Stage set for more social strife

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Narendra Modi government’s attempt to regulate cattle markets across the country appears to be a thinly disguised project to promote the Hindutva agenda of cow slaughter ban through the back door.

Last week the Environment Ministry, which oversees animal welfare, issued a notification imposing stringent conditions on the sale of cattle. While it does not prohibit cow slaughter, it forbids sale of cows, bulls, steers, heifers, buffaloes and camels at animal markets for slaughter.

India had edged past Brazil two years ago to become the world’s largest meat exporter. Last year meat production exceeded Rs 1,300 billion, and beef exports totalled Rs 263 billion.

Since the meat industry gets 90 per cent of its requirements from animal markets the regulations are bound to hit the farmers as well as the meat sellers.

Orthodox Hindus of the Vedic school profess to vegetarianism but the Vedas and other early texts testify that their ancestors ate different kinds of meat, including beef.

Hindus constitute 79.80 per cent of India’s population. However, according to the findings of a recent official survey, only 28 per cent of Indians are vegetarians.

Since some sections venerate the animal, cow slaughter became an issue of contention in the closing stages of the colonial period. In a concession to them, a provision was included in the Directive Principles of the Constitution permitting the state governments to take steps to prohibit the slaughter of milch and draught cattle.

Most states have already enacted legislation to prohibit slaughter of milch cows. However, Kerala, West Bengal and the north-eastern states have not done so.

Since Modi became the Prime Minister and the Bharatiya Janata Party started picking hard-core Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh activists as chief ministers, cow vigilantes have gone on the rampage in several states, attacking and killing Muslims and Dalits.

Mohammad Akhlaq of Dadri in Uttar Pradesh and Pahlu Khan, a dairy farmer of Alwar in Rajasthan were lynched to death. Dalit youths were thrashed at Una in Gujarat while skinning a dead cow. In all these instances, the BJP protected the criminals and pressured the police into instituting false cases against the victims and their families.

Under the newly notified rules, which are to be enforced within three months, only farmland owners can buy or sell cattle at animal markets. Both the seller and the buyer have to prove their identities and establish their status as farm owners. The seller has to obtain an understanding from the buyer that the animals are not for slaughter.

The rules have laid down cumbersome procedures which farmland owners with little education cannot easily cope with.

The government claimed that the rules had been prepared in compliance with a directive the Supreme Court had given in a recent judgement to improve the condition of animals in the markets. Political observers believe it used the opportunity to extend the Hindutva’s cow agenda and fear it may lead to more attacks on Muslims and Dalits.

While most opposition parties and state governments under their control were muted in their response to the Centre’s action, Kerala Chief Minister and Communist Party of India-Marxist Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan roundly condemned it as an attempt to implement the RSS agenda. In a letter to the Prime Minister he said the rules were impractical.

Youth wings of the CPI-M and the Congress conducted beef festivals at many places in the state to demonstrate their resolve to resist interference in the people’s food habits.

The constitutional validity of the new Central rules is bound to be challenged in the courts. Many legal experts are of the view that the courts are liable to strike them down as they go beyond the purview of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act under which they have been issued.

The economic and social consequences of the rules may be more disastrous than the political fallout. Inability to sell cattle which have outlived their utility will upset the fragile economy of farming families which is already driving them to suicide in large numbers.

Some critics feel the government’s real objective is to put an end to the traditional cattle markets and clear the path for big business interests to enter the trade.

The new rules may embolden Hindutva elements to intensify attacks on the minorities and the Dalits, leading to increased social strife. The emergence of the Bhim Army at Saharanpur in UP is a sign of growing Dalit resistance to Hindutva violence. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 30, 2017.

Hindutva’s two-fold strategy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been going around talking about development, shadowy groups have been conducting murderous campaigns to overawe and silence the society.

The violence is directed not against political opponents but against writers, Dalits and Muslims. The game plan, it appears, is to clear the way to declare India a Hindu Rashtra (nation), the proclaimed goal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ideology.

An atavistic element is discernible in the choice of targets. Hindu texts testify to violent attacks on Buddhist centres of learning by proponents of the Vedic religion in the medieval period. Dalits who were outside the Vedic society came under duress after Buddhism declined and a casteist society emerged.

Muslims were the ‘other’ whose presence helped the Vedic community to posit a Hindu society. According to VD Savarkar, originator of the Hindutva concept, a life-and-death struggle began the day Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who had raided the subcontinent 17 times, first crossed the Indus.

Three eminent thinkers have been killed under a plot which was hatched before Modi came to power. Narendra Dabholkar of Maharashtra, a campaigner against superstition, was shot dead in 2013 when there were Congress-led governments at the Centre and in the state. Govind Pansare, also of Maharrashtra, and MM Kalburgi, of Karnataka, were killed after BJP-led coalitions took office at the Centre.

Police investigating the cases have said all three were killed by members of a Goa-based outfit called Sanatan Sanstha, founded 25 years ago to provide education in Dharma. A trial court had found six of its members guilty of planting bombs.

Atrocities against Dalits have been reported from several states. The BJP or its associates have not been implicated in any of the incidents but the party’s caste supremacist approach and failure to condemn the gruesome killing of two children and a youth in two separate incidents in Haryana, where it is in power, put it in the dock.

To make things worse, Union Minister of State VK Singh callously likened the killing of children to stoning of street dogs. Public outrage forced Singh, who is a retired Army chief, to tender an apology.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, last year 47,064 crimes against Dalits by non-Dalits were reported. This was 19 per cent higher than the previous year’s figure. More than half the cases were reported from the socially and economically backward BIMARU states – Uttar Pradesh (8,075), Rajasthan (8,028), Bihar (7,893) and Madhya Pradesh (4,151).

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, who visited the family of the deceased children, linked the incident to the Prime Minister’s attitude and accused the BJP-RSS combine of crushing the weak and the poor. However, his party bears as much blame, if not more, for the current situation in Haryana.

Based on official data, the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations recently said 3,198 cases of atrocities against Dalits were registered in Haryana during the 2004-2013 decade, which was 245 per cent more than in the previous decade. From 2005 to 2014 Haryana was under Congress rule.

The most ominous part of the Hindutva project aims at accentuation of Hindu-Muslim polarisation through campaigns on the sensitive issue of cow slaughter. After the lynching of a man at Dadri in UP on false allegations of killing a cow, a truck driver was set upon by a gang at Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir state, where the BJP is the junior partner in a coalition government headed by the People’s Democratic Party.

The driver died in a Delhi hospital a few days later. A protest by dissidents paralysed life in the Kashmir valley. In Jammu, members of the RSS held a route march, openly displaying firearms.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said the small incidents which had taken place would not dent the country’s prestige, which, he claimed, had gone up under Modi’s prime ministership. However, Modi himself found it necessary to break his long silence and talk of the diversity which was India’s beauty.

What rattled the government was the spirited protest of scores of writers in different languages who returned the awards they had received from the state or its agencies. Most of them pointedly referred to Modi’s silence on the Dadri lynching and the official literary establishment’s failure to condemn the murder of writers. It was protest of a kind with no parallel in living memory.

Some observers are of the view that the violent activities of small Hindutva groups are hurting Modi’s development agenda. But, then, Hindu Rashtra is also part of his agenda. --Gulf Today, October 27, 2015 

The ironies of cow politics

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Two weeks after a man was lynched in a village near Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, no more than 56 km from the national capital, New Delhi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s role in the duplicitous beef war stands exposed.

A mob attacked Mohammad Akhlaq’s house after a priest of the local temple announced over the loudspeaker that he had killed a calf which had been missing. Some Hindu neighbours went to the family’s rescue but not before Ashlaq was killed and his younger son was seriously injured. The women were unharmed. The older son, who works with the Indian Air Force, was away at Chennai, where he is posted.

The police arrested a few persons, including a local BJP leader’s son and the priest who made the loudspeaker announcement, in connection with the crime. BJP leaders claimed UP’s Samajwadi Party government had picked up innocent persons to placate the Muslims. Forensic examination of meat collected from Ashlaq’s house revealed it was mutton, not beef.

The lynching invited widespread condemnation. BJP leaders played it down and called for a Central law prohibiting cow slaughter in deference to the sentiments of Hindus who consider it a sacred animal.

Last week Ashlaq’s family moved to a house in Delhi for its own safety. The IAF arranged to shift his injured younger son to a military hospital.

A committee of academicians from the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University, which conducted a fact-finding study, said the lynching did not happen on the spur of the moment but was pre-planned. It demanded investigation of the role of Hindutva groups in the incident. It also deplored justification of the event by several BJP leaders, including Union Minister Mahesh Sharma, and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to break his “shameful” silence on the subject.

Modi finally spoke at an election meeting in Bihar state but there was no condemnation of the lynching or the violent speeches of his partymen.

He merely appealed to Hindus and Muslims to stop fighting each other and join hands in the war on poverty. The seemingly statesmanlike appeal reinforced the BJP’s electoral objective of consolidation of Hindu votes by setting the event firmly in a religious context.

The demand for a central law banning cow slaughter was disingenuous since it is already banned under local laws all over the country except Kerala, West Bengal and the tribal northeastern states.

Cow politics abounds in ironies. Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir has the oldest law banning cow slaughter. It was promulgated by a governor of the Sikh empire in 1819 at the request of the Pandit community.

The Pandits, who are Brahmins, cook and serve meat, chicken and fish on Shivratri, the most important festival on their calendar.

Some state laws prohibit killing of all cattle and some others ban only killing of cows and calves. The jail term for cow slaughter varies from six months in Andhra Pradesh and Telengana to 10 years in Jammu and Kashmir.

Hindus constitute an overwhelming 78.35 per cent of India’s population but vegetarians are a minority. Surveys have put the number of vegetarians at 31 to 40 per cent. A 2006 survey, conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, found that all-vegetarian families constituted only 21 per cent.

The CSDS found that even among Brahmins, legatees of the Vedic tradition, only 55 per cent were vegetarians. The Lingayats, a Hindu sect which rejects the authority of the Vedas, and the Jains had a higher percentage of vegetarians. At the bottom of the vegetarian table were the Adivasis (12%), Christians (8%) and Muslims (3%).

Incidentally, the Vedas testify to ritual sacrifice of cows and consumption of beef by early Aryans.

While non-vegetarians constitute a majority, frequency of meat consumption is low. Many non-vegetarians avoid beef for religious or sentimental reasons.

Last year India became the world’s leading exporter of beef, accounting for 23.5 per cent of the global trade, pushing Brazil (19.7%) down to the second place. Carabeef (buffalo meat) makes up the bulk of the exports under this head. To make sure that exporters do not ship beef labelled as carabeef the BJP government plans to set up a lab in Mumbai.

India earned $4,781.18 million from beef exports last year. The export business is mostly in the hands of Hindus. Documents published by the media show that Sangeet Som, BJP member of the UP Assembly, who stoutly defended the Dadri lynching, was a founder director of an Aligarh firm which describes itself as a leading producer and exporter of halal meat. -- Gulf Today, October 13, 2015.