DC Debate: The Dadri incident shows that a beef ban has communal ramifications

A plateful of prejudice

Alka Pande Vs Arundhati Dhuru

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Alka Pande: Dadri is not spontaneous, it’s part of a pattern

Anyone who has spent decades in the state of Uttar Pradesh is used to taking conversations revolving around caste and religion in an unflinching manner. A joke about a caste or religion passes off easily, without anyone taking offence. Most people, generally speaking, don’t take them too seriously. Yet, the recent incident in Bisara, a village in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, has shaken the foundation of the nation. It has left the warp and weft of secularism threadbare and frayed the Constitution.

The murder of Mohammad Akhlaq and the agony his family faced recently have made a lot of us question our pride in and patriotism towards our motherland. We are the biggest democracy in the world and we boast of the largest youth population. We have the finest brains. What are we proud of? Intolerance of certain food habits, scornful about other religions on social media sites, prejudiced about the way others dress and the diversity of faiths.

Personally, I feel ashamed as our rights are being outraged by a few fanatics for their vested political interests. We have forgotten how to differentiate right from wrong and forgotten the fact that our actions have consequences. We are becoming a nation of misguided fundamentalists, driven by herd mentality. We blindly follow politics, fashion, hatred, extreme dislikes which fuel the hidden agendas of our cunning leaders.

These leaders are neither interested in development nor in alleviating poverty. We are fed non-stop information and we “like” or “share” whatever we deem relatable without as much as giving it a second thought or having any real feelings on the subject.

A normal human cannot be so easily aggressed to take the life of another human being. Though illiteracy does restrict people from seeing through the designs of khadi-clad politicians, it definitely cannot be blamed for the lack of education or the absence of a proper livelihood. It’s time we look deep into what is causing such violence. Before the elections to Parliament in 2014, western Uttar Pradesh saw riots in which hundreds of people were killed, many injured and rendered homeless. Now, as panchayat elections are underway in the state, we have a similar communally charged incident executed with precision planning to make it look “spontaneous”.

There is a pattern to such activities in the state which indicates more such ugly incidents in the future as we approach the state Assembly elections. Uttar Pradesh is becoming a state where politics and politicians thrive on human conflict. The time has come for people to see through this design. Visits to foreign lands alone do not a country make. A proud nation is built of people who are proud of their deeds. But, are our leaders listening?

Alka Pande is a social activist, communication consultant and a freelance journalist

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Arundhati Dhuru: All parties complicit in beef politics

The air is thick with anxiety, fear, anger on one side and aggression, vio-lence and blood-curdling cries on the other as the innocent cow has been forced to take centrestage in the Indian political arena. Gau-saman — harmless like a cow — is an adjective used to describe a completely harmless person in India’s Hindi-speaking belt. But the Dadri incident proves that in today’s context, the cow is more a political animal than a sacred one.

Apart from the BJP, most other political parties are busy condemning the lynching of Mohammad Iqlakh in Dadri and raising compensation money for his family. But they remain quiet on why 24 out of the 29 states in India has banned cow slaughter under the Congress and other political parties.

Instead, they are now competing with each other to declare themselves both pious and protectors of the cow. The Hindutva forces, led by the RSS, are attempting to turn India into a majoritarian theocratic nation. The fact that India’s exports are composed entirely of water-buffalo meat and not cow meat, as stated in US department of agriculture (USDA) report (April 2015), is conveniently ignored.

So the voice of liberals who cite hundreds of examples of how beef was served and eaten as special food for and by brahmins and produce realistic data about beef exporters being Hindus, or state that many liberal Hindus openly speak of their love for beef, will fall on deaf ears. Their voices will get lost in the war cry of the Hindutva brigade as tensions over beef show that society is moving from a focus on Mandal to kamandal.

B.R. Ambedkar foresaw this and in his book, Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?, he wrote: “If beef-eating had remained a secular affair — a mere matter of individual taste — such a bar between those who ate beef and those who did not would not have arisen. Unfortunately beef-eating, instead of being treated as a purely secular matter, was made a matter of religion. This happened because the brahmins made the cow a sacred animal. This made beef-eating a sacrilege.”

Arundhati Dhuru is a social activist and works for the National Alliance for People’s Movement