There is nothing fine about
dining on animals slaughtered to meet human desire. Indeed, it is a barbaric
act
Over the past six months, volunteers
of Gau Gyan Foundation, People for Animals and Rashtriya Gau Raksha Sena have
been working together to apprehend cattle traffickers and reporting the
matter to the police. Some are journalists, some animal rights activists, and
some grass-roots workers, keeping track of cattle movements across States.
Despite the widespread ban on animal cruelty and cattle slaughter, thousands of
livestock are trafficked every week in places such as Goa, Porbandar, Diu and
Daman for butchering; and smuggled from the northern cow belt, Odisha,
elsewhere, to Bangladesh via West Bengal. Kerala and West Bengal, in the grip
of appeasement politics, patented by the Congress, its splinter Trinamool
Congress, and Communists, anyway allow cattle slaughter, as do some Christian
pockets in the North-East. But the open collusion between law-keepers and
traffickers is a blatant offence.
Reports of trafficking are
generally ignored by the police. And, even if they do file FIRs under pressure,
lax court proceedings let the traders and cattle free. Yet, such offences are
punishable under numerous laws: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960;
Delhi Agriculture Cattle Preservation Act, 1994; Punjab Prohibition of Cow
Slaughter Act; Transport of Animal Rules, 1978; Sec 5/7, Sec 295(A) Indian
Penal Code and the like. The culprits get away by pleading that the cattle are
being transported for farming purposes. Activists, who have been investigating
such incidents, are certain that greasing palms eases their passage. It is a
well-entrenched network of traders, intermediaries and official facilitators.
This gives a new meaning to the
state functioning as a facilitator. When cheerleaders for free-market reforms
eulogise the delights of fine dining, they overlook one simple fact: There is
nothing fine about feasting on the flesh of living creatures. It is, rather,
the nadir of human development. And when the same people choose to turn their
attention to their other obsession, Mahatma Gandhi, the irony is accentuated.
Indeed, the Congress's continued association with Gandhiji, his name being
invoked to vest the party and its leaders with credibility, is absurd because
it has completely repudiated whatever the Mahatma espoused: Promotion of a
home-grown economy; the culture of non-violence; and ban on cattle slaughter.
The Congress-led UPA coalition's
track record is utterly dismal in this regard, with domestic industries being
forced to give way to giant transnational players; cottage industry reduced to
a quaint ethnic enterprise; the politics of minorityism thwarting communal
relations on an even keel; and cattle smuggling for the purpose of slaughter
and beef exports magnifying alarmingly. Congress allies in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar
and West Bengal, with the Trinamool Congress only recently having severed ties
as a populist stunt, are equally unworthy of invoking Gandhiji's legacy. For,
despite their socialist pretensions, their support made it possible for the
Congress to follow the economic course that threatens to reverse whatever India
can claim as its own. Acknowledging that cattle was integral to rural wealth,
Gandhian Acharya Vinobha Bhave launched a ceaseless satyagraha near Deonar,
Mumbai, where thousands of cattle smuggled from other parts, are daily
butchered, to meet the craving for fine Indian beef, free of the trigger of mad
cow disease.
The grim paradox of the nation,
and the Congress especially, paying homage to the Mahatma, one of the greatest
proponents of ahimsa and cattle protection, on his birth anniversary is
underlined by current data on India emerging as the biggest beef exporter in
the world. It is the pink revolution that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi
has been highlighting as one of the worst lapses of the Congress-led UPA
regime. To achieve this dubious distinction, the Government gives subsidies for
exports and has modernised slaughter houses. This is reprehensible, considering
that the reforms initiative is pegged to cutting fuel and other subsidies,
which hits the poor hardest. United States Department of Agriculture's Foreign
Agricultural Service forecast for 2012 avers that we will export about 1.5
million metric tonnes of beef, overtaking Australia. Worse, the export quantum
has doubled in just three years.
And where does this beef, sourced
reportedly from buffaloes, go? To the Middle East, North Africa and South-East
Asia mainly. So even if the ruling coalition has failed to feed India's poor,
several hundred millions of people can seek solace in the fact that our
livestock is being depleted rapidly so that there is no dearth of cheep meat in
other countries. Little matter that these animals could have been better
deployed for farming and production of milk. Or that such slaughter is
antithetical to the ethos of compassion, integral to our heritage. The UPA's brutalising
influence and policies are the logical corollary of its rootlessness.
Business lobbies have been trying
since a decade to coerce the Army into replacing canvas PT shoes with shoes or
combat boots, made of cow leather. This will entail the The slaughter of
millions of cattle. Devout jawans, most from villages, may then rise up,
triggering another rebellion against alien rule.
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