Rajnath hints at total ban on cow slaughter

Says Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat have imposed a total ban and there is a need to expand it to the rest of India

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has indicated that the government might push for a blanket ban on cow-slaughter across India.

Addressing a national conclave of the Jain community in Indore, he said, “Cow slaughter cannot be accepted in this country. We will make all-out efforts to ban it and will also try hard to have a consensus for this purpose.”

Referring to the cow slaughter ban in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, the senior BJP leader said nobody should doubt the government's commitment to prevent on the issue.

Singh recalled that when he was Agriculture Minister in 2003, his ministry had prepared a bill for the total ban of slaughter of cows.

"But the moment I rose to present it (bill) in Parliament, uproar was created. That is why we couldn't get the bill passed," he said.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that transportation, storage and sale of beef was banned in the state. As many as 12,000 people have been arrested on a cow-slaughter charge in Madhya Pradesh. Of them, 1,500 were convicted during 2009-2014. The Prohibition of Cow Slaughter Act was introduced in 2004 by the then chief minister Uma Bharati. It was amended in 2010 to make cow slaughter a criminal offense. It attracts penal provision of jail term of one to seven years.  

“We want to make it more stringent,” said Chouhan.

The amended Act has provisions to include not only the transporter (of beef, cow or hide), but the driver and co-owner of the vehicle as well.

Rajnath Singh, who is visiting the state primarily to assess crop losses, will visit the hailstorm-affected areas in Gwalior. According to Chouhan, crop losses have been reported in 400,000 hectares of the total sown area of 10.7 million hectares across the state, affecting nearly 400,000 farmers.

The local weathermen have sounded an alarm of a fresh spell of hailstorm and rains at isolated places in the state.