The framework of law is being compromised in India to favour
Hindu religious outfits which are using lawless means of
violence to intimidate and punish the minorities.
ByShahrukh Mehboob | January 2021
In the left-liberal discourses one often hears that while the BJP is programmatically communal, the Congress is pragmatically so. The view finds an alarming resonance in the two-month old Kamal Nath government in Madhya Pradesh. India’s so-called “cow protection gangs” display antithetical qualities to the ones they attribute to their sacred animal – they are unholy, ungentle, frenzied, and violent. According to the data analytics site India Spend, 45 people were killed in 120 cases of cow-related violence reported across India between 2012 and 2018. The highest number of violent incidents were recorded in the state of Uttar Pradesh, with 19 verified incidents of cow-related violence resulting in 11 deaths.
There seems to be a political attempt underway to reorder social spaces in India according to majoritarian diktats. The secular framework of law is being compromised to favor Hindu religious outfits which are using lawless means of violence to intimidate and punish minorities. In a move that is bizarre even by Indian political standards, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), and a senior leader of the ruling right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched a “Cow Cabinet” for the protection and conservation of cows in the state.
The world’s first such initiative for animal welfare, the cabinet encompasses six ministries: home, revenue, animal husbandry, agriculture, panchayats and forests. In a flurry of initiatives, over 2,000 cow shelters will be built across the state to safeguard the bovine creatures and a cess, a tax to be used for a specific purpose, will be levied on citizens to generate additional funds to operate them. Cows, considered sacred by Hindus and revered as “Gaumata” (holy mother), have often been used by political parties as a symbol to peddle thinly-veiled populist measures. Opposition parties have equally been guilty of indulging in such activities to garner political brownie points. In the Congress-ruled state of Chhattisgarh, Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel announced plans to purchase dung from cow owners to woo them in the run-up to the state’s by-elections held earlier in December.
However, critics have slammed such governance innovations as a case of skewed priorities. Instead, they recommend that funds be better utilized to help the poor and to address other pressing issues. Such prudence is all the more critical for backward states like Madhya Pradesh, which lags on critical human development indices like education, child welfare, women’s empowerment, job creation, and education.
However, under the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party’s Hindu nationalist administration, cow worship has taken on an unprecedented salience. Legislation in some 20 of India’s 29 BJP-ruled states has been amended to ban cow slaughter and criminalize the sale and transport of cattle/beef as well as mere possession of beef, whether it is intended for sale or not. The punishment for such offences has also been enhanced and also made non-bailable.
Anyone found guilty of cow slaughter in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s western home state of Gujarat and in Haryana in the north can face imprisonment of up to 14 years. The average jail term for cow slaughter in other states varies between five and seven years. Public debates, sporadic violence and mass mobilization on the cow slaughter issue have been ongoing in India since the late 19th century. During the partition, Gandhi made the secular argument that “Hindu law cannot be imposed on non-Hindus”. The Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, in the spirit of defining India as a secular republic, kept the question of cow protection out of its original draft.
In India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has unleashed a slew of cow welfare measures since he assumed power in March 2017. These include, among others, a cow ambulance service, a toll-free number to assist the authorities in rescuing cattle in distress, as well as a scheme by which the state exchequer allocates about $15 monthly for each cow’s wellbeing.
Adityanath has also directed the state police to take action against cow slaughter and cattle smuggling under the draconian National Security Act and the Gangster Act. Of the 139 people against whom the NSA has been invoked in Uttar Pradesh this year, 76 – more than half – have been booked in connection with alleged cow slaughter cases, points out a report in The Indian Express. The gory lynching of anyone transporting cattle, or any animal meat suspected to be beef, at the hands of vigilantes across the country has already been widely reported and invited international opprobrium. Madhya Pradesh is traditionally clubbed as part of a group of India’s four most underdeveloped states – Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh – also referred to using the acronym BIMARU, a play on the word “ailing” in Hindi. According to the Census of 2011, Madhya Pradesh has a literacy rate of 70.6 percent as against the all-India average of 74 percent. As few as 34.1 percent of the states’ children in Class 5 could read a Class 2 text in 2014, compared to 75.2 percent in the case of Himachal Pradesh, according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2014. Currently, 24 states in India have various regulations prohibiting either the slaughter or sale of cows. The idea of an existing prohibition is being used in Uttar Pradesh by Hindu cow vigilante groups to spread lawlessness and inflame communal passions within their own community.
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