M Arslan Jamal Ghauri
India is now a country where silence is the collective code of conscience. In this Nation of the dumb and the mute, not a single person notices the brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy on a crowded platform. From the station master and his staffers to a nearby postmaster, to the vendors at the platform, nobody appears to have seen anything at the Asaoti Railway station in Faridabad, Haryana, where Junaid Khan bled to death after being repeatedly stabbed aboard a local passenger train. What an amazing brotherhood of Hindutva this is! Gau bhakts travel drunk on trains -model sons of gau mata indeed – and then kill a Muslim on the suspicion of carrying beef. They soak their hands with the blood of fellow human beings in the name of an animal they desert on streets to scavenge for food in dustbins.
In the 2014 elections, the BJP campaigned on the slogan “Vote for Modi, give life to the cow” and “The cow will be saved, the country will be saved,” cashing in on the Hindu belief that cows are holy. The BJP subsequently made good on its promise to ban the selling of cows for slaughter in 18 States in India so far and has established hostels where cows are cared for in their dotage. India is therefore a nice place for cows, but what about the poor? The hypocrisy is jarring given that India is a major exporter of beef, accounting for almost one-quarter of the global market and earning more than $4 billion a year.Why are cows more sacred than these people? Whether Christian Muslim or outside the fold of upper-caste Hinduism, beef is one of the few cheaply available sources of protein. India is rightly proud of being the largest democracy, but failing to uphold the rule of law and allowing self-appointed posses to engage in extrajudicial killings targeting Muslims tarnishes the Nation’s dignity and is an assault on human rights.Hindus only proscribed beef after they lost political power to the Muslims, belatedly embracing cow protection as a symbol of identity and faith. Unhappy with these facts, the BJP government in 2006 deleted school textbook references to ancient Hindus eating beef. Food fascism is trending, with the head of the BJP’s influential ideological mainstay, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, recently calling for a countrywide ban on the slaughter of cows. Meanwhile, a senior judge said cows should be declared a National animal and people who slaughter the bovines should be sentenced to life in prison. A cow is not an animal. It is a symbol of universal life,” Gujarat Law Minister Pradipsinh Jadeja said in explaining the harsher penalty enacted in 2016. “Anybody who does not spare cows, the government will not spare him.” It’s too bad he doesn’t show similar concern for the millions of impoverished citizens of his State.
In such a diverse Nation, there really is no alternative to tolerance, but in the Northern State of Uttar Pradesh, the BJP has other ideas, driven by the calculus of polls rather than religious precepts or human rights. Uttar Pradesh has 200 million people, including 40 million Muslims, many of whom eat beef or are engaged in the beef business. They have reason to be worried because the state’s chief of police recently announced that anyone who trades in beef is subject to prosecution under the National Security and Gangsters Act.India Muslim women ‘raped’ in fatal attack ‘over beef’. Four men carried out the attack in Northern Haryana state two weeks ago. She denied consuming beef. She said the men beat her uncle and aunt to death in their home in Mewat. Many Hindus consider cows sacred and the slaughter of the animal is banned in several States, including Haryana. The suspects have been arrested and charged with rape and murder. However police have told reporters that there is no evidence to suggest that cow protection groups were involved in the attack.
Two Nation theory was based on facts, that Hindu and Muslim are completely two Nations from every point of view. We have different languages, different histories, our heroes are their villains and vice versa, Hindu worship cows, but we Muslim slaughter it to eat, they drink the urine of cow, but we say it one of the dirtiest things. Muslims were the target of 51 percent of violence centred on bovine issues over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017) and comprised 86 percent of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents, according to an India Spend content analysis of the English media. As many of 97 percent of these attacks were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power in May 2014, and about half the cow-related violence-32 of 63 cases-were from States governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when the attacks were reported, revealed our analysis of violence recorded until 25 June, 2017. About half the cases of cow-related violence-32 of 63-were from States governed by the BJP at the time; 8 were run by the Congress, and the rest by other parties, including the Samajwadi Party (Uttar Pradesh), People’s Democratic Party (Jammu & Kashmir) and Aam Aadmi Party (Delhi). Will India now, apart from being a Nation of hypocrites, cowards, bigots, also be a country without a conscience? Will India now be a land of people without a soul?
