The term cauliflower is deployed as a coded threat against Muslims, evoking the 1989 massacre of Muslims in Bhagalpur, a city in India’s Bihar state. During the riots, an estimated 900-1,000 Muslims were killed, and over a hundred bodies were later found buried and camouflaged under cauliflower plantations.
Background and Context
This euphemistic term resurfaced on social media during sectarian Hindu-Muslim clashes in March 2025 in Nagpur, a city in India’s Maharashtra state, when Hindu nationalist accounts across various social media platforms circulated images of cauliflower fields with captions suggesting a similar “solution” for dealing with Muslim protesters. The reference to “cauliflower farming” in these posts implicitly threatened a repeat of Bhagalpur-style violence, obliquely advocating for the killing and burial of Muslims beneath crops to conceal the evidence.
Impact and Harm
The term functions as a veiled call for incitement to mass violence, invoking historical atrocities to intimidate and threaten Muslims without explicitly stating so. The coded language reflected in the use of the term normalizes the idea of killing and disposing of Muslim bodies as a necessary action in situations of conflict, escalating offline harm.
Variants and Alternative Forms
Cauliflower Farming
Online Usage
