beef ban? is that all it is?

“Moving onto the section of what has been banned in India today, state x has banned the right to freedom of thought - forget expression - and any pretense of equal rights for all. State y has banned sensibility.”

This is a generic gist of what news sounds like, right now. There have been many controversial bans that have made respective communities/sympathizers up in arms trying to drive some sense into the perpetrators of the ban. I’m not going to talk about the political or monetary gain that these perpetrators enjoy, or about what is evidently going to climax into India being the country of the ‘hindus’ and all the consequences that’ll be derived from it.  Beef ban. Appropriately offensive to everybody but one community? Yes. But that’s not all. When the President finally signed a bill that had been pending for twenty whole years for good reason, did anybody consider entire sections of Maharashtra whose quality of life would take a big hit as a result of it?

The slaughtering of cows and calves had been banned way back in 1976, under the Animal Preservation (amendment) Bill, but buffalo, bull and bullocks were still a huge source of business, both export and import, for a large section of society. Thirty-three operational abattoirs, many more illegal slaughterhouses, and a lot of independent slaughterers all came to a halt on March 4, this year. The estimated revenue loss, due to beef ban, is a whopping 10,000 crores. These are numbers that show you how horrible the effects of this entirely unnecessary ban are.

Beef has always been the cheapest meat available in India. Hence this featured, whenever possible, in a large number of households. Since widely available beef meat has now disappeared off the market, the demand for other meat rises. And this automatically calls for a surge in its pricing. Where does this leave the people who aren’t upper middle class? With all the expenses that an average middle class family faces, meat is going to be another rarity in their lives. And the poor, well, when have we ever really considered the effect of religious fanaticism on them?

There are muslims, Christians, other minorities and even multiple sects of hindus, not to mention the nonbelievers who are somehow exempt from all this, who consume beef. For the sake of one ‘majority’, when dividing people based on their religions, an important part of life of the rest has been taken away. How do I even begin to explain the significance of the qualifiers? In a ‘secular’ country like India, in a very big state, everybody has been banned from eating a particular food item, to cater to the needs of the group of people who make the claim of gomatha. Say, if in a small city, somewhere in India, where the population register shows that Muslims are larger in number, they decided to enforce the rule of no eating in public during Ramadan, do we even need to talk about the gory outcome of that?

Among a million other questions that pop up in our minds daily, owing to the claims made by right wing fanatics on national television and otherwise, one particularly disturbing one is, inspite of all claims of unity in diversity and every other related cliché, as a non-fanatic hindu, will I ever be heard or considered. Without naming names, let’s just say that this question was the beginning of the end for a lot. Beef ban is a life choice an irrationally opinionated bully made for everybody, and gomatha, is their entirely absurd excuse.