Eight months after it shocked the world, the case of the beating to death of Mohammad Akhlaq, infamously known as the Dadri lynching, gets dredged up again, and this time for probably more dubious reasons than were touted earlier.

A defence lawyer has allegedly circulated a handwritten report obtained from the government’s forensic laboratory in Mathura, dated October 3, 2015, stating that the meat sample it tested belonged to a ‘cow or its progeny.’ And the legend is that the meat sample was taken from Akhlaq’s fridge!

This is notwithstanding the fact that SSP Kiran S of Gautam Budh Nagar station, (who incidentally was transferred on June 1, 2016) confirmed to The Times of India that no meat was found in the Akhlaq home and that only one sample was collected from a street on September 29, 2015 by station officer SK Singh in the presence of three witnesses. This sample was sent to the state veterinary hospital in Gautam Budh Nagar where the deputy chief veterinary officer, while recommending a forensic examination, confirmed that the sample appeared to be mutton.

This new development, though dubious, has offered renewed scope for those inclined to rake up sensitive issues and promote polarization for reasons of political expediency. There is vigorous clamor for filing of an FIR against the Akhlaq family by the relatives of those who were arrested for the lynching and some politicians who are sitting BJP MPs in the current NDA government.

Most are notorious for not much else on their political scorecard except the stoking of communal issues. Among them are BJP leader Sanjay Rana, whose son and nephew are in jail for participating in the killing. Even though his being an MP implies that he is supposed to be an upholder of the law, Rana participated in a mahapanchayat called this week by Bisada villagers in spite of prohibitory orders which forbade any gathering in the area that has once again become communally sensitive. BJP MP Yogi Adityanath, who has often been censured by his party for crude utterances, has also joined issue ferociously. The rest of the right wing brigade, comprising of BJP MPs and sympathizers have taken to social media like Twitter and Facebook to once again whip up mob frenzy even though they know that the case before the courts is not about proof of beef but about the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq.

Legal experts contend that there are no grounds for the filing of an FIR against the Akhlaq family, that too on the basis of a forensic report on a piece of meat picked up from a street. They see it more as a ploy by family members of the accused and local politicians who wish to help the killers escape punishment for beating a man to death.

It may be recalled that on the night of September 28, 2015, 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq, a resident of Bisada village in Uttar Pradesh, was dragged out of his home and beaten to death by a mob that comprised of his neighbors and other villagers who were present at some sort of religious event in the area.

Akhlaq was lynched on the suspicion of having cooked and consumed beef. His son and other family members who tried to intervene and save him from the frenzied mob were also attacked. While the son sustained injuries that required his being admitted to a hospital for treatment, the bruises on others were deemed too trivial to be placed on record and it was suggested that they should rather be grateful for being allowed to live at all.

It subsequently emerged that a local rabble rouser who was present at the religious function in a temple coerced the organizers into allowing him to make an announcement over the public address system, where he spoke about beef lying in the Akhlaq home and also incited the mob to go across and teach the family a lesson.

The police who arrived much after the bloodletting have clearly recorded that they found no meat at the Akhlaq home and had collected a sample of meat lying on the street at a junction even though they could not establish the connection between the sample and the Akhlaqs.

Union Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma tried to pass of the Dadri lynching as a misunderstanding and an accident while Union Minister (and former Army General) VK Singh tried to play down the incident by stating ‘more terrible incidents have taken place in the country but no one protested in this manner.’

BJP MP Tarun Vijay, local BJP leaders Vichitra Tomar and Nawab Singh Nagar, BJP district president Thakur Harish Singh, vice-president of BJP’s western UP

unit Shrichand Sharma are on record for having made hostile remarks, further adding to tensions in the area.
The trend to attack and assault people and even kill them on suspicion that they have consumed or are transporting beef has only increased over the years, thanks to the police and the judiciary being wary of ‘offending the religious sentiments’ of the attackers or murderers.

A few days after the Dadri lynching, riots erupted in Agra and four Muslims were brutally beaten up for allegedly skinning a cow. Subsequent police investigations revealed that the dead cow had been handed over for disposal to the Muslims by its Hindu owner, and the culprit was a relative who knew about this fact but had still instigated a mob.

Sometime later, four BJP legislators attacked a sitting J&K MLA inside the Assembly over his alleged beef party. BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj, who has been censured time and again for being an embarrassment to his party, referred to the four BJP legislators as ‘true sons of Bharat mata.’

It was around that time that noted artists, reputed writers and film personalities, disturbed by what they had begun to perceive was an atmosphere of intolerance in the country, began to return their national awards in protest against the government’s reluctance or inability to reign in violently elements from within and without the party.

The reaction to this by various BJP leaders and ministers in the government and even the Prime Minister was not unexpected. Most of those returning their awards or expressing their disillusionment were branded as traitors and anti-nationals and asked to go to Pakistan.

Shockingly, the only reaction to Akhlaq’s lynching from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pre-occupied with campaigning in the state of Bihar, was that Hindus and Muslims should fight poverty and not each other. Pushed for further comment on the deteriorating law and order situation, he stated, ‘it is bad but we cannot be blamed for it.’

But it was clear as to which side of the debate he was in when reacting to a remark by former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad Yadav, who said that it was wrong to kill

someone for their food habits and that some Hindus also ate beef. Speaking at a rally in Munger, the PM tried to stoke trouble by suggesting that Lalu had insulted the Yadavs by commenting on their food habits. By this remark, Modi himself unwittingly inferred that beef eating was bad.

‘Killing cannot be justified but the followers of religions, which have come from outside the geographical and cultural boundaries of India, must understand and accept the 5,000-year-old civilisational tradition and philosophy of India. It’s not about following Hinduism, it’s about being Indian,” said Muralidhar Rao, a BJP national general secretary to India Today.

The government machinery, in a bid to counter the growing dissent, got former actors-turned-BJP luminaries to criticize and belittle some of the country’s finest artists, writers and actors for expressing their concern over the atmosphere of intolerance. A solidarity march was organized by one such pro-government luminary but such was the vitiated atmosphere that brooked no criticism of the leaders and their shortcomings that a female journalist covering the rally was brazenly heckled and molested by protesters.

Alok Prasanna Kumar, research director at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a non-profit organization contends, ‘There is no national law on cow slaughter. There is no ban in most of the North East, Kerala and Lakshadweep, though animals below 10 years of age cannot be killed. Assam, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu require a ‘fit for slaughter’ certificate for animals old and of no economic use. Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Goa ban cow slaughter and require a certificate for other animals. On most other states, slaughter of ‘cow and its progeny’ including bulls and bullocks of all ages is fully banned.

The Maharashtra government banned the sale and consumption of beef in the state. The law it passed in March 2015 was the strictest with offenders facing up to five years imprisonment or Rs.10,000 fine or both for slaughter, sale, possession, consumption and export of the cow genus. The move has since been stalled by the courts. However, the grey areas and ambiguities in the law, the pliability of the police compounded with the unreasonable violence of the vigilantes, has opened the doors to harassment of meat traders by way of seizure of their consignments, being illegally stopped and their roughed up by activists or being detained by bribe seeking cops.

The scope for manipulation of evidence, where mutton or buffalo meat can
subsequently get branded as beef from ‘cow or its progeny’ has scared off many traders and the business, reportedly a multi-crore activity, is suffering almost everywhere in the country.

Death and violence continue to stalk those still involved in the meat trade, and those who eat it, regardless of whether it happens to be from a source other than a ‘cow or its progeny,’ because prejudice against meat eating itself is building up as part of the new religious assertiveness under the RSS-backed Modi government and a ‘nationalistic resurgence’ where the cow enjoys renewed status as gau mata.

In October last year in Shimla, suspected Bajrang Dal activists beat a truck driver to death over allegations of cattle smuggling.

In May this year in Rajasthan’s Chittorgarh district, four Kashmiri students who had sneaked meat into their Mewar University hostel room were beaten up by a mob and later arrested by the Rajasthan police. Tests confirmed that the meat was not beef, which meant the offence was a mere violation of rules which forbade consumption of non-vegetarian food inside the institution. But so much frenzy was drummed up by BJP leaders that platoons of police had to stand guard in the area to prevent escalation of violence.

In the same month in Jharkhand’s Latehar district, two Muslim cowherds who were moving their eight buffaloes were brutally beaten up by cow protection vigilantes and hanged to death from a tree.

Overzealous vigilantes have been attacking even those transporting goats during the Eid seasons under the pretext of preventing animal cruelty, with police actively goading them on or standing by as mute spectators. Instances of seizures of meat being ferried for sale or even for export have increased with the states and their police not enforcing existing rules against the illegal vigilantism.

The first week of June has again seen the ugly side of vigilantism and police complicity in BJP-ruled Rajasthan, where a mob of around 150 Bajrang Dal goons and gau raksha samiti members stopped two trucks in Pratapgarh district and beat up three persons for ‘transporting cows.’

Horrific images of one of the victims lying naked on the ground with his assaulters, who include a cop, standing with their feet upon his nude body, have appeared in
newspapers and electronic networks all over the world.

A blanketed thought process regarding cattle and their slaughter has rendered this nation too emotionally unstable to see the catastrophic economic downside. There was a healthy relationship with cattle traders when bullocks and milch cows that were past their productive prime were sold off by the farmers or owners and new healthy livestock would be purchased from the proceeds of such sales. With the beef ban, most rural folk are stuck with cattle they were better off without, and have to make provisions for their fodder and water in a scenario where the people themselves are facing starvation amidst extreme drought conditions, with food and water scarce or already unavailable.

In Maharashtra, a farmer buys a bullock for anywhere between Rs.35,000 and Rs.50,000, and after it ages he sells it off to traders for anywhere between Rs.15,000 to Rs.20,000. The money generated from the sale serves to offset the cost to be paid for a new bullock. But with the beef ban, he can no longer sell the old bullock.

This is where the disaster gets compounded. Each animal needs to eats 35 to 50 kilograms of fodder each day and drinks 60 to 70 litres of water. The cost incurred in looking after an unproductive bullock turns out to be approximately Rs.39,366  per annum. The 1.18 million unproductive bullocks in the state are maintained at a cost of Rs.4,677 crore per annum!

Prior to this, the used cattle market in Maharashtra yielded a turnover of Rs.1,180 crore per year, but the government is too steeped in its agenda to think on behalf of the farmer saddled with mounting debts and the many mouths to feed now including those of animals he cannot get rid of.

The BJP-led Central and state governments have failed to stop the sense of desperation which they had promised to eradicate after coming to power and there has been a record increase in the numbers of farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra, with figures too sketchy from other parts of the country. The cattle are likewise dying of thirst and starvation because the several schemes touted for their care and welfare have remained largely on paper only, with some token efforts by a few gau raksha outfits and NGOs managing to reach but a miniscule percentage of the
suffering cattle. The betrayed farmers, many of who have migrated with their families to cities to escape death by thirst and starvation, have reluctantly released
their animals into the countryside to fend for themselves, and emaciated carcasses are a common sight in rural Maharashtra.

The governments at the Centre and the states are looking away from this tragedy just as determinedly as they have been looking away from the tragedy of farmers’ suicides for the past two years.

The ultimate impact on the farmers and even on those involved in the trades of meat and leather has yet to be quantified. But not much hope is expressed by observers because the current political dispensation has been in a denial mode all along and will continue to do so until future election results teach it that it should have done otherwise.

Currently, the courts have allowed beef slaughtered outside Maharashtra to be brought in for sale and consumption by citizens, but hotels and other establishments have not yet taken any initiative to acquire such produce because of the fear of harassment and extortion by right wing fundamentalists and by police seeking pecuniary gratification.

Most vigilantes, quite a few of who belong to RSS-affiliated organizations, see the eating of beef from ‘cows and their progeny’ as offending their religious sentiments. However, they have no sentiments for the cows, calves and bullocks starving to death in the countryside even as a few smugly believe that the government is doing something for the cattle there. They also have no qualms over the slaughter of buffaloes and pigs, or the lives of millions of chicken and fish that routinely end up on Indian dinner tables cutting across all religions.

According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, figures for export of buffalo meat under the BJP government crossed 2.4 million tons in 2014-15, which constitutes 23.5 per cent of the global beef exports. The meat, valued at Rs.30,000 crore, reaches 65 countries including Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The ban on consumption of beef has a gassy environmental downside. All cattle, including cows, and also sheep and goats, are major contributors to greenhouse gases, as they excrete high quantities of methane. Methane traps 21 more times
heat than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to increased global warming.

While India’s population of cows and bulls is estimated at 190.9 million, its water-buffalo population is around 108.7 million. Add to that our goats, camels, horses and other such animals and you have a half-a-billion livestock population accounting to more than a sixth of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s estimated livestock.

A report carried last year in the Asian-Australian Journal of Animal Science details that India’s livestock annually produces 14.32 million tons of greenhouse gases, which is 15 per cent of the global total!

While we have seen the economical and the environmental downsides of our bans, the comic turn comes from a recent 21-state survey which debunks the perceived religious correlation to vegetarianism: More than 76 per cent of Indians are non-vegetarian.

12 states have between 75 to 99 per cent of their citizens feasting on non-vegetarian fare, with as many as 6 states having 97 to 99 per cent indulging in it.

5 states (including Maharashtra) have more than half their populations eating non-vegetarian food with Madhya Pradesh at 51.1 per cent and Jammu & Kashmir at (surprisingly modest) 69 per cent.

40 per cent of Gujaratis are non-vegetarian, while more than quarter (27 per cent)  of the Rajasthani population savors non-vegetarian fare.

Is it just a case of one man’s meat is another man’s poison?

By Robin Shukla