The meat in the fridge was mutton
So speaking of blasphemy laws, and India, and violence…the Washington Post also reports on a news item from India: a mob dragged a Muslim man out of bed and beat him to death for eating beef.
The attack on Monday night in the northern Indian city of Dadri has shocked the country, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise. For the past six months, meat has been a matter of major debate in India.
Eighty percent of the country’s of 1.3 billion inhabitants are Hindu — who avoid beef for religious reasons. Roughly 250 million Indians are not. That tally includes almost 25 million Christians and up to 140 million Muslims, like Akhlaq.
Such incidents have increased since Modi came to power, Michael Miller says.
Modi is a Hindu nationalist who, as governor of Gujarat state, presided during religious riots in 2002 in which more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims — were killed. For years afterwards, Modi was blocked from visiting the United States because of his role in the riots.
All that changed last year, however, when Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power. Modi campaigned on a vision of India finally fulfilling its economic potential — a promise highlighted by his recent tour of Silicon Valley.
But that doesn’t make him any less a Hindu nationalist and it doesn’t make the BJP any less a Hindu nationalist party.
Since Modi’s election, Muslims have grown worried about a string of inflammatory statements and actions by Hindu nationalist leaders. Accused Islamist terrorists have been executed ahead of non-Muslims, stirring anger. Meanwhile, BJP lawmakers have openly called for Hindus to out breed Muslims to “protect Hindu religion.” That same politician, Sakshi Maharaj, invited outrage when he called Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin a “patriot.” (Nathuram Godse was a militant Hindu activist who killed Gandhi for “appeasing” Muslims.) Finally, India’s foreign minister has called for the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, to be declared a “national scripture.”
Theocracy hates people.
Last March a bill was passed in Maharashtra banning the sale of beef.
Despite legal challenges to the ban, the new law immediately brought results. Just days after the law’s implementation, two people were arrested for allegedly slaughtering two calves, the BBC reported. Last month, four more people were accused of smuggling beef into Mumbai, according to the Indian Express.
The crackdown on cow-eating is driven by a desire for religious/national purity, but critics point out that it’s already creating political and practical problems.
Oh that desire for religious/national purity (and political, doctrinal, attitudinal, verbal purity) – what a curse it is.
“Some Hindu hard-liners insist the idea of eating beef was introduced by Muslim invaders, despite references to its consumption in ancient texts like the Vedas, written more than a millennium before the time of Muhammad. By eradicating this ‘alien’ practice, they hope to return the country to values they hold dear as Hindus,” wrote novelist Manil Suri in a New York Times op-ed.
Suri said it was part and parcel of a broader conservative cultural shift under Modi and the BJP.
“With the recent re-criminalization of gay sex, bans on controversial books and films and even an injunction against the use of the colonial-era name ‘Bombay’ instead of ‘Mumbai’ in a Bollywood song, the new laws join a growing list of restrictions on personal freedom in India,” he warned.
That’s how theocracy is. It’s the worst.
Beef again became a pretext for violence during Monday’s mob attack in Dadri, a city of roughly 60,000 near New Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where a near-total ban on beef is in effect.
The attack allegedly came moments after an announcement at a nearby Hindu temple that Mohammad Akhlaq had slaughtered a calf. The calf had gone missing several weeks earlier, according to the Indian Express. Rumors quickly spread around the neighborhood that Akhlaq was the culprit.
Incited by the announcement, the mob broke down Akhlaq’s door and dragged him into the street, where 100 men beat him to death with bricks, his family members told the Express. The invaders also dragged Akhlaq’s 22-year-old son, Danish, outside, beating him until he was close to death as well.
All for the sake of religious and nationalist “purity.”
Ophelia, India, the ‘world’s largest democracy’, so far, has escaped the scrutiny it deserves. This is just the beginning, the Modi regime will probably reinforce the caste system and intensify India’s tradition of vicious misogyny, the Western MSM has been mesmerised by Islam and its toxic ideology and has consequently ignored Hinduism and its repugnant values.
The authoritarian ‘Confucian’ regimes of East Asia are exemplars of sanity by comparison.
Doesn’t Jonathan Haidt tell us that purity is one of those axes of morality that conservatives care about and liberals don’t? But we’re supposed to respect their feelings?
Yes, he does, and I think he’s so wrong.
He frames it as conservatives having more axes of morality and so being morally richer and deeper than liberals. That’s such a crock of shit.
Eighty percent of the country’s of 1.3 billion inhabitants are Hindu — who avoid beef for religious reasons.
This is inaccurate. The figure of 80% includes Dalits and Tribals, who consume beef. In fact, beef consumption has become an important motif in Dalit identity politics, such as the beef festivals that have occurred in various universities. Along with Muslims, there have also been Dalit victims of putatively anti-beef mob violence. Northeasterners also consume beef, and Kiren Rijiju, a member of the govt, has spoken out against the ban.
The BJP is just trying to provide sops to their base at the same time as the economy becomes more unequal. If they saw that they were losing elections because of it, they would lose interest.
This is just the beginning, the Modi regime will probably reinforce the caste system
This comes across as a bit glib. The BJP plays both sides because they have to for electoral reasons. So on one hand, Modi refers to himself as coming from a low status caste (whether he actually does is a matter of heated debate), there is a concerted effort to recruit Dalits and other disprivileged castes into the organization (IIRC there is more caste diversity within the BJP than within the left) etc. But on the other hand, the BJP’s non-electoral sister org, the RSS, is extremely Brahminical, the BJP’s definition of Hinduism is also extremely Brahmanical, the beef ban, emphasis on Sanskrit etc. Kancha Ilaiah has argued that it is better for Dalit-Bahujans to join the BJP than it is to join the left, in terms of resisting the caste system.
suya@4
“This comes across as a bit glib.”
Yes, fair comment, I should have been more explicit. I was considering the way that authoritarian regimes use existing oppressive institutions to enforce their rule, e.g. Putin and the Orthodox Church, the Japanese militarists and the Emperor cult, the Hindu caste system seems ideal for any aspiring dictator. It would be interesting to see how Modi’s caste status is portrayed during his term in office.
Of course this is one of those ‘only time will tell’ questions.
It annoys the drop out of me when people say something along the lines of “they have to play both sides” when referring to political parties or politicians. They don’t have to do anything of the sort. The do it because they want to maintain power and that is more important to them than maintaining principle. To say otherwise gives the appearance of excusing that behaviour.
Now, if a political party openly said “We believe policy A is wrong, but we are going to promote it because then we will get re-elected and can implement policies B, C and D. These policies do good that outweighs the harm of A in our view”. Then we could decide whether to punish or support them. Instead they pretend to believe in all the crap they promote. It’s cynical, manipulative, dangerous, bullshit.