By Taha Amin Mazumder,
As the status of the cow gains momentum in India with the lynching of a religious minority man in Dadri near the national capital Delhi over the mere rumor of beef consumption, the status of human beings seems to be proportionally sliding. The man was killed because the mob thought he ate the meat of cow, an animal considered sacred by the majority community in the country. This is clearly a case of communal violence on the pretext of saving the sacred cow and no way has any link to the animal rights.
The objective of the incidents of mob violence, such as Dadri, has been a key concern in India because of its recurrent religious or political links, and so a Communal Violence Bill was introduced in 2011 to check or curb communal violence, which unfortunately has not been passed after 4 long years. The main purpose of the bill to crudely call is to check men slaughter, or to be gender neutral, “slaughter of humanity.”
Communal Violence Bill
The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill was originally drafted by the National Advisory Council or NAC, a group of activists and civil society representatives chaired by Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
The term communal violence, defines the bill as “any act or series of acts, whether spontaneous or planned, resulting in injury or harm to the person and or property, knowingly directed against any person by virtue of his or her religious or linguistic identity.”
The proposed law seeks to punish organized communal violence with life imprisonment, hate propaganda with up to 3 years of imprisonment or fine or both, funding of communal violence with 3 years or fine or both, dereliction of duty with imprisonment from 2 to 5 years and breach of command with imprisonment of up to 10 years.
Cow slaughter, Bihar polls and Dadri ‘man slaughter’
While many are finding connections between the Dadri incident, as well as the recent spurt of beef or meat ban in a number of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states, and the coming Bihar polls beginning this month, where BJP is allegedly trying to polarize votes on communal lines, senior BJP leader Sushil Modi said on 5 October that cow slaughter will be banned in the state if his party comes to the power after the assembly polls.
With BJP’s poll promise to ban cow slaughter come the communal connections and the apprehension that many Dadri might be in the offing with the renewed upgradation of the status of the cow. Incidentally, a number of BJP members have been arrested for instigating the mob against 50-year-old slain Akhlaq, spreading the rumor that his family ate and stocked beef.
Rahul’s jibe at BJP and communal violence
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi too, while campaigning in Bihar on 7 October, accused BJP for making polarization a poll plank. Rahul said, “Wherever there are polls, be it Bihar, Haryana or Uttar Pradesh, BJP folks try to incite people to fight against one another.”
Incidentally, maximum of the communal violence occurred in India during the Congress rule. One of the most lethal communal massacres at Nellie in Assam in 1983, which left more than 2,000 people killed (unofficial count is 5,000), occurred when a Congress government was ruling the state. Congress has been many a times accused of having communal orientations and overlapping with the splinter groups of majoritarian communal organizations allegedly behind instigating most of the slaughtering of human beings in politically motivated communal riots in the country.
Politics of the bill against men slaughter
As the Indian laws have enough measures to tackle the individual perpetrators of violence, they hardly offer any remedy when the same action is committed by a group, particularly when it has a communal color. In most cases of communal violence in India, the maximum brunt had be to borne by the minority Muslim or Christian people, such as the infamous Gujarat riots of 2002, which reportedly left more than 2,000 Muslims dead. BJP, which is often accused of instigating communal violence, has incidentally been against the Communal Violence Bill right from the beginning saying the bill does not safeguard the majority community. The Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011, which got the approval of the National Advisory Council (N.A.C.), defines a “group” to mean “a religious or linguistic minority, in any State in the Union of India, or Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes within the meaning of clauses (24) and (25) of Article 366 of the Constitution of India.”
Since the introduction of the bill in 2011, although the BJP has been opposing, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by the Congress, has also failed to come up with a viable solution regarding the bill. The UPA missed several occasions of legislation of the bill in the Parliament or creating a consensus by dropping the provisions unacceptable to the BJP or its conglomeration National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The UPA left the bill dilly-dallying, and on 5 February 2014, it finally dropped the plan to even introduce the bill succumbing to the severe opposition by then opposition party BJP. The proposed law came back into focus after the Muzaffarnagar riots of October 2013, which left more than 60 killed and nearly 40,000 displaced in the western Uttar Pradesh. Now with the fringe BJP governments at states propagating meat or beef bans, one can hardly expect that the Communal Violence Bill will be introduced soon to tackle the slaughter or human beings. Interestingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had reportedly called the bill a “recipe for disaster” when he was the chief minister of Gujarat.
With the UPA’s reluctance in talking about the bill anymore and BJP putting it on back burner, the question for the country remains hanging in balance, what is more important — to politicize the cow slaughter issue or to save the humans from being slaughtered in the name of cow, with the aid of the Communal Violence Bill?
