Backstory 2024: They were bigoted gaurakshaks, but they were good to me

“I’m sure you don’t actually mean that,” I told Sonu Jat, slightly bewildered. “You are a good, decent person.”

Jat had just told me, in a rare, unguarded moment, that he would be ready to kill anyone who slaughters a cow.

“You are right. We won’t actually kill anyone,” Sonu Jat told me apologetically, with a weak smile. “I just got carried away.”

Jat, 29, is the Gurgaon district head of the Akhil Bharatiya Bajrang Vahini, one of several cow vigilante groups or gau rakshaks – literally cow protectors – active in Haryana.

I was sitting with him and some of his associates in a small, dilapidated shop in Badshahpur in the Gurugram district of Haryana on a sweltering September afternoon.

Jat and I had been talking for nearly two hours. I was working on a story about the declining electoral support for the Bharatiya Janata Party among gau rakshaks ahead of the Haryana Assembly elections. He was one of the handful of gau rakshaks who had agreed to speak to me on record.

Jat has a menacing smile and a slightly unhinged look in his eyes. I felt a hint of apprehension entering a small room with him and his associates when I first met him.

However, he was soft-spoken and charming. He was...

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