Ban on eating beef in India

A variety of bans, influenced by narrow caste, ethnic and religious loyalties and nationalistic sentiments, are being steadily imposed in India.

The country's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which completes a year in office on May 26th has proscribed the sale and consumption of beef in two provinces where it is in power.

In March the federal government also banned a BBC film by a British film-maker on the vicious gang rape of a physiotherapy student in Delhi in December 2012 asserting that it gratuitously and deliberately discredited India.

Home minister Rajnath Singh objected to an interview in India's Daughter with one of the four rapists, all facing a death sentence, and threatened to extend the ban to the BBC, which aired the documentary almost immediately.

Concurrently, BJP provincial governments in Maharashtra – of which Mumbai is the capital – and Haryana, adjoining Delhi, recently declared the slaughter, sale and consumption of beef to be a criminal offence in bills passed in their respective legislatures.

In Maharashtra, the possession or consumption of beef carries a five-year jail term and a fine, while in Haryana it entails a 10-year sentence.

Hindus, who comprise more than 80 per cent of India’s population of 1.25 billion, revere cows and the sale and consumption of beef is largely considered “unclean”.

Bloggers have critiqued and mocked the authorities for trying to legislate and direct people’s eating habits, but to little affect.

The beef ban has also triggered concern over the fate of bulls and bullocks and even cows, too old to work or produce milk.

Meanwhile, the federally-appointed film censor board recently issued a list of 34 words it wants banned, which other than expletives, include "Bombay", as Mumbai was earlier called. This was to please the BJP's ally, the ultra-right wing Hindu Shiv Sena Party, responsible for renaming the port city Mumbai in 1996.

The Shiv Sena has been known to threaten violence if any film or play refers to Mumbai as Bombay. This list is currently on hold, following widespread protests from Bollywood film-makers.

But in what is perhaps the most bizarre proposal, the Shiv Sena recently demanded the revocation of voting rights of India’s Muslim minority population, as political parties exploited them as a “vote bank” during elections.

Muslims, who constitute around 14 per cent of India’s population, can influence the electoral outcome in around 90-100 of the country’s 543 parliamentary constituencies. Consequently, all political parties target Muslim voters, who tend to vote en bloc.

However, few, if any, Muslims vote for either the Shiv Sena or the BJP.

"Muslims will have no future as long as they are used as vote banks, which is why Balasaheb had once said voting rights of Muslims must be withdrawn. What he said holds true" said Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut earlier this week in Saamna, the Shiv Sena's magazine and mouthpiece.

Cigarettes

He was invoking Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray who died in 2012 and was virulently anti-Muslim. But one ban or statutory warning the Modi government badly needed to impose, but did not, was on cigarette packets.

The parliamentary committee, appointed to approve the size of these warning labels to cover 85 per cent of all cigarette packets, claimed there was no evidence available locally that smoking caused cancer.

This was despite 1.5 million Indians dying each year of tobacco-related diseases like cancer.

The committee included Bharatiya Janata Party MP SC Gupta who runs a business selling bidi’s, a local cigarette variation that is doubly harmful, as it has no filter.

Gupta likened tobacco to sugar, which he said was not banned despite being linked to diabetes.