By Joel Pinto:

A burning issue in India is whether to pass the anti-cow slaughter bill or not, and this drama has taken the center-stage. Hindus want their cow god unslaughtered and worship it and some are trying to just find some meat to eat. I have seen people fight to get food to eat, but I’ve never seen people fighting over the issue of whether to kill a cow or not.

It seems funny that the life of a cow has become a center issue in the nation, but people who are being killed every day are not even cared about. Has animal meat become more important to us than the life of a human being? Issues like terrorism have shaken the whole world, but we Indians are fighting like children over a piece of meat.

Hindus worship cow as God. I don’t have any objection to it. In the future, there will be a religion which might worship Hen/Chicken as God, so will the government put a ban on killing it? Pantheists believe that nature is god and anything that grows in nature has God. According to their ideology, we cannot cut anything, nor eat anything. So, will the Government issue an anti-nature cutting bill, if someday Pantheists propose it?

We live in a secular and democratic country where one is free to eat anything that s/he wants; no person has the right to object to it. Harming people over the issue of beef is depriving them of their fundamental right. The recent events that I have noted in the news give a horrible impression of our country. The Maharashtra beef ban, attack on people for eating beef etc., is how extreme people can go and it can be stated as a disgrace to our country.

Man is a rational being and is capable enough to think and reason out what is right and wrong, good or bad. There are many people who are starving and dying and have nothing to eat. Have we ever thought of them? There are greater issues that need to be discussed to make our country a better place, but are those issues discussed? A few months back there was a huge commotion regarding Ghar vapsi, and now we have the anti-cow slaughter bill. For us, religion is important than the value of human life. We have blinded ourselves and give a deaf ear to the cry of the other. I feel the words of a great philosopher Sartre are coming true “Other is a Hell to me, He steals my freedom, the other has to be annihilated”. If this goes on, there will be no one left to eat what is left on the earth.

“Religion is Opium of the people,” as said by Karl Marx. We are now not able to live for the other; we want us and only our religion to survive. If God does exist, he/she may be looking at us and laughing at our stupidity. Let us, once and for all, just leave this issue and focus on the betterment of the country, not any religion.