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At the core of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva pitch is the safety of cows and ban on slaughter of the animal thought-about sacred by many Hindus. While the Congress has had a combined response to this, now it has seized a chance to hit out on the BJP.
The raging farm protests have given an opportunity to the Congress to join the cow with the kisan. The occasion is planning a mega march and marketing campaign notably in Uttar Pradesh in opposition to the Yogi Adityanath authorities on this.
Sources say Priyanka Gandhi Vadra too might be a part of in sooner or later although she has already tweeted on this. The Congress says that the ban on cow slaughter has affected the farmers in UP very badly. Party leaders say usually a cow provides one of the best milk until the delivery of three calves after which the output falls sharply. Many farmers discover little use for these cows after that and abandon them.
Also, with modifications in the method of tilling farms, and with intensive use of tractors, even the usage of bullocks has fallen. So, farmers are more and more abandoning these bovines. This means stray cattle on the streets, usually discovered in inhuman circumstances, in accordance to the Congress, and likewise farmers are having to guard their farms with barbed wire fences which implies their prices are going up. This is what the Congress hopes to use as ammunition in opposition to the Yogi authorities and BJP.
Given the truth that the Congress desires to toe a Hindutva line, it is conscious it can’t be seen as supporting cow slaughter. But by linking it to the kisan challenge, as cows and farmers are inextricably linked, the occasion hopes to accomplish a effective balancing act.
Cows have been a supply of dilemma for the Congress in phrases of its political technique. Very few keep in mind that ‘a cow with a suckling calf’ was the occasion image when Indira Gandhi broke away to kind her personal Congress and he or she was denied the sooner ‘bullock and yoke’ image by the-then principal Congress. Her slogan was, “Vote for calf and cow, neglect others now.”
In fact the strengthening and moulding of Indira as a steely politician finds its genesis in the cow-saving lobby she faced in the 1960s when there was an agitation for a ban on cow slaughter. She had said then that she would not “cow down to cow savers”. But as the movement gained support, Indira Gandhi could not maintain her stance for long. A section of the Congress was already in favour of a countrywide ban on cow slaughter. Indira Gandhi did realise that committing the Congress to a policy that made it appear opposed to the cows of India meant risking a large percentage of votes in the elections due in February 1967.
However, Gandhi was not willing to give in to a complete ban since it would be against the party’s secularist ideology and would have also appeared disrespectful to her father’s memory. She needed a mid-way approach that could keep the cow protectors happy while at the same time not risk the image of her party. She explained that she was deeply concerned about the problem of cow-killing and was setting up a high-level committee of animal husbandry experts and politicians to check on the feasibility of a total prohibition on cow slaughter. The committee ruled against a blanket ban.
And this was her way of finding a balance to both protecting cows and also run the Congress line of not interfering in eating habits and religious beliefs.
Years later, her granddaughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is also seen by some Congress proponents as Indira reborn, is searching for a similar balance in UP. She knows that taking on Yogi in his karmabhoomi cannot be done by going against the cow slaughter ban. But by shrewdly linking it to the farmers for whom the connection with the cow runs deep, Priyanka is trying to strike the same balance. “Farmers can’t be comfortable with the therapy of cows which are left to fend for themselves beneath Yogi Raj” is the pitch for the Congress in UP.
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