When a state cannot digest the sands of time
BY VIKRAM DOCTOR
HE FURORE over the allegedly illegal activities of the Reddy brothers, Karnataka’s politicians-cum-mining lords, the support they seem to have from state politicians and the attempts made by the activists, the media, the Lok Ayukta, and even the Governor, H.R. Bharadwaj, to bring them to book has overshadowed another interesting tussle going on in the state. This is over the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2010, which raises the stakes in the endless battle over cow slaughter in India in interesting ways.
This really is the one debate that never goes away (not least in this column!). It featured in the independence struggle where Mahatma Gandhi was both attracted by its ahimsa aspects, but distrustful of the aims of some of its strongest proponents, who seemed to be more concerned with harassing Muslims and Dalits rather than any consideration for cows. In the Constituent Assembly it was the subject of some bitter debates, only resolved by the fix of putting attempts to end cow slaughter among the Directive Principles of State Policy, but not as the law of the land.
Like many fixes, this worked then, but has led to much turmoil over time. Soon after independence several state legislatures passed bills banning cow slaughter, which landed up in the Supreme Court. In the case of Mohd. Hanif Quareshi vs the State of Bihar(1959), the Court, in the first of many verdicts it was to deliver on this issue, upheld a state’s right to ban slaughter of cows, meaning female cattle, but not the extension of the ban to buffaloes or male cattle beyond their age of useful life. This was a genuine attempt to find a compromise between, on the one hand, the needs of animal husbandry for culls of old animals and of the industries that used these carcasses, and on the other hand, the special cultural value placed on cows in India.
The problem was that few wanted any compromise. The meat lobby, it was alleged, would still slaughter cows and pass it off as buffalo meat, or transport animals to states like Kerala or West Bengal where cow slaughter was legal. For its part, the anti-cow slaughter lobby, as Gandhi had foreseen, was less interested in rational animal husbandry arguments than in using the issue for symbolic purposes. A surprisingly candid admission of this by M.S. Golwalkar, the head of the RSS, is recorded by Dr Verghese Kurien, the Amul head and architect of India’s dairy revolution in his autobiography I Too Had a Dream.
Kurien and Golwalkar were both members on a high power committee set up by the government to examine the issue. Kurien argued strongly for the dairy industry’s need for culls; Golwalkar was adamantly opposed to this, so it was rather to Kurien’s surprise that he found himself becoming friendly with the Hindu rightwing ideologue. He did not agree with Golwalkar’s methods, but could not deny the man’s patriotism or sincerity, and responding to this recognition, Golwalkar once told him the rationale behind the cow slaughter agitation.
Golwalkar said it had started as a simple way to embarrass the government. In the Nehru years the Hindu right was still suffering from association with Gandhi’s assassination and looking to make themselves relevant again. A cow slaughter ban petition was one tactic and Golwalkar visited UP to see how it was progressing. There he saw a woman who, after finishing her busy housework, set off in the blazing summer sun to get signatures. Golwalkar wondered what motivated her and “this is when I realised that the woman was actually doing it for her cow, which was her bread and butter, and I realised how much potential the cow has.”
Golwalkar felt the cow could be the symbol of the RSS’ vision of India: “I saw the cow has potential to unify the country — she symbolises the culture of
Bharat. So I tell you what, Kurien, you agree with me to ban cow slaughter on this committee, and I promise you, five years from that date, I will have united the country. What I am trying to tell you is that I’m not a fool. I’m not a fanatic. I’m just cold-blooded about this. I was to use the cow to bring out our Indianness.” Kurien could not, of course, agree with the RSS’ partial view of Indianness, nor the sheer lack of science in their arguments, but was still impressed by Golwalkar’s honesty and sincerity.
The committee had been set up in response to a considerable escalation of the issue in the ‘60s, on two fronts. The cow protection movement tried using the loophole of ‘age of useful life’ to push the states they were strong in to set very high ages, on the basis of studies conducted on animals in very special, ideal circumstances. This led to another case, Abdul Hakim Quraishi vs State of Bihar (1961) — one reason for the confusing number of petitioners named Quraishi is because it’s a common name in the community of kasais or butchers — where the Supreme Court struck down this tactic, agreeing that only the ages of average cases should be considered.
Stymied on this front, and also angered by the fact that there were states where cow slaughter bans could make no headway, the movement decided to take the political route via Jana Sangh. Congress politicians in states like UP and MP were successfully challenged on cow slaughter platforms, and emboldened by this, the movement decided to go directly to Parliament to demand a national ban. In November 1966, Indira Gandhi’s new government was challenged by a huge rally in Delhi that culminated in a march on Parliament which for the first time included the sadhus waving trishuls and spears.
InIndia After Gandhi Ramachandra Guha describes what happened next. Swami Rameshwaranand, a Jana Sangh MP suspended for unruly behavior, decided to inflame the crowd: “He asked the sadhus to gherao (surround) Parliament… At this point the Jana Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee appealed to the swami to withdraw his call. It was too late. As the sadhus surged towards Parliament’s gates, they were turned back by mounted police. A ding-dong battle ensued: tear-gas and rubber bullets on one side, sticks and stones on the other. As thick columns of smoke rose over the Houses of Parliament, the crowd retreated only to vent its anger on what lay in the way.”
Firing ensued, a few people were killed and for the first time since 1947 the army was called out on the streets of Delhi. In this anti-cow slaughter riot were presentiments of so many events to come, right down to Vajpayee’s convenient ineffectualness at critical times. Perhaps stunned by how far things had gone, the movement pulled back a bit, while the government offered palliative measures, like the appointment of the committee. In the chaotic years to come, between JP movement, Emergency and Janata Party, cow protection took a backseat, perhaps because the Jana Sangh saw the issue as useful for independent agitations, but less so when fighting campaigns in coalitions — another presentiment, perhaps, of the BJP’s view of the issue.
Instead, the campaign moved back to the courts, fighting incremental battles over issues like banning cow slaughter for ritual purposes, where it had increasing success, for example in State of West Bengal vs Ashutosh Lahiri (1994). Another example was the campaign against D.N. Jha, professor of history at University of Delhi whose book The Myth of the Holy Cow argued for the considerable evidence of beef eating in Indian antiquity. The situation is now complex: meat eating is on the rise, but the movement against it has also been making gains, in issues like the ban on foreign athletes eating beef during the Commonwealth Games, or cases like Hinsa Virodhak Sangh vs Mirza Moti Kuresh Jamat (2008) where the SC upheld a ban on butchers in Ahmedabad killing goats during the Jain festival Paryushan (in an odd historical coincidence, the judge who wrote that decision, Justice Markandey Katju, is the grandson of Kailash Nath Katju, chief minister of MP in 1962, who was one of the first Congress politicians to lose his seat, to a RSS member, in a battle based largely on cow slaughter).
Perhaps it is such gains that have helped fuel the Karnataka bill, which is the most sweeping yet. It plugs holes by specifically preventing the slaughter of all cattle and preventing their transport to another state. It takes steps towards answering the argument that such bans simply lead to the abandonment and starvation of old cattle — local authorities are now directed to provide for the welfare of old cattle, though it is unclear who will pick up the hefty tab for such schemes (the one truly risible part of the bill must be the short statement that this bill will involve no expenditure; this is either a lie or an expectation of failure). Most scarily of all, for the first time, I think, this bill extends its scope from cow slaughter to simple possession or consumption of beef. The police would now have the power to enter premises where they suspect anything contravening the act exists, a wide enough definition to extend from an abattoir to samples of beef biltong someone brings back from South Africa.
It is possible this bill, by its sheer ambition, marks a moment of overreach. In the past opposition has only come from those directly affected, like butchers, and not from wider society. But a coalition is emerging in Karnataka that aims to challenge it, built around minority groups, who see all too clearly the scope it gives for police harassment of Muslims, Christians and Dalits, along with industry organisations and even farmers. This, as Mr Shivasundar of the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike, one of the organisations opposing the bill, told me, has been the real breakthough: “Farmers need to sell old cattle in order to be able to buy new ones, but now they cannot do that, but even have to pay for their transport to the shelters. It is calculated to drive farmers into debt and suicide.”
In the past, after the cataclysmic events of 1966, political parties have usually avoided directly opposing the anti-cow slaughter movement, in order to avoid alienating Hindu votes. But Mr Shivasundar says that by defining the movement in anti-farmer terms, along with its blatantly anti-minority aspects, they are getting the opposition parties in Karnataka behind them. They also have hopes that the Governor may refuse to sign the bill, perhaps due to certain political compulsions, but also perhaps from his knowledge, coming from having been the longest serving Union Law Minister, of any dubious aspects of the bill, ranging from contravention of the original Quraishi guidelines (by including buffaloes) to how it undermines civil rights. “This bill is an attack on the food culture of this country,” says Mr Shivasundar firmly. It will be interesting to see if a campaign based on that argument can make headway against the incremental, but very real gains the anti-cow slaughter movement has made in all the years since Independence.
vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com
Scenes from the huge rally in Delhi in 1966 against the Indira Gandhi government that ended in a march on Parliament and violence
(Courtesy :
BY VIKRAM DOCTOR
HE FURORE over the allegedly illegal activities of the Reddy brothers, Karnataka’s politicians-cum-mining lords, the support they seem to have from state politicians and the attempts made by the activists, the media, the Lok Ayukta, and even the Governor, H.R. Bharadwaj, to bring them to book has overshadowed another interesting tussle going on in the state. This is over the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2010, which raises the stakes in the endless battle over cow slaughter in India in interesting ways.
This really is the one debate that never goes away (not least in this column!). It featured in the independence struggle where Mahatma Gandhi was both attracted by its ahimsa aspects, but distrustful of the aims of some of its strongest proponents, who seemed to be more concerned with harassing Muslims and Dalits rather than any consideration for cows. In the Constituent Assembly it was the subject of some bitter debates, only resolved by the fix of putting attempts to end cow slaughter among the Directive Principles of State Policy, but not as the law of the land.
Like many fixes, this worked then, but has led to much turmoil over time. Soon after independence several state legislatures passed bills banning cow slaughter, which landed up in the Supreme Court. In the case of Mohd. Hanif Quareshi vs the State of Bihar(1959), the Court, in the first of many verdicts it was to deliver on this issue, upheld a state’s right to ban slaughter of cows, meaning female cattle, but not the extension of the ban to buffaloes or male cattle beyond their age of useful life. This was a genuine attempt to find a compromise between, on the one hand, the needs of animal husbandry for culls of old animals and of the industries that used these carcasses, and on the other hand, the special cultural value placed on cows in India.
The problem was that few wanted any compromise. The meat lobby, it was alleged, would still slaughter cows and pass it off as buffalo meat, or transport animals to states like Kerala or West Bengal where cow slaughter was legal. For its part, the anti-cow slaughter lobby, as Gandhi had foreseen, was less interested in rational animal husbandry arguments than in using the issue for symbolic purposes. A surprisingly candid admission of this by M.S. Golwalkar, the head of the RSS, is recorded by Dr Verghese Kurien, the Amul head and architect of India’s dairy revolution in his autobiography I Too Had a Dream.
Kurien and Golwalkar were both members on a high power committee set up by the government to examine the issue. Kurien argued strongly for the dairy industry’s need for culls; Golwalkar was adamantly opposed to this, so it was rather to Kurien’s surprise that he found himself becoming friendly with the Hindu rightwing ideologue. He did not agree with Golwalkar’s methods, but could not deny the man’s patriotism or sincerity, and responding to this recognition, Golwalkar once told him the rationale behind the cow slaughter agitation.
Golwalkar said it had started as a simple way to embarrass the government. In the Nehru years the Hindu right was still suffering from association with Gandhi’s assassination and looking to make themselves relevant again. A cow slaughter ban petition was one tactic and Golwalkar visited UP to see how it was progressing. There he saw a woman who, after finishing her busy housework, set off in the blazing summer sun to get signatures. Golwalkar wondered what motivated her and “this is when I realised that the woman was actually doing it for her cow, which was her bread and butter, and I realised how much potential the cow has.”
Golwalkar felt the cow could be the symbol of the RSS’ vision of India: “I saw the cow has potential to unify the country — she symbolises the culture of
Bharat. So I tell you what, Kurien, you agree with me to ban cow slaughter on this committee, and I promise you, five years from that date, I will have united the country. What I am trying to tell you is that I’m not a fool. I’m not a fanatic. I’m just cold-blooded about this. I was to use the cow to bring out our Indianness.” Kurien could not, of course, agree with the RSS’ partial view of Indianness, nor the sheer lack of science in their arguments, but was still impressed by Golwalkar’s honesty and sincerity.
The committee had been set up in response to a considerable escalation of the issue in the ‘60s, on two fronts. The cow protection movement tried using the loophole of ‘age of useful life’ to push the states they were strong in to set very high ages, on the basis of studies conducted on animals in very special, ideal circumstances. This led to another case, Abdul Hakim Quraishi vs State of Bihar (1961) — one reason for the confusing number of petitioners named Quraishi is because it’s a common name in the community of kasais or butchers — where the Supreme Court struck down this tactic, agreeing that only the ages of average cases should be considered.
Stymied on this front, and also angered by the fact that there were states where cow slaughter bans could make no headway, the movement decided to take the political route via Jana Sangh. Congress politicians in states like UP and MP were successfully challenged on cow slaughter platforms, and emboldened by this, the movement decided to go directly to Parliament to demand a national ban. In November 1966, Indira Gandhi’s new government was challenged by a huge rally in Delhi that culminated in a march on Parliament which for the first time included the sadhus waving trishuls and spears.
InIndia After Gandhi Ramachandra Guha describes what happened next. Swami Rameshwaranand, a Jana Sangh MP suspended for unruly behavior, decided to inflame the crowd: “He asked the sadhus to gherao (surround) Parliament… At this point the Jana Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee appealed to the swami to withdraw his call. It was too late. As the sadhus surged towards Parliament’s gates, they were turned back by mounted police. A ding-dong battle ensued: tear-gas and rubber bullets on one side, sticks and stones on the other. As thick columns of smoke rose over the Houses of Parliament, the crowd retreated only to vent its anger on what lay in the way.”
Firing ensued, a few people were killed and for the first time since 1947 the army was called out on the streets of Delhi. In this anti-cow slaughter riot were presentiments of so many events to come, right down to Vajpayee’s convenient ineffectualness at critical times. Perhaps stunned by how far things had gone, the movement pulled back a bit, while the government offered palliative measures, like the appointment of the committee. In the chaotic years to come, between JP movement, Emergency and Janata Party, cow protection took a backseat, perhaps because the Jana Sangh saw the issue as useful for independent agitations, but less so when fighting campaigns in coalitions — another presentiment, perhaps, of the BJP’s view of the issue.
Instead, the campaign moved back to the courts, fighting incremental battles over issues like banning cow slaughter for ritual purposes, where it had increasing success, for example in State of West Bengal vs Ashutosh Lahiri (1994). Another example was the campaign against D.N. Jha, professor of history at University of Delhi whose book The Myth of the Holy Cow argued for the considerable evidence of beef eating in Indian antiquity. The situation is now complex: meat eating is on the rise, but the movement against it has also been making gains, in issues like the ban on foreign athletes eating beef during the Commonwealth Games, or cases like Hinsa Virodhak Sangh vs Mirza Moti Kuresh Jamat (2008) where the SC upheld a ban on butchers in Ahmedabad killing goats during the Jain festival Paryushan (in an odd historical coincidence, the judge who wrote that decision, Justice Markandey Katju, is the grandson of Kailash Nath Katju, chief minister of MP in 1962, who was one of the first Congress politicians to lose his seat, to a RSS member, in a battle based largely on cow slaughter).
Perhaps it is such gains that have helped fuel the Karnataka bill, which is the most sweeping yet. It plugs holes by specifically preventing the slaughter of all cattle and preventing their transport to another state. It takes steps towards answering the argument that such bans simply lead to the abandonment and starvation of old cattle — local authorities are now directed to provide for the welfare of old cattle, though it is unclear who will pick up the hefty tab for such schemes (the one truly risible part of the bill must be the short statement that this bill will involve no expenditure; this is either a lie or an expectation of failure). Most scarily of all, for the first time, I think, this bill extends its scope from cow slaughter to simple possession or consumption of beef. The police would now have the power to enter premises where they suspect anything contravening the act exists, a wide enough definition to extend from an abattoir to samples of beef biltong someone brings back from South Africa.
It is possible this bill, by its sheer ambition, marks a moment of overreach. In the past opposition has only come from those directly affected, like butchers, and not from wider society. But a coalition is emerging in Karnataka that aims to challenge it, built around minority groups, who see all too clearly the scope it gives for police harassment of Muslims, Christians and Dalits, along with industry organisations and even farmers. This, as Mr Shivasundar of the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike, one of the organisations opposing the bill, told me, has been the real breakthough: “Farmers need to sell old cattle in order to be able to buy new ones, but now they cannot do that, but even have to pay for their transport to the shelters. It is calculated to drive farmers into debt and suicide.”
In the past, after the cataclysmic events of 1966, political parties have usually avoided directly opposing the anti-cow slaughter movement, in order to avoid alienating Hindu votes. But Mr Shivasundar says that by defining the movement in anti-farmer terms, along with its blatantly anti-minority aspects, they are getting the opposition parties in Karnataka behind them. They also have hopes that the Governor may refuse to sign the bill, perhaps due to certain political compulsions, but also perhaps from his knowledge, coming from having been the longest serving Union Law Minister, of any dubious aspects of the bill, ranging from contravention of the original Quraishi guidelines (by including buffaloes) to how it undermines civil rights. “This bill is an attack on the food culture of this country,” says Mr Shivasundar firmly. It will be interesting to see if a campaign based on that argument can make headway against the incremental, but very real gains the anti-cow slaughter movement has made in all the years since Independence.
vikram.doctor@timesgroup.com
Scenes from the huge rally in Delhi in 1966 against the Indira Gandhi government that ended in a march on Parliament and violence
(Courtesy :
| The Economic Times Delhi; | Date: Jul 28, 2010; | Section: Frdm frm Economics; | Page: 32 |
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