People who are counting their blessings that they live miles away from Maharashtra and can still be BFF with beef, your happy days may be over. Some people who love and worship cows – of the living kind – have gotten together to push the government into replacing the tiger with the cow as the national animal.
A report on Mint states: “Demands to declare the cow as the national animal in place of the endangered tiger have grown, with over 100,000 individuals and groups writing to the Union government, many hoping to appeal to the pro-Hindu leanings of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that leads it.”
The report says that Ministry of Environment and Forests have received the most number of messages, asking them to confer the national animal status on cows. It quotes an official as saying that there are 20,000 organisations who are pushing these appeals, with 15,000 appeals coming from just one organisation in Maharashtra.
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This isn’t the first time that such an appeal has surfaced, but it has definitely got a boost after a much-publicised beef ban in Maharashtra. In 2014, the Sanatan Brahma Foundation, considered an offshoot of the RSS, had demanded that the Ganga should be declared the national river and the cow, the national animal. The Times of India had then reported that, the leaders of the organisation had threatened to continue their stir till the government came around.
“A tiger is known for its carnivorous nature, a cow on the other hand is revered owing to the fact that from its milk to urine and dung are being used by the mankind,” Ashok Kumar Pandey, chairman of the organisation, had told TOI.
Mint quotes one Jagpreet Luthra from an organisation called Gau Gyan Foundation, “Killing cows is a symbolic killing of the idea of India and there is a huge organized cattle mafia in India. We need to protect our cows and thus it should be declared as the national animal. A cow protection task force should also be set up like anti-terrorism squads.”
The New Indian Express reports that, despite their enthusiasm, the cow-friendly activists have got their ministry wrong. So, instead of sending the mails to the Ministry of Home Affairs, these appeals are being sent to the environment ministry.
“Each day, the MoEF gets cartons and gunny bags filled with thousands of pamphlets and clippings from scriptures corroborating the urgency of their demand. The majority of them are sent by Hindu groups in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat,” reports The New Indian Express.
One can only hope that these appeals, like many reasonable ones, remains stuck in the bureaucracy and is never taken up seriously by the government. Because if they do, however much you may want them to see reason, the government will fall back on their power to regulate the rights of the citizens and ban the consumption of beef. For example, Maharashtra government had the following to say in defence of the beef ban: “It is not a fundamental right of a citizen to eat beef. It cannot be said that the government cannot take away these rights. The state legislation can regulate consumption of flesh of any animal the source of which is reprehensible. Under the Animal Protection Act, there is a prohibition on consumption of wild boar, deer and other animals,” Advocate General Sunil Manohar argued.”