Such communal animosity is a bad advertisement for India overseas particularly now, when India is the focus of global attention with the bursting of the Chinese bubble in the wake of the stock market crash. Modi has riled opponents by calling for a nationwide ban on cow slaughter & blamed the previous authorities for promoting beef exports. Muslims especially are under siege in India today. Do fundamentalist Americans realise that more Americans have been killed by guns in the United States since 1968 than in all U.S. wars? A Hindu mob, hearing rumours that a Muslim family was keeping beef in their fridge, descended on their home in Bisara village, near the capital, and dragged out a man and his son. But wasn’t Prasad’s statement provoked by the Dadri incident in the first place? His son, aged 22, was also beaten and seriously injured.
Advertisement
The incident has outraged the whole nation.
The melee is the latest in a number of beef-related clashes in India that are escalating tensions between Hindus and Muslims before voting starts in Bihar on Monday. Immediately after Independence the largest seminary in Asia, Darul Uloom Deoband, issued a fatwa in 1955 that “in the interest of peace and coexistence between communities, we direct Muslims to refrain from offering beef for sacrifice because alternatives are available”. Under the Indian constitution, people of all faiths enjoy equal rights.
Add to this mix more proscriptions-and proclivities. The BJP’s aim, as it had been in previous elections, was to break voting patterns based on caste, class, and traditional party loyalties and unite the Hindu vote. Hence the widespread criticism in the global media of this “accident”, as Union Minister of State for Culture Mahesh Sharma called it. It is not a must for Muslims to kill cows, bulls or bullocks and eat beef. A senior member of the Hindu right wing and the part of the BJP’s inner circle, Tarun Vijay, uses the veneer of Hinduism to justify the barbarity in an open column in the Indian Express. To make sure that exporters do not ship beef labelled as carabeef the BJP government plans to set up a lab in Mumbai.
After a year and a half, a few of that magic seems to be gone.
India claims to be a democratic country under the leadership of idiosyncratic hooligans who represent the BJP.
This polarization is not limited to politics. In the lead-up to the 2014 elections, Modi and the BJP incited anti-Muslim hysteria among Hindus. In today’s India, the minorities live in fear. Since the ancient times, Hindus have treated them to be “Motherly”.
“There is no doubt that we are under attack”.
Meanwhile, Sartaj Mohammed, who was at his brother’s bedside after they moved him out of the intensive care unit, said his brother is eating and can recognize him and their uncle.
While India is the fastest-growing major economy, its stocks and currency have fallen along with other emerging markets as optimism fades over Modi’s ability to push through wide-ranging reforms.
Activists of various Indian Muslim groups shout slogans against Indian prime minister Narendra Modi during a protest against the killing of a Muslim farmer, in New Delhi, India, October 6, 2015. It needs a conducive social atmosphere to be sustained.
Advertisement
March 3 – Pending since 7 years, law banning slaughter of Cows and Bullocks in Maharashtra passed.
