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The Hindu right’s pro-cow policies are terrible for India’s cows

www-economist-com.libproxy.berkeley.edu · 93 words · saved by 1 readers

T he indian government is not terribly keen on counting people. The country’s census, conducted every ten years between 1881 and 2011, was postponed in 2021 owing to the covid-19 pandemic. It has yet to be rescheduled. Counting cows, for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), is a different matter. The bjp government of the big northern state of Uttar Pradesh (up), home to an estimated 240m people and perhaps 20m cattle, is conducting a new bovine census. The point of this, says the government, is better cow protection. The effort highlights a glaring cow-related contradiction in the bjp’s Hindu nationalist ideology. The party says it wants to protect cows, which are associated with divine beneficence and venerated by Hindus. Yet its pro-cow policies, including bans on cow slaughter, appear to be detrimental to cattle welfare. They are thought to be causing an increase in stray cows, typically male calves and aged milkers which, having little commercial value, are let loose by their

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