The official X account of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Karnataka wing today, May 23, posted an image depicting Union home minister Amit Shah holding a cauliflower over a gravestone that reads “RIP Naxalism.”
This post was captioned “LOL Salam, Comrade” – a take on communists’ use of ‘lal selam’ or ‘red salute’. It was posted as a response to a press statement by the CPI(ML) condemning ‘Operation Kagar’ – a joint operation by the paramilitary, state police, and various security forces in the dense and hilly forests of Telangana and Chhattisgarh, in which officials said 27 ‘Maoists’ were killed.
The CPI (ML) had condemned the “cold-blooded extra-judicial killing of Maoist activists and Adivasis in Narayanpur-Bijapur.”
The party statement also said that Shah’s celebratory post reflected that the “state is spearheading Operation Kagar as an extra-judicial extermination campaign and taking credit for killing citizens and suppressing Adivasi protests against corporate plunder and militarisation in the name of combating Maoism.”
The connotations of a cauliflower
While the Union government’s response has indeed been celebratory, it was, in fact, the presence of a cauliflower in BJP Karnataka’s X post that stunned online commentators.
The use of the cauliflower has become a de-facto stand-in for a call to Muslim genocide.
Capable of circumventing hate speech laws online, it was most recently widely shared by pro-BJP political commentators following the communal clashes in Nagpur.
The imagery is understood to refer to the 1989 Bhagalpur anti-Muslim riots in which over 900 people were killed. In the village of Logain, 110 Muslims were killed and buried in a farm. It is well known that cauliflower saplings were planted over their dead bodies.
In recent years, this reference has been revived by alt-right groups, particularly the trads. Some of its less disguised versions in the past have portrayed hijabi women as cauliflowers.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.