No, Modi government. Cow ministry is ridiculous
The BJP national president Amit Shah has declared at a recent press conference in Lucknow that the Narendra Modi government is considering setting up a ministry for cows. A report in The Telegraph quotes Shah saying: “There are many recommendations about a cow ministry. A discussion is on.” Sitting next to him was, of course, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister and a long-time crusader for cow protection and shelters, Yogi Adityanath.
The semantics matter, but not so much that they provide any out-of-ordinary explanation for the fact that the Narendra Modi government, despite failing indicators on a huge range of issues — including GDP growth rate, health, uglification of politics, post-election coups to dismantle elected state governments, alarming rise in lynchings and vigilantism over beef, rampant Islamophobia, small-scale riots in states that the BJP is eyeing electorally, and countless other related matters — would focus its energies on the possibility, nay near certainty, of constituting a cow ministry.
Of course, only one state so far has a full-scale ministry for cows, and no prizes for guessing that happens to be the BJP-ruled Rajasthan. Hardly a coincidence that a number of the beef lynchings, including that of Pehlu Khan in Alwar and Zafar Khan in Pratapgarh, occurred in the Vasundhara Raje-ruled Rajasthan.
The chief minister put forward a meek castigation of the lynchings in a pusillanimous article in the Times of India, where the CM invoked Akira Kurosawa’s “multiple perspectives”, but she failed to mention how the state sanction for such sickening display of vigilantism comes in the form of the legislations that are brought in, the covert nods from the authorities that egg on the cow zeitgeists.
Naturally, in a state where symbols, textbooks and the signs of India's plural, syncretic past are being constantly saffronised, wiped out from memory, the cow ministry and cow lynchings are hardly out of place. A lynching is a public spectacle, meant for general consumption, and it’s designed to send home a message: that the minorities can be lynched, subjected to public flogging anytime, anywhere. That they are, effectively, second-class citizens, with fewer real rights and more obligations, that they better accept the rule of the majority, stay in their place, or face the dangerous music of majoritarian violence as comeuppance.
But a Union cow ministry for the whole of India? Is it really that unthought-of, given the broad tendencies that the Modi government has been displaying with brazen aggression, perfectly in line to promote and deliver by 2019 the dreamed-of goal of turning India into a Hindu Rashtra?
We have seminars on cow urine, dung being organised in hallowed institutions such as the IITs. IIT Delhi, last year, had a three-day seminar on the fabled anti-cancer properties of panchagavya, the concoction comprising cow dung, urine and other bovine derivatives. As we had said on DailyO then, it’s one thing to chance upon the anti-cancer properties, if any. It’s simply quite another to steer the whole course of research at a publicly-funded premier technology institute.
But again, not unexpected. Because we have a bevy of ministers and BJP leaders singing paeans to cow urine, including Nitin Gadkari, who wanted hospital floors to be washed with cow urine, to Devendra Fadnavis, and the latest joinees Shaina NC and Meenakshi Lekhi.
Cow urine helped former gov law officer recover from serious illnessShd spread ancient science related to cows using recent tech
— ShainaNC (@ShainaNC) August 2, 2017
At a time when the government should have come down heavily on those murdering in the name of the cow, it’s enshrining the cow agitprop by giving the bunkum a ministry in the near future. Of course, this would have little to do with animal husbandry per se, or ensuring livestock is bred with scientific precision, and much more to do with bringing in half-baked, and asinine measures like the one that was brought in on May 23, 2017, banning the trade of cattle for slaughter in the animal markets in the whole of India, that too under the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals Act.
Although the court stepped in to halt the cow juggernaut by staying the legislation, its impact had been harrowing, causing huge setback to the thriving meat and dairy products industry. An IndiaSpend article documents how the Marathwada farmers, particularly those who have small holdings or are landless, had been left in the lurch by the effective ban on cattle slaughter. The article showed how the poor, landless farmers are the biggest block of cattle and livestock owners, who were now saddled with the infirm, unproductive animal, thus making livestock rearing itself an unviable job.
Another IndiaSpend article predicted that the purported loss of the cattle slaughter restrictions could be as high as Rs one lakh crore, bringing the thriving meat and dairy products industry to a grinding halt, affecting the hundreds of thousands of workers from poor and economically weaker sections suddenly unemployed.
This bringing in of a cow bureaucracy was not only discriminatory, unconstitutional and based on unsound economic logic, it was also a way of sanctioning the substratum of paid goons, vigilantes on political payroll and affiliated to the ruling party directly or indirectly to unleash their frenzy in the form of cow-related anti-minority violence. Several commentators have observed how the anti-minority lynchings, such as the stabbing to death of 16-year-old Junaid Khan on a Delhi-Mathura train occurred over accusations of being a beef-eater, a “katwa”, on the way Junaid sported his Islamic prayer cap.
Under the name of cow protection, the worst form of violence has been given a free rein. From lynchings of Muslims in UP, Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and other states during transportation of bovine animals, or over suspicion of eating beef, in Gujarat, Dalits have been beaten mercilessly because they skinned the dead cow. This is doubly ironic because no one removed the cow carcasses from the streets of Una when the Dalits refused to touch the cow corpses during a strong agitation to protest these rising instances of cow-related violence.
However, ministers such as Mahesh Sharma wrapped one of the murderers of Akhlaq Khan – the first cow casualty who was lynched to death in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh – in the national flag, and said the killer, who died in jail of pneumonia, was a martyr.
This is also the time when tax exemptions are given to Patanjali Yogpeeth, Baba Ramdev’s think-tank, under “medical relief” and “yoga” clauses, even as reports surface that the swadeshi business magnate has been placing misleading advertisements on TV. But it’s achhe din for Hindutva capitalism, and the Ramdev’s journey from godman to business mogul is already being documented with unsparing detail on his several pecuniary malpractices owing to his proximity with PM Modi.
The logic behind cow ministry is all the more shrouded in mystery (beyond the usual political trappings) given we already have a National Institute of Animal Welfare, the Animal Welfare division under the Ministry of Environment and Forests. We have the Animal Welfare Board of India. In addition, we have the department of animal husbandry, dairying and fisheries under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. The rationale behind a cow ministry – not a cattle or livestock ministry – is unavailable, when not viewed through a highly saffronised cow protection-tinted lens.
Then why the sounding out of the BJP-led Centre’s plans of setting up a cow ministry? The historian Mukul Kesavan writes: “The cow is so totemic for the BJP that the murder of human beings in this animal's cause makes responsible leaders resort to silence, deflection, denial, defensiveness or arguments in mitigation that would shame the moral sense of a three-year old.”
Take the example of Rajasthan, once again, the state with the existing cow ministry. Rajasthan’s home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, much like his chief minister Vasundhara Raje, is Kurosawa-ish when it comes to owning up the ultimate responsibility for the murder of Pehlu and Zafar Khan in his state. But no, it was “manhandling”, and obviously the cow is supreme, and the vigilantes were merely delivering their patriotic duty.
In the new scheme of things, the gau rakshak is on the same pedestal as the soldier, and is therefore unchallenged in the nationalist pecking order. And even as PM Narendra Modi gently admonishes the fake gau rakshaks in his speech and tweets, after a highly impactful #NotInMyName protest in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar against Junaid’s murder, he nevertheless ensures the fake gau rakshaks are regularly confused for the good gau rakshaks, thereby making justice beyond reach for those at the receiving end of the cow zeitgeist.
Exactly as the foreign press writes disparagingly of the India story, calling Modi a “constant tinkerer”, “not much of a reformer”, ridiculing “Modi’s strongman economics”, repeatedly underlining that foregoing the economics of a secular, tolerant India would be tantamount to an economic downward spiral, such bitter pills are being spat out with the newfound arrogance of this fast becoming bovine theocracy such as ours. Only the cows themselves have little to gain from the politics in their name.
Whether it’s floods in Gujarat or Assam, or the underfed, overpopulated cow shelters all across the country, cows are dying of neglect, even as some murderous mobs are killing in their name. By gifting the mooing animal a ministry, we can only expect things to take a turn for the worse.