Adiya Aamir
‘Gai Hamaari Mata Hai’ does not mean the cow is everybody’s mom. It is a political slogan to muster votes and to cover up for the horrible manner in which Indians treat the cow.
Cows roam roads and streets in India, looking for morsels to satiate hunger but settle for plastic waste at garbage dumps. Many with ribs sticking out – liquid eyes ruminating at the dishonesty in Indians with their fake love for the cow.
UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath with cows is a daily sight in Lucknow newspapers. Some of the pictures he shares space with the cow are revealing. In them he keeps his distance from the cow, may be because the ground is soaked with cow urine and stepping on cow urine is not good optics.
Uttar Pradesh is a state which has the cow-ambulance and the Yogi is the only chief minister who sets by example his reverence for the cow. And like the animal he reveres, Yogi has shown tremendous restraint and not once has he uttered a threat to kill or maim using the cow as an excuse.
But not Gyan Dev Ahuja, BJP MLA from Alwar, Rajasthan, who the other week reportedly said that if someone engages in cow smuggling or slaughters a cow, he (the someone) will be killed. Period.
Being a straight shooter, he told a national newspaper, “Mera toh seedha seedha kehna hai ki gautaskari aur gaukashi karoge to yu hi maroge. The cow is our mother.”
Ahuja held out that bovine threat after a man named Zakir was beaten to a pulp by a mob in Alwar because he was taken for a cow smuggler. Not surprisingly, as happens in India, the police arrested Zakir and none of those who set upon him to beat him to a pulp. Recollect that after dairy farmer and cattle trader Pehlu Khan was murdered by a mob of cow vigilante, his sons were arrested and not his killers.
Reportedly Ahuja point-blank denied mob beat up Zakir. “The truck overturned, resulting in the injuries… SHO has told me people didn’t beat him. He was injured because the vehicle overturned,” the newspaper quoted him.
According to reliable last eight-year data on cow-related hate crimes, the number of such crimes was highest in 2017. Eleven people were killed and of those killed, 86 percent were Muslim.
Ahuja is a serial headline-maker. In April 2015, when Pehlu Khan was lynched, Ahuja, with an impressive spread of moustache, had said that he had no regret or remorse. “We should not take law into our hands. But we have no regret over his death because those who are cow-smugglers are cow-killers. Sinners like them have met this fate earlier and will continue to do so,” he said.
Ahuja is otherwise also in a class by himself. Apart from abhorring alleged cow smugglers, he also cannot suffer smokers and non-vegetarians. And he reads in used condoms what some fortune tellers read in the dregs of tea leaves. In February 2016, he said 3,000 condoms are used in the JNU campus every night – “misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters.”
Talking of the cow, isn’t it revealing that the cow vigilante appears to have gone on leave? After the spurt of killings of innocent people pulled out of “cow trucks” in some north Indian states earlier this year, the cow vigilante has disappeared. Where? That is a question the cow must be ruminating on.
And it is at such a time of relative peace that Ahuja has to come up with his “seedha-saadha” threat to kill cow smugglers. It would be good for everybody if he takes a leaf from Yogi Adityanath’s cow-book and photograph himself with cows making sure that he does not step on spilled cow urine. (IPA Service)
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