What the ‘Cauliflower’ in BJP Karnataka’s X Post Means

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.

In their social media bios, many Hindutva ‘trads’ refer to themselves as “cauliflower farmers.”

Trads constitute the extreme end of the Hindutva universe, and comprise youth who want to serve as self-styled civilisational warriors online. Trads view other right-wingers as too liberal and call them ‘raitas’. They also consider PM Narendra Modi too weak to further the real Hindutva agenda due to his alleged appeasement of Dalits and inability to deal with the Muslims with an iron hand.

In 2022, The Wire had reported on these trads following the ‘Sulli Deals’ case in which a hundred Muslim women were ‘auctioned’ on an app.

The Wire had reported how trad iconography is usually designed to ‘trigger’ minority communities with shockingly violent ‘humour’. They include memes depicting the beheading of Muslims, caricatures of Muslims being mowed under their cars, Dalits depicted as “cockroaches” being gassed, or rape victims (who are either Muslims or Dalits) being urinated upon by a saffronised ‘Pepe the Frog.’

The report had said how this dependence on iconography draws directly from Western neo-Nazi creators and in some cases imitates the content of alt-right 4chan activists. References like the cauliflower meme or the invocation of the Ranveer Sena, a banned anti-Dalit militia accused of massacres in Bihar, are local additions.

While the BJP had so far steered away from this extreme discourse and gory trad imagery, the recent caricature is testament to its growing tolerance.

In the past year, trad iconography has become more acceptable in mainstream Hindutva lexicon, especially while addressing Muslims. In the many caricatures the BJP have posted since January 2024, especially during their 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, they adopted some of this imagery and symbols – like Pepe the Frog, a depiction of PM Modi dressed in saffron and taking on the Muslims in green, and an animation of Muslims taking away property and the belongings of the Dalits.

In 2022, in a post on X captioned Satyamev Jayate (truth alone prevails) a caricature was shared by the official handle of the Gujarat BJP featuring a dozen skull-capped and bearded men in white kurtas being hanged. Social media users and commentators drew comparison with Nazi caricatures and the tweet was taken down by Twitter. But the party said that they were not targeting any particular religion and that the cartoon was based on real incidents – a Gujarat court convicting terrorists for the 2006 Ahmedabad blasts.

Courtesy: The Wire