Violence broke out in Bhagalpur on 24 October 1989 after months of sustained communal mobilisation, including processions linked to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. A fact-finding report by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights documented the systematic targeting of Muslim localities, the role of rumour in inciting violence and the complicity or active participation of the police in enabling large-scale killings of Muslims. One of the most brutal instances of mass violence against Muslims in independent India occurred during these riots: the Logain massacre. At least a hundred Muslims were killed in the village of Logain, situated on the edges of Bhagalpur district, in Bihar. Their bodies—mutilated and hacked—were dumped into a pit, over which cauliflowers were planted to conceal the mass grave.
Decades later, the Logain massacre has found an afterlife in the digital realm, where anonymous right-wing social-media handles, as well as politicians, increasingly use the incident as a threat to Muslims in this country. On the surface, these phrases themselves retain some banality—“cauliflower farming is needed in every corner of this country,” “mass cauliflower farming required,” “only cauliflower farming can fix this issue”—yet their repetition across platforms, often in response to news events or moments of heightened communal tension, produces a shared vocabulary through which the desire to exterminate a community is articulated without being explicitly named.
