When I say my grandparents are hardcore vegetarians, I mean they won’t even touch garlic. They don’t hate non-vegetarians but lets just say that even if you were to take up one of their 2 empty flats on rent, you couldn’t be non-vegetarian. What they choose to do with their own environment is completely up to them. I truly believe there is absolutely no problem with having your own beliefs and morals, no matter how strong they may be if they don’t dictate how someone else lives their life. My grandparents are peaceful, god-fearing souls that would never harm another human being, let alone an animal. Their strong views stem from not wanting to kill in order to survive and that’s a perfectly good point of view to have as long as they don’t hate other people for their beliefs, which they don’t.
The recent incident that left an entire nation torn on opinions was because a man was lynched to death because some priest from the comfort of his own temple declared that he was ‘hiding’ beef in his house. From there things took a turn for the worst as the victim’s entire village declared war on him for this apparent and blatant disrespect towards Hinduism.
His own neighbors turned into bloodthirsty animals, the same neighbors that were once amongst his own inner circle of friends and loved ones. Are our relationships really so easily threatened and divided by claims that are not only not justified but not proven either?
We Hindus are extremely touchy when it comes to cows because we worship them after all but it is ironic to see the amount of cows that starve to death on the streets, the cows that get hit by cars on busy roads, the cows that are left tied to trees for days abandoned by their owners. We have a history of being extremely hypocritical when it comes to such situations, especially ones that revolve around human rights and religion combined so it was no surprise when this news garnered all sorts of views on social media.
The arguments that justified this mans brutal murder (in front of his wife and little daughter) were baseless and revolved around religion which only led me to believe that the next world war would be over the consumption of certain foods. At the end of it, however, I was only completely livid when the meat that police sent in for forensic testing (yes, they did send the meat in for testing) was in fact not beef to begin with! Now I feel like I have major beef with the people that did this. I was always angry about what happened and found it absolutely Ludacris and medieval but it’s not an uncommon phenomenon to be killed in India over beliefs.
Our country has a knack for justifying tragedies with their undying belief in a million ignorant unproven theories. Take rapes for example, the attacker always justify their actions by not stating that they were horny but by claiming that they were doing the nation a favor by “moral policing” the girl. Why were they moral policing a girl? Because apparently according to our religion, the woman should not do certain things including step out after 6 pm without being accompanied by a man. Now doesn’t that sound familiar? We unknowingly practice the sharia law and then we kill a Muslim for offending Hinduism. The irony is just as hypocritical as us.
So all in all, this innocent man was killed over an assumption. The point however remains that his death wouldn’t have been justified even if that meat was in fact beef but at the end of the day the one justification that those ignorant people had to kill this man in cold blooded murder, turned out to be a hoax as well. At least if it was infact beef, some ignorant, uneducated priest somewhere could have justified the blood on his hands and blamed it on his religion.
When I think of this situation I can’t help but see how easily we are swayed to commit such atrocities, how easily we are offended and all I see are hypocrites. A while back a girl was apparently looked at wrongly by 3 African American men at a metro station in Delhi. What followed was a case of extreme lynching and all the “Indian” men at the station took it upon themselves to defend the girl who was nowhere to be seen. So the hypocrisy being that only we Indian men can harass our own women and get away with it. We need to realize that this incident was nothing but an excuse to take out our inner racist beasts the same way the man who was killed over beef was really just killed in a battle of the religions.
No one has the right to take another persons life, isn’t that what God says anyway? So why is this death justified? The truth is that its not and there’s a bigger problem waiting to blow out of proportion here. This was not a beef by death ordeal. This was another excuse to show superiority between the races. We have a habit, we disguise our problems in order to downplay them and to say that a girl was raped because her skirt was too short and that’s not how a woman dresses would be wrong. To say this murder was over beef would be the same scenario. She was raped because her attacker couldn’t keep it in his pants and this man was murdered because its been a while since the religions fought over who was more superior.
