Why Gujarat hasn’t been able to take the cow by its horns | Political Pulse News,The Indian Express
Last week, BJP leader Nitin Patel got injured as a stray cow ran through a rally he was attending, putting the spotlight back on a longstanding problem -- cattle on the roads
On Saturday, August 13, former deputy chief minister and BJP leader Nitin Patel got injured while participating in a tiranga yatra at Kadi in Mehsana district as a stray cow ran through the crowd. Patel suffered a fracture in his left knee and was advised to rest for three weeks. The incident put the spotlight back on the debate on stray cattle and the state BJP government’s reluctance in tackling it an election year.
On March 31, after a debate that continued well past midnight, the Gujarat Assembly passed a Bill in the Assembly to license, regulate and prohibit cattle movement in urban areas of Gujarat. The Opposition Congress, however, refused to support the Bill while blaming the BJP government for using “cows for votes”.
However within days of the passage of The Gujarat Cattle Control (Keeping and Moving) in Urban Areas, 2022, on April 7, the government announced that its implementation would be kept in abeyance till the objections of the Maldhari community were addressed. The Maldharis are a cattle-rearing community in the business of milk supply. Constituting 10 per cent of the population, the Maldharis are among the OBC communities that the BJP has been trying to woo for votes.
The law that’s now on hold would have made it mandatory to obtain a licence from a local authority (municipal corporation or municipality) to keep cattle. Though the law was meant to check the stray cattle menace, with the ‘statement of objects and reasons’ of the Bill mentioning the threat they pose to those riding two-wheelers, the Maldharis objected saying the conditions in the law would push them out of the city limits and out of business.
“Given the vote bank it could hurt, both the BJP and Congress are now reluctant to support the law, leaving it to the courts to take up the issue of stray cattle on the roads,” said a government official.
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