On 2 October last year, a day before I was to leave my hometown Supaul, a small town in northern Bihar, for Delhi, my mother was pleasantly surprised and unbelieving in my refusal to take Bakrid’s meat (basically mutton and chicken) for my younger brother and friends in Delhi, as I would usually do the years before. She was particularly not happy with my behaviour because this had been a practice for almost a decade now.
She was quite aware of how my friends, both Muslims and non-Muslims, would eagerly wait for my arrival after Bakrid, in order to have their annual share of good meat. But I was persistent this time as I felt that the times were not good to carry any meat, let alone beef, given that Akhlaq had just been killed a few days before on the mere suspicion of storing beef in his fridge. Naturally, I was taken aback by the incident and thought it best to avoid carrying any in such circumstances.
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The Dadri Effect
I was overtly cautious
because there was no assurance that in the event of a bag search and before it
could be proved that the meat wasn’t beef, but mutton or chicken, I could have already been beaten by vigilante groups or harassed by the police. However, when I broke this news to my friends
through Facebook, informing them through a post that I would not be bringing
meat because of the ‘Dadri effect’, many thought that I was joking.
Some even felt that I was getting paranoid unnecessarily because the Dadri incident was an exception and that it shouldn’t demoralise the Muslims from their cultural and religious practices. But a few also felt that it was a necessary precaution on my part, going by the lines, “precaution is always better than cure”.
Legitimising Cow Vigilantism
What I feared in October last year turned out to be a reality this year. On 13 January, a Muslim couple was beaten up in Madhya Pradesh while travelling in a train on the suspicion of carrying beef. According to the state police, the “couple was among passengers assaulted by at least seven members of the Gauraksha Samiti at Khirkiya railway station, in Harda district of Madhya Pradesh, when they objected to their luggage being searched on suspicion that they were carrying beef”.
Hence, when I recently heard the news of biryani testing by the Haryana Police, I was hardly surprised. To me, irrespective of how bizarre this process of testing sounded, it was nothing, but a visible legitimisation by the Haryana government to what was being religiously practiced for long by vigilante groups, better known as Gau Rakshak Dals. It is a well-established fact that over the years, especially in states like Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, the state has nurtured the gau rakshaks in the name of protecting Gau Mata.
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Unjustified Laws
However, the crucial
difference is that the state has now taken it upon itself to play the role of
vigilante, thanks to draconian legislations like the Gauvansh Sanrakshan and
Gausamvardhan (Cow Protection and Development) Bill 2015 passed by the Haryana
Assembly on 16 March, 2015, which not only bans the slaughtering of cows and the
sale of beef in the state but also its import. The amendments in the
Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act, 1976 also requires special mention here. Fortunately,
unlike Haryana, later a ruling by the Bombay High Court allowed consumption and
export of beef.
The fundamental problem with laws like these is that they make almost every meat eating persona suspect, especially those belonging to religious minority communities, the Dalits and Adivasis.
Naturally, these laws have also created a sense of fear amongst the meat eaters, apart from rendering lakhs of people whose livelihood was/is dependent on it, jobless in some way or the other.
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Criminalising Food Habits
The recent report of two
Muslim women being allegedly gangraped in Mewat (Haryana), and one claiming
that the accused asked her if she had consumed beef hints at the extent to
which the vigilantes can go. Moreover, news is also coming in that after the
testing drive, a “deep sense of terror and fear stalks Mewat in Haryana, the
only district where there is a sizeable Muslim community in the state”.
Not just in Haryana, this has happened and continues to haunt the states of Gujarat, Jharkhand, Himachal and North East as well. If you ask me if I would consider carrying meat this year, my answer would be a big no. The situation, instead of improving, has only worsened. It is ironic to note that those vulnerable are not protected and those committing crimes are given a free hand and state patronage.
In short, law is the problem more than anything because it criminalises food habits and preferences of a large section of Indians.
Hence, as long as arbitrary and archaic laws and provisions like these exist, there will be a reign of terror, killings, harassment and other forms of subjugation. Unless we get rid of these, no dramatic changes are going to take place. The sooner we get rid of these laws, the better. Just saying there are some bad gau rakshaks is not going to solve the problem. Because the perpetrators are precisely aware that they have the backing of not just their political masters, but law as well.
By the way, let me wish you a not so Happy Bakrid ! Not so happy because what is Eid if I can’t feed my friends meat prepared by my mother.
(Mahtab Alam is an activist and writer. He tweets @MahtabNama. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
Also read: Is It Really About Beef, Though?
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