At about 1am on August 24, Aryan Mishra, a 19-year-old 12th-grade student received a phone call.

Two of his friends, both sons of Mishra’s landlord, wanted him to join them for a late-night snack – noodles, according to reports.

Mishra soon joined them, grabbing the passenger seat in the landlord’s red SUV in a middle-class neighbourhood in Faridabad, a city in Haryana state on the outskirts of the national capital, New Delhi.

One of the brothers, Harshit Gulati, was at the wheel, while his elder sibling, Shankey Gulati, 26, was in the rear with their mother Sujata Gulati and her friend Kirti Sharma, according to Indian media reports.

As they drove along the largely empty streets of Faridabad, a car with a flashing red and blue beacon on top of it tried to stop them, local media reports said. Such beacons are usually allowed only on government vehicles. But the illegal use of these beacons by private vehicles remains rampant – especially when the owner is politically influential.

Details of what happened next are hazy and are being investigated by the police. But according to most reports, the car that Aryan and his friends were in tried to speed away from the chasing vehicle. Was that because they were just scared of being followed by an unknown car? Was it because Shankey, according to some reports, was accused in a separate attempted murder case, and his family thought they were being pursued by a police vehicle?

What is known is that a 40-kilometre (25-mile) chase followed. During the chase, a gunshot fired from the car behind hit Mishra on the shoulder. Harshit stopped the car. The men behind pulled up. One of them walked up to the car and pumped another bullet into Mishra’s neck from close range. The teenager was rushed to a local hospital, where he died.

Though the killing took place almost two weeks ago, its details are emerging only now, shocking and outraging the country.

Mishra had been killed in cold blood. But it is not that alone that has caused the outrage. It is the fact that Mishra was Hindu, killed by another Hindu – who thought he was Muslim.

The suspects were cow vigilantes, members of a nationwide right-wing Hindu militia, Gau Raksha Dal (GRD or Cow Protection Association), that claims to protect cows – considered holy by many Hindus – from slaughter, mainly by Muslim cattle traders.

Cow slaughter is banned or regulated in most Indian states.

The vigilantes have rarely faced the brunt of the law. Instead, it is their victims and their families who have often faced police cases and scrutiny over whether they were actually in possession of beef.

Against that backdrop, global and Indian rights groups believe these vigilantes operate under the patronage and protection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since the Hindu nationalist leader came to power a decade ago.

The BJP has denied that it is linked to these attacks, and in 2016, Modi publicly criticised vigilantes. But a cow vigilante in the southern state of Karnataka has received an election ticket from the BJP. Eight vigilantes convicted of lynching a 45-year-old Muslim meat trader were garlanded by a BJP minister in 2018. And the funeral of one of the men accused of lynching a Muslim man in 2015 was attended by another BJP minister.

The Gau Raksha Dal has chapters in almost half of the Indian states, mostly in the north. Their logo depicts the head of a cow, flanked by two automated rifles or a pair of daggers. The vigilantes are armed with guns and sticks and patrol the streets through a large network of WhatsApp groups. They are the judge, jury and executioner, delivering their deadly justice on the streets of India.

The vigilantes also share information about alleged incidents of cow slaughter or cattle smuggling with the police and are reported to have even joined police officers in conducting raids or arrests.

Since 2014, when Modi first came to power, nearly 50 cow-related lynchings of Muslim men have been reported – most victims are poor farmers or daily wage workers, who left behind grieving families staring at an uncertain future. In nearly all such incidents, no cow meat was found, only the battered and tortured – and often lifeless – bodies of the victims.

‘We killed our brother’

According to a report on The Print website, when the local police told Mishra’s father Siyanand they suspected the involvement of cow vigilantes in his son’s killing, he did not believe they could kill “one of their own” and asked to meet the alleged shooter, Anil Kaushik, who was in judicial custody.

During the meeting, Kaushik confessed to the distraught father that he regretted killing “a brother”, thinking he was a Muslim, and sought forgiveness. The report added that Kaushik did not know Mishra was a Brahmin, the most privileged class in India’s complicated caste hierarchy.

“This incident is a blot for us. This is the first time in a decade that such an incident has happened. It’s a sad truth that we killed our brother,” Shailendra Hindu, a member of Bajrang Dal, a far-right militia that runs the cow vigilante groups, told The Print.