Bihar poll result: Assam Minister’s ‘cauliflower’ post stirs controversy

A social media post by Assam’s Health and Family Welfare Minister Ashok Singhal about cauliflowers has stirred controversy, with netizens claiming he referred to a gory incident during the 1989 Bhagalpur riots.

Soon after the National Democratic Alliance swept the Bihar Assembly elections by winning 202 out of 243 seats, Mr Singhal posted a photo of a cauliflower field with the caption: “Bihar approves Gobi farming.”

He neither elaborated nor explained the thought behind the post that many said was an allusion to the infamous “cauliflower burial case” or the Logain massacre during the October 1989 Bhagalpur riots amid rising tension linked to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign.

More than 110 Muslims were reportedly killed in Logain, a village in Bhagalpur district’s Goradih block, and cauliflower saplings were planted over their buried bodies. Images of cauliflowers have since been used as a grim reminder of the massacre.

Earlier this year, such images were used during the Nagpur violence in March. The Karnataka unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party also used cauliflowers as a meme to celebrate the killing of Maoists in Chhattisgarh in May.

“…a cabinet minister in Assam, is openly glorifying and calling for a repeat of the massacres of Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar,” an X user reacted to Mr Singhal’s post.

“This is coded hate speech with a horrific history. Gobi [cauliflower] farming invokes the 1989 Bhagalpur massacre, in which more than 1,000 people were killed, with some investigations suggesting the toll may have surpassed 2,000,” another X post by Diaspora in Action for Human Rights and Democracy read.

“…This imagery has since been adopted in contemporary right-wing digital spaces as a form of coded incitement against Muslims,” the post further read.