The controversies and killings over beef in the rest of the country have cast a shadow over the prospects of the BJP in next week’s local-body elections in beef-eating Kerala.
The mayhem at Dadri and a series of violent incidents over beef has caused revulsion across the State – the huge majority of whose residents eat meat, especially cow and buffalo meat. A large section of Hindus, who make up 54 per cent of the population, also eat beef. “The beef issue will hurt the BJP’s winning chances in the elections,” political commentator and social activist CR Neelakantan told BusinessLine .
“More than the curtailing of the right to choose one’s food, the violence in the name of the cow has served as an indication of where the BJP is taking the country to.”
“Realising the damage, State leaders of the BJP belatedly stated that it was up to the individual to decide if he wants to eat beef or not,” Neelakantan noted. “But, the damage is done.”
Even before Dadri and other killings, the RSS-inspired beef ban in other States had caused unease among Keralites, especially Muslims and Christians. A Central Minister’s open challenge to the Congress to ban beef in Kerala had upset even vegetarians.
Kerala gets its meat supplies mostly from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and the violence in Tamil Nadu on trucks carrying bullocks and buffaloes two months ago had given an indication of the intolerance of right-wing groups to Kerala’s meat-eaters.
To protest against the intolerance, the Democratic Youth Federation of India, the youth wing of the CPI(M), held a series of ‘beef festivals’ in the State. One such festival, in the campus of a Hindu-management-run college at Thrissur, had led to clashes between two groups of students. A teacher at the college who on Facebook supported the students’ right to protest against the obscurantist tendencies, was threatened with dismissal. However, following a public uproar, the management dropped the move.
Added to this is Monday’s police raid on Kerala House, the State Government’s representative office in Delhi, for allegedly serving beef at its canteen. The raid has evoked public outrage in Kerala and several leading politicians in both the Left Democratic Front and the United Democratic Front have condemned the incident.
The sensitive beef issue hit the BJP at a time when the party was trying to make the best out of the local body elections. In the last such polls, held in 2010, the party was just an also-ran: it could secure only 6.5 per cent of the vote and not even a single Gram Panchayat. This time around the party had hoped to make it big, ahead of next year’s Assembly elections.