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Union Minister for Women & Child Development Maneka Gandhi has said there should be a nationwide ban on cow and buffalo slaughter.
In an interview to NDTV, she said 90 per cent of cow and buffalo slaughter happening in the country is illegal. While the law says cows can be killed after a certain age, say 14 or 16 years, “all the ones that are being killed now are pregnant, milch cows”, she said. According to Gandhi, this is because there's no demand for the meat of old cows, especially while exporting. The demand is for the meat of cows and buffaloes “in their prime of their life”, she noted.
Gandhi attributed the shortage of milk in the country to the slaughter of milch cows. According to her, 80 per cent of the milk being sold in this country is fake. She said the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have no real milk. The milk being sold in these states are not even adulterated, she said. It’s cent per cent fake milk made from “white paint, water, sugar and oil”.
She said India currently imports Rs 1.5 lakh worth of urea. The high salt content of urea makes the land ‘thirsty’, making farmers spend a lot of money in digging deep tube wells etc. This could be avoided by using alternative fertilisers such as cow dung. Lamenting that there’s no valuation for cow dung and cow urine, she said her office floors are cleaned using cow urine.
Gandhi is not the first in the National Democratic Alliance government to talk in favour of a blanket ban on cow slaughter. Earlier, Home Minister Rajnath Singh had said the government would try to bring in a pan-India ban on cow slaughter. Addressing a convention of Jain saints and sadhvis in Indore on March 29, he had said: "Cow slaughter cannot be accepted in this country. We will make all-out efforts to ban slaughter of cows and will also try hard to have a consensus for this purpose."
Cow slaughter is currently banned in certain states such as Maharshtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana.
