They’ve done it again!

A government is supposed to solve problems, but the present one in Delhi creates problems when there’s none. Regularly!

After NOTE-BANDI, it’s CATTLE-TRADE-BANDI!

In one fell swoop two days ago, the Government of India has destroyed the livelihood of millions of ordinary Indians by virtually banning camel- and cattle-trade.

How many Indians work in tanneries and related fields? How many Indian lives depend on the legal business in buffalo and camel meat? Experts will certainly calculate the figures, but very roughly, even if half a percent of our population depends on these until-yesterday legal activities, the number would be a staggering 65 lakhs or 6.5 million.

Most of these people are poor, they know no other trade. The government doesn’t even seem to bother to offer them an alternative occupation, which in any case, it can't. So, the ban consigns these mostly-poor people to slow starvation deaths. Also, from the sociological point of view a vast majority of them are Muslims and Dalits, two most vulnerable sections of our society. (Dwivedis, Dasguptas, or Nambudris don't skin dead animals, do they?) And all this in the name of cows, one of the least sentient creatures around us.

Cartoon is by Keshav in the Hindu

If you permit me a short digression, three to four million Bengalis were killed in the Great Bengal Famine of the 1940s – engineered directly by the poster boy of the British right wing, Winston Churchill. Unlike Hitler, who killed six million Jews, Churchill didn’t need bullets and gas to kill millions. And the lesson from this gory chapter of history is: you can murder millions without using machine guns. I have reasons to believe something similar is going to happen in India unless this insane order is reversed.

Is it a bloody joke to play with the lives of such a huge multitude of already-struggling citizens, without a public debate, without taking the parliament into confidence, by a mere executive order? As if it was something like banning plastic packets?

Have Indians seen a more destructive ruler in the Indian capital since Robert Clive who stole shiploads of gold and silver from Bengal and turned the most prosperous place on earth into barren fields of dying people in just a few years?

If you are an Indian, whether you call your country Bharat Mata or not, please stand up and protest. We must get this ban reversed.

Sunday, 28 May 2017