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The rumors of beef being eaten, the murderous rage evoked and the public lynching in September 2015 of a 58 year old Muslim man Aqlakh in Bisada village next to New Delhi, the capital of India, compels psychoanalytical gaze. Whether the meat was in fact beef is irrelevant and steps taken by the investigating agencies like sending the meat for forensic analysis can only feed into the notion that killing and murder of residents of a house in which beef is found is acceptable. We traverse from the manifest to the hidden.
The cow is revered as Mother by a sizable section of upper caste Hindus. That the announcement by the priest from the temple in the village that beef was being eaten in the house of the victim evoked anger in the predominant community of the upper caste Thakurs in the village is in the realm of the comprehensible. However, the explosion of murderous fury leading to the lynching of Aqlakh and the beating to near death of the son Danish is indicative of tapping into emotions whose roots may lie deep.
At the conscious level the strong mother-son relation characteristic in North Indian culture is simple: The son loves the mother and the mother loves the son. Even viewed from this angle at times we want to incorporate our loved ones and tell small children - “we will eat them up”. In a sense the giving up of mother necessary for individuation appears to be a traumatic process. The internalization through the process of introjection and incorporation akin to eating up and having a little mother inside, aids in dealing with the distress and trauma of separation from the mother.
The imago of the mother takes many forms. The quintessential protective mother to the son is emotion laden. Simultaneously, the mother to be protected by the son is a powerful motif too appealing at subliminal levels. Prior to the last parliamentary elections in India there were posters in Delhi like - “29 aktoober ko Bharat Mata ka sher dahedega” (trans. “On 29 October the son of Mother