Right in the middle of Friday afternoon, as counting of votes in Bihar pointed to a big NDA win, a minister in the Himanta Biswa Sarma cabinet celebrated it with a cauliflower post, a grim reminder of the 1989 Bhagalpur massacre, in which many Muslims lost their lives.
“Bihar approves Gobi farming,” Ashok Singhal, the Assam Minister of Health & Family Welfare and Irrigation Department, posted on X, with an image of a lush cauliflower field.At first, the post appeared out of place, like a square peg in a round hole. It required a double-take.
The cauliflower image was an apparent reference to the 1989 Bhagalpur massacre in Bihar, in which many Muslims were killed and buried in a farmland where cauliflower saplings were later planted to conceal the bodies.
“Gobi (cauliflower) farming” invokes the 1989 Bhagalpur massacre, in which more than 1,000 people were killed, with some investigations suggesting the toll may have surpassed 2,000. In Logain village, police later uncovered the bodies of 116 Muslims buried in mass graves over which cauliflowers had been planted to hide the killings. This imagery has since been adopted in contemporary right-wing digital spaces as a form of coded incitement against Muslims,” Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy posted
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