“Whatever the majority wants should happen. That’s democracy, right?” said a friend to me the other day when we were sitting around in a group and the discussion took a few political detours into the question of beef eating and cow slaughter. It brought to my mind Dr B.R. Ambdedkar’s criticism of the “Divine Right of the Majority to rule[Read More…]
Source: India Ministry of Livestock,2019 Sources: Live Mint, a web portal news service,2019. Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the national election in 2014, India has seen an outbreak of religious hate crimes against Muslims, lower caste Hindus, and Christians. , with an average of one happening every[Read More…]
GUWAHATI, APRIL 9: In a shocking incident of hate crime reported from Assam’s Biswanath Charali headquarters of Biswanath district, about 240 km north-east of state capital Guwahati a sexagenarian skull capped bearded man identified Shaukat Ali was thrashed by an agitated mob for allegedly selling cooked beef at his eatery, stopped to go for namaz and forced to consume pork[Read More…]
When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw. -Nelson Mandela India has been bedeviled by a spate of gruesome lynchings. And at the epicenter of the country’s violent upheaval is the indolent cow which is considered sacred by Hindus .The targeted communities have lately[Read More…]
The second book from Countercurrents.org publishing is out. It is a book on the cow politics in India and the resultant lynchings that’s happening around the country. It is titled “The Political Economy Of Beef Ban”. This volume contains 57 articles on beef and the politics around it, how it has affected the social fabric of India and the people,[Read More…]
The more conservative a society, the more is its ritualistic overtone, and vice versa. In other words, by the very definition of conservatism – an ideology built around the idea to conserve – is heavily dependent on various rituals and practices epitomizing that ‘ism’ of conservation. Therefore, conservatism and ritualistic celebration are directly proportional to each other and not at[Read More…]
There have been several brutal lynchings of Muslims and beatings of dalits on the issue of Holy cow. Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri, Pehlu Khan in Mewat being just two of the cases from the long list. In these cases some pretext is cooked up to beat the cow traders or those consuming meat or beef. The incidence of Una shows that[Read More…]
This is an excerpt from Gandhi’s prayer discourse of July 25, 1947, from the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 88, as published online by the Gandhi Heritage Portal. Rajendra Babu tells me that he has received some 50,000 postcards, between 25,000 and 30,000 letters and many thousands of telegrams demanding a ban on cow-slaughter. I spoke to you about[Read More…]
Cows, cows and more chocolate brown cows. Driving on the highway that cuts through the vast Argentinian pampas, south of Buenos Aires, that’s all one sees everywhere around for miles and miles on end. Thousands of cows, peacefully grazing on grass or eating non-stop at the feedlots – huge dumps of artificial feed where they grow fatter and fatter- till[Read More…]
New Delhi | 26th June: National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) is shocked and horrified by the gruesome murder of sixteen year old Junaid Khan in running train enroute to Mathura from Delhi on 22nd June. This happened in public view inside a train where ordinary people were travelling to their respective destinations. Junaid and his three brothers were returning[Read More…]
No one could accuse the present Government of a lack of a sense of drama. The last few months in particular have witnessed one spectacular move after another – so completely unexpected that they have caught even the Government’s diehard supporters gasping. And each manoeuvre has led to a trail of shrill debates, speculations, analyses, protests, jubilation as to the[Read More…]
(RSS through the ruling BJP is aiming to turn the Great Republic of India into a “Cowistan” with the help of their Gau Rakhshaks who are India’s “Kaliban”!) The obsessive protection of the cow and the subsequent attacks on people having various professional activities connected with it especially the Muslim minorities and the Dalits have created a piquant[Read More…]
When I was in school we used to say a pledge in the morning assembly. It began this way, “India is my country. All Indians are my brothers and sisters….”. This was the India we dreamed of when we were children. But, is this the India we are living now? Distressing news are coming from all around India. From Kashmir[Read More…]
Please come out strongly against this illegal ban on cattle slaughter. Kindly translate your verbal assurances to concrete actions. Undertake a padyatra from Kashmir to Kanyakumari against the illegal, divisive law and uphold the secular value that the Congress professes.
There is no doubt the government of India has attempted to prohibit through the backdoor, beef consumption across the country through new rules made under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960. The rules per se do not explicitly ban cattle slaughter or beef consumption, but they ban the sale and purchase of cattle for slaughter in cattle markets,[Read More…]
The Economic Times reported that Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi told party leaders from minority communities in Karnataka to be prepared for polarisation efforts by the BJP in the run-up to the 2018 assembly polls. According to the report he said “We need to be ready to take on polarisation of Hindu votes in the upcoming elections.Let us be very[Read More…]
Jaipur — Rajasthan State Commission for Minorities has sought a factual report on a video that went viral on Thursday showing four Sikh men purportedly beaten up by local residents of Chainpura in Ajmer district.The 51-second video shows four members of Sikh community being abused and thrashed by a mob as people witnessing the incident filmed the entire episode…..three[Read More…]
Ever since the Rajasthan High Court judge made public, his suggestions on declaring the cow, the national animal of India solely based on his inner voice and also went a step further to enlighten us on his knowledge of the non-existence of sexual intercourse between peacocks and peahens, social media is in a frenzy with memes and jokes on the[Read More…]
Brothers ! Sisters ! Listen !
Unite and hasten
To counter cow vigilantes
Forced religious conversions
Voice right to dissent
And rights of women empowerment
Release of illegal detainees
Without speedy trial and justice
Around 25 people protesting the ‘beef ban’ in Bangalore were arrested and put under police custody today. About 500 people marching towards the Bangalore town hall were stopped by the police and at least 25 were arrested. Jagdish Chandra , New Socialist Alternative (CWI-India) , Balan (AICCTU) ,Shankar (Politburo member, CPIML), Narasimha Murthy ( Human Rights Defender) Rajan Chinnaiah (Karnatak[Read More…]
The reason that I care about this food issue, although I personally can eat beef any day of the week that I may please since I live in the USA, is really simple. It ultimately goes back to the underlying theme of this poem: “First they came …” is a poem written by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It[Read More…]
Last week, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has issued an anti-constitutional gazette notification– Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017 –banning cattle slaughter and introduced severe restrictions on the sale of cattle to prevent their killing. The order applicable to the whole of India, except the State of Jammu and Kashmir, says that[Read More…]
This is a brief account of what happened in the IIT Madras campus in the last two days. The central govt’s notification was a matter of serious discussion amongst students. On Sunday a group of students initiated the idea of holding a discussion on the issue, where cooked beef was also distributed. We shared the invite of the festival in[Read More…]
I wish the people in India the best of good fortune in this alarming situation taking place in India so as to end beef farming, the beef industry overall and beef consumption. What will the central government start to dictate next? Will it be clothing styles, lack of public schools for girls or people of lower castes, the diet that[Read More…]
The new rule notified under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PCA) Act of 1960 banning cattle trade across India is clear encroachment of states’ rights. It will end federalism and will be a death knell for farmers. It is a virtual beef ban across India and also will destroy the livelihood of millions of farmers. The states have to[Read More…]
My harvest of poems
will be winnowed.
if done deftly,
the lighter shallow poems
blow away in the wind
while the heavier, meatier poems,
fall back onto the tray,
to become the fire in my belly
like beef.
In the recent past, one has witnessed violence being increasingly inflicted by actors such as Gau Rakshaks, Anti Romeo squads and Hindu Yuva Vahini. Violence by Hindu senas, Ram senas, Bajrang dal was always there. These are extra-constitutional actors aiming to impose a culture through usage of physical violence. Under the current National regime and State regimes in BJP ruled[Read More…]
India is a mosaic of great cultures. Not now. The culture which we inherited from our founding fathers and martyrs who wanted to preserve the greatness would be ashamed to see India today. India today which is digital, India which is nuclear and India one of the fastest growing economies of the world is now also the land of[Read More…]
The crackdown on illegal abattoirs was one of the first decisions taken by Yogi Adityanath soon after taking over as Chief Minister of the most populous and politically crucial state of the country following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) resounding victory in the recently held assembly elections. The UP is the country’s largest meat exporting state having a business[Read More…]
One Pehlu Khan from Haryana came to the cattle fair in Jaipur to purchase a buffalo. He was a dairy farmer. In the fair he was impressed by high milk yielding Cow and bought that instead of his plan of buying a buffalo. On way back in Alwar ‘Go Rakshak’ (Protectors of Cow) attacked his group and mercilessly beat[Read More…]
Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) strongly condemns the manner in which our member Ms Bondita Acharya, a well known women’s activist from Jorhat, Assam, is being criminally intimidated, abused in sexual language, defamed and trolled on her Facebook account only because she expressed her personal opinion regarding eating of beef, a common practice in her state of[Read More…]
Madhavikutty, the renowned Malayalm writer, was ahead of her times. Here is a short story she wrote in Malayalam in the sixties. It foretells what’s happening in India now. One day, while a boy was picking up banana skin from the waste bin and eating it, a cow reached there and grabbed it from him. He pushed the cow[Read More…]
Three people, including a minor, was arrested on 5th of April for cooking beef. The news is not from the state of Uttar Pradesh or Chhattisgarh, where eating or possessing cattle meat is prohibited. Sadly, It is a news from the North Eastern part of India and to be precise, it is from Jorhat district of Assam. “They bought beef[Read More…]
One Kamal didi ( she signs as Kamal didi too) of the Rashtriya Mahila Gau Rakshak Mandal was trying to catch stray cows with the help of the nagar nigam to take them to the Gau shalas, when Qasim a cleaner boy from Rabbani Hotel came to throw garbage in an empty plot near the dustbin on Kanti Chandra road.[Read More…]
India’s beef ban politics has taken a turn for the bizarre with Haryana police have started collecting samples of Biryani sold in Mewat district, the states only Muslim dominated district. The biryani checks are taking place days ahead of Eid festival. The biryani checks have taken many by surprise asking whether the police should be focusing on other crimes in[Read More…]
“In these four years, I also saw with, some disquiet, forces of divisiveness and intolerance trying to raise their ugly head. Attacks on weaker sections that militate against our national ethos are aberrations that need to be dealt with firmly. The collective wisdom of our society and our polity gives me confidence that such forces will remain marginalized, and India’s[Read More…]
A BJP local leader in Karnataka who was transporting cows in a vehicle died after he was attacked allegedly by right wing Hindutva group called Hindu Jagrana Vedike. Praveen Poojary, 29, was traveling with a friend Akshay Devadiga when they were stopped and thrashed by men. Poojary died of his injuries in hospital four hours after the assault. Devadiga is[Read More…]
We have a Prime Minister who said that this government is for the Dalits, and the same Prime Minsiter says nothing when Dalits are publicly flogged by the gau rakshaks. Everybody knows on whose side he stands, but with his rhetoric he tries to convince the civilised world that he criticises the vigilantism that targets the Dalits
The Prime Minister came out with statements condemning the act of Cow vigilante groups. By stating that most of self styled cow protectors are anti-social elements, he tried to create a dichotomy that there are fake and real protectors. Fake protectors are into anti social activities, resort to violence, and ignore important issues such as cow deaths due to consumption[Read More…]
Narendra Modi’s high octane poll campaign was littered with the promise of Development, with a capital D. Big business, in India and abroad, had bought his promise too. And now, after a little more than 2 years old premiership, the developments under his watch have rattled most of them. The ‘developments’ were not the “development” they were looking for. Further,[Read More…]
One doesn’t often see a respected international media house asking a democratic republic’s prime minister to break his silence in an editorial. Even more rare is it to see this “silence” tagged with the adjective “shameful”. The New York Times did exactly that today, 4 August 2016. The editorial forewarns Mr. Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, of the bleak[Read More…]
The lesson on Cow is a popular lesson among School children. If School Children were asked to recite an essay on Cow in present times, it would go like this: Cow is a sacred animal for some Hindus. Cow is our new national animal. This is not yet made official. But our Government led by Sri. Narendra Modi ji has made[Read More…]
Gujarat is witnessing widespread protests following the incident at Una where seven Dalit youths were beaten up for skinning a dead cow on July 11. 16 members of the Dalit community, including local Congress leader Anil Madhad, attempted suicide in Saurashtra on Monday and Tuesday as a form of protest. Several suicide attempts were reported on Tuesday from Junagadh, Gondal,[Read More…]
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Our beloved K.P.Sasi is no more. Filmmaker, cartoonist, writer, mentor, friend and above all tireless activist championing the cause of every underdog, Sasi breathed his last, mid-afternoon this Christmas day – after battling a medical condition for months. I remember the last time I met him, almost exactly a month before he passed away, at the ayurvedic healing center in[Read More…]
