COW SLAUGHTER TO BE
PUNISHABLE BY LIFE SENTENCE IN GUJARAT
The leader of an Indian state has
announced that slaughtering cows and transporting beef will soon be punishable
by a life sentence, the harshest penalty yet for crimes against the revered
animal in the Hindu-majority country.The chief minister of Gujarat, Vijay
Rupani, said his government would introduce a bill in the next week to bolster
existing laws against butchering cows and related crimes. The current
punishment is a Rs50,000 fine (£622) and up to seven years in jail.
“We want to make this law more
strict,” said Rupani, a member of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), a Hindu
nationalist party whose elected officials – including the Indian prime
minister, Narendra Modi – have long championed a national ban on beef consumption.“In
the bill, we will make a provision wherein people found involved in
cow-slaughtering as well as transportation of beef will be punished with life
imprisonment,” Rupani told a gathering at a Hindu social organisation. “Their
vehicles too will be seized permanently.”
A number of BJP-led states have
extended bans or tightened punishments against cow slaughter since Modi became
prime minister in 2014. The former Gujarat chief minister was elected on a
platform that included a vow to outlaw it.Killing cows or transporting beef in
states such as Haryana, Jharkand or Jammu and Kashmir is punishable by large
fines and up to 10 years’ prison. Beef consumption is permitted in only eight
of India’s 29 states and
Most Hindus honour
cows as the embodiment of the principle of non-violence and idealise the animal
as a selfless, nourishing mother.But attitudes towards beef consumption are not
uniform across the country. Some southern Indian Hindus regularly eat beef, as
do Muslims and members of less socially dominant castes who regard the animal
as a cheap source of protein.Cow protection has been a
trigger for sectarian violence throughout modern Indian history and a
resurgence in recent years has been linked to an increasingly assertive Hindu
nationalist movement.
A Muslim villager from the
outskirts of Delhi was lynched in September 2015 after being accused of storing beef in his freezer, a murder that government
ministers were accused of underplaying.Bands of self-styled “cow
protectors” have sprung up in northern India, and have been accused of fomenting
sectarian violence and carrying out vigilantism.Cow-protection gangs were
rebuked by Modi last year after videos emerged of their members flogging young
Dalits. The least powerful group in the caste hierarchy is traditionally
enlisted to dispose of dead cows.
Prof. John Kurakar
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