Another man lynched to death, this time in Himachal Pradesh.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The beef row in India doesn’t seem like ending anytime soon as fresh controversies pile up each day with right-wing Hindu bigots and political leaders making insensitive and lame comments over the issue.
In an interview given to The Indian Express, the Chief Minister of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, said that Muslims can stay in India if they are ready to give up the habit of eating beef.
Khattar was quoted by The Indian Express saying, “Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef. The cow is an article of faith here.”
The discussion over the beef fired up after a 50-year-old Muslim man was lynched to death by a mob in Dadri, Utter Pradesh, for allegedly slaughtering and eating a cow, which is considered as a sacred animal by Hindus. A detailed forensic analysis of the sampled meat collected from the house of the victim confirmed that the flesh was of a lamb and not from a cow.
Since the lynching incident in UP, media and political parties have been using the Dadri case as a bait to target the Modi-led right-wing BJP government. With BJP’s Manohar Lal Khattar new remark on how people should conduct their food habits in a free society like India, the ruling BJP has once again found itself groping for shelter.
The Haryana CM also added, “freedom of one person is only to the extent that it is not hurting another person.”
He continued, “Eating beef hurts the sentiments of another community, even constitutionally you cannot do this. The constitution says you cannot do something that offends me, I cannot do something that offends you.”
He added: “They can be Muslim even after they stop eating beef, can’t they? It is written nowhere that Muslims have to eat beef, nor is it written anywhere in Christianity that they have to eat beef,” he said.
Ironically, according to the US department of Agriculture, India is the world’s top exporter of buffalo meat. It is estimated that by the end of 2015 India will export 2.4 million tonnes of beef, a step ahead of Brazil, which exports 2 million tons.
Adding to the row, a truck driver in Himachal Pradesh was lynched to death by a mob after he, along with four other accomplices, tried to smuggle cattle on Friday.
According to police, the five cattle smugglers were spotted by the villagers while trying to flee and were manhandled mercilessly to an extent that one of them succumbed to injuries.
The police said that a case has been registered under the section 302 of IPC for murder after a close relative of Noman, the deceased driver, filed a complaint in the Pachhad police station. The body of Noman has been sent for post-mortem as media suspect the involvement of Bajrang Dal activists in the lynching.
The four accused, Mohammed Nishu (37), driver of the truck, Guljar (22), Salman (20) and Gulfam (24), all residents of village Rampur of Saharanpur district, have been booked under different sections of Cruelty against Animals Act.