Curse Of The Holy Cow

Bajrang Dal men strip and beat in public two Muslims and a Dalit for killing a cow. Karnataka quietly watches. SANJANA reports

" God? I think God is on holiday or has run away."

– Kunimaydu, 61 years old

ON MARCH 4, 2008, two Muslims and a Dalit were stripped, beaten mercilessly and publicly humiliated by Bajrang Dal activists in Shantipura in Karnataka's Chikmaglur district. The three had been declared guilty of having killed a cow. Around 500 people watched for over two hours as the mob attacked Kunimaydu KA, Bawa K. and Jayaram K. Says a bitter Kunimaydu, 'Most of the boys who attacked me were half my age.'

Earlier in the day Kunimaydu had purchased a cow, intending to slaughter it for meat as part of a family celebration. The fact that he refused to deny this incensed the Bajrang Dal brigade even more. But it was Jayaram, a daily wage worker, who faced the brunt of the attack. Being a Dalit and hence a supposed 'Hindu', his mere presence on the farm was collusion enough. He had betrayed Hindus all over Karnataka, claimed the Bajrangis. ' They used absolutely filthy language... even dogs are shown more mercy. Jayaram had nothing to do with the meat,' says Bawa, blinking hard to avoid the tears. Stripped, the three men were forced to march to the centre of the village with the meat on their heads. The beatings continued there.

Kunimaydu’s neighbour Sundaresh Gowda led the attack. ' He was the one who sneaked into the house from the back door. He was looking for the meat, even as he abused Muslims in general. I fell at his feet and asked him to spare us,” recounts Kunimaydu. Sundaresh only whistled for others to join in. “This boy grew up in my vicinity. His grandfather and I were good friends. Now that he is a Bajrang Dal leader, he doesn’t remember his past,” says Kunimaydu. What happened in Shantipura is only a reminder of the rapid communal polarisation taking place in Karnataka. Two days after the Shantipura incident, a hotel-owner in the nearby town of Mudigere was threatened by the Bajrang Dal for serving beef at his hotel.

A couple of days later, Helen Mary, a school prinicipal, was attacked by the Bajrang Dal on charges of attempting to forcibly convert students. Ghouse Mohiuddin, a local activist with the Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum, says Shantipura is the first time that the Sangh Parivar has attacked a Dalit in the state for killing a cow. “Otherwise, a daily scan of local newspapers in the region will show at least one communal incident every day.”

THE BATTLELINES between the saffron brigade and those who consume beef and trade in cattle have been drawn for a long while now. October 2006 saw fullfledged riots rocking Mangalore, BC Road, Farangipet, Ullal and other towns in coastal Karnataka for over three days. The immediate spark for the riots were rumours that a Muslim trader who was driving a tempo with cows for slaughter had knocked down a Hindu woman. In March 2005, in Adi Udupi, a town in coastal Karnataka, two Muslims were attacked for transporting cows for slaughter — they were stripped, paraded naked and beaten mercilessly for over four hours before 400 onlookers.

The Karnataka Prevention of Cow Slaughter and Cattle Preservation Act (Cow Slaughter Legislation) was passed in 1964, though amended several times over. The Act does not completely ban cow slaughter but does lay down strict guidelines — cows can be slaughtered following an official certification that “the animal is over 12 years old, has become permanently incapacitated for breeding, draught or giving milk due to injury, deformity or any other cause.”

Mahesh Kumar, an activist with the Peoples’ Law Forum, says there is a need to look afresh at the cow slaughter law. “Right now the argument is based on two facts — that the sacrifice of a cow is not a religious mandate for Muslims and that killing a cow offends a particular community’s religious sentiments. Why do we have to prove religious mandate? Why aren’t social practices taken into account? Also, if members of a community claiming to be hurt by beef-eating consume beef themselves, it is a bit hypocritical for them to cast judgements on others,” he says. The law aside, the Sangh Parivar forgets that the Vajpayee-led NDA government itself recommended a removal of the ban on beef export as part of the Tenth Five Year Plan proposal in 2002. It had allocated Rs 5,137 crore to modernise slaughterhouses across the country.

There is hardly any dispute that Muslims are not the only community that consumes beef. Many Hindus eat beef and have always done so, a fact that is well documented in historian DN Jha’s 2001 book, The Myth of the Holy Cow. This is a question that the Sangh Parivar does not want to address. The violence instigated by the Sangh Parivar comes at a time when the BJP has been trying to reinvent itself as a party focused on development issues. Ahead of the Assembly elections in May, the violence practised by its allied outfits and its avowed development plank pose a contradiction difficult to ignore.

WRITER'S EMAIL:
sanjana@tehelka.com