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28 Mar 2024, Edition - 3180, Thursday

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Columns

Defending the indefensible

Covai Post Network

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Watching the fiasco that is the politics over the death of a man after he reportedly ate beef- I have battled varying degrees of intense fury, disgust and incredulity over the last few days.
My first thought when I heard of the story was, denial. I remember thinking that something like this could not have come to pass in this day and age.

Then came, shock. A mob lynched a man- a few kilometers away from the seat of governance of a secular, democratic country- over suspicions that he may have eaten a kind of meat whose consumption a section of right wing crusaders are trying to ban under the garb of righteous religious sentiment.

Disbelief was quick to make an appearance over reports that the meat had been sent for ‘forensic’ analysis.

And now, days on, as a family is still grappling with the death of a beloved member, adding insult to injury is the sheer absurdity being voiced by varying sections of a group that call themselves ‘devout’ Hindus.

Let me first put this on record- there is NOTHING that justifies what happened in Dadri. Absolutely nothing. Not the fact that Akhlaq may have eaten beef. Not the fact that he was Muslim. Not even the fact that many Hindus (but not all) consider the cow holy.

Not. One. Thing.

Contrary to what a few fanatics will have you believe, India is not a country only for Hindus.
We may be a majority but we DO NOT dictate terms to how others live- we certainly, under no law (constitutional or societal) have the right to decide who gets to live or die based on their dietary preference.

We do not get to decide who is innocent or whose death was an ‘accident’. The law does. We do not get to defend the murderers- like some democratically elected representatives of the people (NOT of one single community) have been doing. We do not get to put the onus on the victims and refer to them as ‘cow slaughterers’.

We do not get to trivialize a family’s tragedy by saying it was the ‘result of poor governance’ and reducing it to how it affects ‘the national project of the central govt’.
What it affects is the moral fabric of the society we are living in- where popular discourse makes certain communities live in abject fear.

This is the result of hate spewing, arming a section of society with the heady belief that in some cases they can literally get away with murder.

It is the result of the wrong people- with ideologies that do not stem from an understanding of the diverse nation that we are- spout garbage to attempt to defend what happened, by shifting blame, by labeling criticism of how the incident was handled as ‘attempts to politicize the issue’.

So, where does the buck stop?

With those whose responsibility it is to check these elements.

With those who are conspicuous by their silence.

Politics over food has- sadly- dominated headlines for a while now. This is the first bloody chapter of a saga that should unite us all in our condemnation and horror, of efforts to loudly decry what happened. To say, we as a nation, are not okay with this.

This has nothing to do with religion- and everything to do with bigotry, hate, misguided beliefs and injustice.

[Note: For those who have a beef with the arguments made here, the writer is a born and bred vegetarian Hindu]

Neha Poonia

Disclaimer:Views expressed above are the author’s own

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