Right from “Pushpa, I hate tears”, Rajesh Khanna’s famous dialogue in Amar Prem, to peddling Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo with the tag-line ‘No More Tears’ as the perfect contraceptive for peahens, the social media has been having a field day. Twitter, in particular, which tests your ability to say something witty, relevant or irreverent in just 140 characters, simply loved the parting shot the Rajasthan High Court Judge, Mahesh Chandra Sharma, gave on his retirement day.

His theory: peacocks don’t have sex, the peahen becomes pregnant by drinking tears of the peacock. In the face of the storm of ridicule that broke out, Justice Sharma remained defiant, maintaining that everything didn’t need scientific evidence; what he had stated was mentioned in “religious texts”.

Earlier, the same judge, while delivering a judgement, had expressed the voice of his “conscience”, when he recommended that the cow be made the National Animal, and killing it should be punishable by life imprisonment. He said the cow represents “33 crore gods and goddesses; it inhales and exhales oxygen, it is almost like a hospital in itself; drinking cow urine washes off sins of past life; gau mutra keeps liver, brain and heart healthy; cow dung keeps away radiation.”

Peacock and bull stories

While our Whatsapp is flooded with forwards about peacocks and their mating habits, and jokes/cartoons related to cows, the humour leaves you troubled. One grim cartoon displayed a mammoth cow seated atop our Parliament building, triggering sadness at what we are doing to our country. The harsher criticism describes telling people what to eat “food fascism” or “dietary profiling”.

But while the peacock farce has been dismissed with the contempt it deserves, the cow debate continues. It was chilling to hear some obscure sadhvi from Rajasthan justifying the lynching in the name of gau raksha . She repeatedly asked on TV, “ Aapne dekha hei, woh kitni berehmi se gau mata ko kattey hei? (Have you seen with what cruelty they cut gau mata ?). She was in no mood to listen to the explanation that the two could not be equated; cattle slaughtered to serve the food habits of people couldn’t be compared to the lynching and murder of people for eating beef.

Cattle slaughter has been a sensitive issue in India; 18 States have banned the slaughter of cows for long years, but suddenly cow vigilantes have become active, and are displaying frightening rage to hunt down traders and eaters of beef.

The cow is suddenly occupying so much of our mindspace that now the Centre is mulling Aadhaar-like IDs for cows, and Jharkhand has taken an enthusiastic lead here. By April-end, the State had had tagged over 12,000 cows with 12-digit unique identification numbers to “prevent illegal transportation of cattle, improve their milk yield and monitor their health.”

The pain of those who worship the cow as a mother is understandable. But against this segment of society, there are others, in the North Eastern States, or southern States such as Kerala, where cow slaughter is not banned and eating beef is not illegal.

Shameful bullying

The Centre’s latest rules regulating the sale of animals for slaughter has kicked up a huge row as this will adversely affect farmers who sell only cattle which has stopped giving milk, or is too old and infirm for any use. Forget meddling in people’s eating habits, coercing the farmer or making it difficult to sell his livestock that is no longer of any economic use to him will only aggravate the already endangered and fragile farm income systems.

Add to this the shameful bullying that is going on by the cow vigilantes, and it is clear that all is not well in India vis-à-vis the basic freedoms that any civilised country gives its citizens. Take Tamil Nadu, where cow slaughter has been banned from 1976. While in grotesque development, a calf was publicly slaughtered in Kerala to defy the restrictions on the sale of animals for slaughter Tamil Nadu too has protested against the latest missive from the Centre, seen as an indirect ban on the sale of beef.

Students at Madras IIT, never considered an activists’ hotspot like the JNU, held a “beef festival”, and one of the participants was attacked and attained a grievous eye injury. Interestingly, the cow slaughter ban in Tamil Nadu had been introduced when the State was under President’s rule, but not for religious reasons. It was done on complaints that slaughtering cows and calves was affecting rural economy and impacting milk production, and “reducing the availability of breeding stock for upgradation of milch animals”.

As we debate cows and peacocks, economic growth, job creation, and so on have been forgotten.

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