A media student and a mystery caller: Muslims in UP village allege conspiracy in cow slaughter case

At midnight on August 25, when 21-year-old Zakir Ali Tyagi was still awake watching the news, more than a dozen policemen showed up at his door. They asked him his name, and before he realised what was happening, they arrested him.

“They did not let me speak and did not answer my questions,” said Tyagi, a journalism student from Aminabad village in western Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut district. “One of them just said, ‘Tu wohi Yogi-Modi wala hai’ [You are the Yogi-Modi guy] and they dragged me away.”

For the past three years, Tyagi has grown accustomed to the “Yogi-Modi” tag. In 2017, as an 18-year-old living with his aunt in Muzaffarnagar, he was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police for two of his Facebook posts – one of them a joke about the criminal record of then newly appointed chief minister Adityanath, who uses the honorific “Yogi”. Tyagi was booked under the Information Technology Act and spent 42 days in jail.

But his latest arrest on August 25 had nothing to do with this social media case. Instead, officials from Meerut’s Qila Parikshitgarh police station had booked him for alleged cow slaughter, a crime that carries a sentence of 10 years in prison under the Uttar Pradesh...

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