Keep it boiling till the cows come home..
The Congress party’s ‘youth’ may just want another reason to behead a calf and parade its head. They may do so just to show their hatred for Hindus who hold the cow dear and sacred.
After all, the calf that was led to slaughter perfectly symbolizes what Congress did to the nation since Independence, as Abhinav Prakash Singh pithily observed.
But what they cannot claim to have done is to protest a ‘beef ban’ stemming from the latest environment ministry rules. Why? Because there is no such ‘beef ban’ these rules talk about.
What? These rules do not ban beef? No, they do not.
Despite many among the media-academia complex crying ‘beef ban!’, they’re all wrong, perhaps intentionally or out of sheer habit. There may be other rules in vogue that ‘ban beef’ but the latest rules do not in anyway amount to a fresh ban on beef.
The environment ministry’s rules only ban sourcing cattle from any random place for slaughter and consumption. What this means is, you probably cannot walk up to a random market, buy cattle, take them home, slit their throats (Congress can coach you on this?), and start munching away. Slaughter-houses or meat-traders must source cattle directly from farms.
In any nation with a sane public intellectual ecosystem, this ‘ban’ may have been welcomed. Because it works towards providing a farm-to-table accountability that could help in identifying diseased cattle back to their farms and taking remedial measures on other cattle of that farm. This would help in avoiding consumption of diseased cattle.
But it appears that some people want to encourage consumption of cows, diseased or otherwise, just to spite Hindus. Now I’m confused if it is some cattle that are potentially diseased or diseased are those who think a dead calf’s severed head is the barometer for secularism.
Creating and exacerbating faultlines has always been a useful political ploy and this grotesque celebration of calf-beheading and ‘beef festivals’ is a part of it. But this may have ramifications, some unpleasant ones, which surely has been the intention — foment social unrest anyhow and of course there’s always Modi to blame.
This debased celebration is the most perfect representation of Congressi secularism and its faithful adherents in the media-academia complex, where the interests of the majority must not only be sacrificed (sometimes literally) but must also be paraded and rubbed in their faces.
From having the cow and calf as a symbol for the Indira Gandhi faction of the Congress in the past, to this particular day, the Congress has indeed come a long way.
