Weeks after the red meat served as the key political ingredient for controversies and violence in the politically more significant States, the issue of beef, consumed by more than 30 per cent of the State’s population as well as thousands of tourists in the State, is back on the boil in the coastal BJP-ruled State.
Senior leaders of parties across the State, barring the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, have raised their hackles after senior Sangh Parivar leaders, including the saffron party’s MP Subramanian Swamy questioned the State’s beef-eating habits, ominously suggesting that it needed to be stemmed.
While the BJP as well as its Ministers has been mum on the subject, the party’s ruling alliance partners have criticised the overtures of the Sangh Parivar leaders, with Town and Country Planning Minister and Goa Forward MlA Vijai Sardesai demanding a ban on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Goa.
“As a Minister, I want to tell VHP very clearly that it should not tell us what to eat. There is a Constitutional freedom for it. The VHP will be banned in Goa is such utterances are rep-
eated,” Sardesai told The Pioneer.
Sardesai was responding to recent utterances of the Parishad’s central secretary Acharya Radhakrishna Manori, who on Sunday had claimed that beef-consumption could be banned in Goa within two years. “If the Government is unable to stop it (beef), we are capable of imposing a complete ban on cow slaughtering and beef eating across the country, including Goa,” Manori had said at a public meeting earlier this month in South Goa, addi-
ng that the outfit had enough cadres to enforce the ban.
Cheaper than mutton, beef is also commonly consumed in the tourism-oriented coastal belt which sees nearly three million tourists, half a million of which are foreigners.
According to official statistics from the Goa Meat Complex, the State’s only abattoir facility allowed to slaughter cattle and buffaloes, the State consumes more than 40 tons of beef every day.
While cow slaughter is already banned in Goa, Swamy, a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP, has also said earlier this month, said that beef-eating habits in Goa needed to be altered, something which Tourism Minister Manohar Ajgaonkar, a member of the Maharashtra-
wadi Gomantak Party, opposed. “We cannot tell people what to eat and what not to. Eating habits need to be respected,” Ajgaonkar told The Pioneer.
The Aam Aadmi Party also wants action against Manori for his ‘threat’ to ban beef.
“The highly vitriolic public statement of Manori suggesting that private armies of the VHP will take law in their hands to impose a beef ban in Goa is despicable and a grave crime. It attracts criminal charges under provisions of the IPC dealing with causing discord among different communities in Goa,” AAP’s Valmiki Naik said.
The Congress has also condemned the statements by the VHP leader and Swamy, accusing the BJP of trying to polarise communities in Goa.
“This is also part of hidden agenda to make such statements, in order to create artificial shortage of beef and then take a cut on the increased price of beef,” Faleiro said.
While senior BJP leaders and its Ministers have been mum on the subject, the only BJP leader to offer comment on the subject is its MlA and deputy speaker in Goa legislative assembly Michael lobo.“Beef politics will not work in Goa. Thirty per cent (of the population) are minorities,” lobo said.