As we in Goa, had reason to revel in quiet comfort that desecrations of religious structures could not inflict even a tear on our social fabric we cannot camouflage the rising voices in the national media (inspite of increasing attempts at its subjugation) of the unfortunate and tragic moving away from the main narratives that our nation should grapple with, and the holding on to the narrow and the divisive, like cow vigilantism.
As the orgy of violence, both in deed and in word still erupts in town and country across India, the nation is indeed asking, whether abject human rights and criminality in the name of cow vigilantism can take over some of India’s most fundamental concerns like jobs, employment, wealth creation, agricultural productivity, good market prices for farm produce, bailing out of farmers crippled with agricultural loans and the end to wave of farmers suicides across Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. As a dalit is about to enter the portals of Rashtrapati Bhavan as a ‘representative of the dalits and the marginalised’ those who are really marginalised are our youth cutting across caste lines.
India can no longer tolerate any further killings in the name of cows when each of the issues above are living realities. Mr Aroon Purie writes in India Today, “India has recently seen a spate of horrific lynchings accompanied, quite disturbingly, by prolonged silences from those in power, at the centre and in the states.” He goes to state that vigilantes have been allowed to believe that killings of people in the name of cow protection, have legal sanction. Ashish Nandy in an essay in the magazine, calls it the ‘Chartered Accountancy of violence’, “because the people who plan these attacks are not driven by faith or fanaticism but by calculations of political power”. And this takes lethal forms, when you believe that you can get away with it.
While the BJP and its president Amit Shah may well have condemned the killings, the RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat has said, “We want cow slaughter to be banned in the entire country”.
While condemnations, either genuine or for the purpose of lip service have their place, this country seems to be suffering from the inability to prioritise issues our country must be grappling with. Irrespective of what our growth indices are.
Our job potential needs a big push. In a blog on the World Bank website, ‘Education and Employment: The big push needed for India’s youth’, Raghbendra Jha of the Australian National University writes, “India has enjoyed high economic growth this has largely been jobless economic growth. It is imperative for there to be a big push in the areas of education and employment in India. This is the most significant policy challenge facing the Indian economy. In 2012, India’s population was 1.23 billion of which 65% was of working age. India already has a smaller ratio of old people to those of working age population than that of China. Therefore, over time, if India’s youth is productively engaged, the country’s private financial savings and physical capital investment are likely to boom.”
Meanwhile a constant source of worry is rural prosperity which is going down. If the purchasing power of rural India goes down, it severely hurts major manufacturers looking to push their products into these areas. India’s growth projection may be pegged at 7.5% but rural prosperity and growth is far from achieving those figures.
Health, especially rural health, needs critical health care. In a report in Business Today, Earl C Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School, Dartmouth, writes “The infant mortality rate in India is seven times that of the United States and three times that of China; almost two-thirds of babies in rural areas are born without the aid of skilled health personnel. India has 63 million diabetics and 2.5 million cancer sufferers, the majority of whom will not be diagnosed, much less treated. Seventy per cent of India’s 20 million blind people could be helped with simple surgery – if it were available. Less than five per cent of the 2.5 million Indians annually who need heart surgery get it.”
This was written in 2014 but it still holds true even today.
Therefore, we do not just need to take the focus away and stop every hand that rises in the supposed protection of the cow, to kill a human, we have the onus to bring the nation’s attention to the critical needs of our country and its people. Our priority is not killing in the name of cow protection, but making an India where the basics of health, education, jobs are a given.
This country needs a serious priority rebooting and everyone should become stakeholders.
