Did You Know: Eating Beef Patties Could Now Land You In Jail For 5 Years #OnlyInIndia

Beef has been banned in Maharashtra. The Union government has given its assent to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, almost two decades after the state assembly had passed it under the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government in 1995.

Maharashtra had always banned the slaughter of cows but allowed the slaughter of bulls, bullocks and water buffalo. The new act will ban the slaughter of all cattle with the exception of water buffaloes. In fact, the very possession of beef – much like, say, cocaine – is now punishable with a prison sentence.

The beef trade in the state is largely controlled by Muslims of the Qureshi caste. “Apart from rendering people jobless, the immediate effect will be the spiralling price of other meats as people will be forced to gravitate to them,” president of the Mumbai Suburban Beef Dealer Association Mohammed Qureshi said.

Beef, generally seen as the poor man’s meat, costs almost a third of mutton. Mumbai alone consumes nearly 90,000 kg of mutton every day, sold through 900 licensed stalls and an equal number of illegal stalls.

Beef traders said they are checking if they can take legal recourse. “We are now holding deliberations to see if we can challenge this in any way. The beef traders have been impacted but it will be the farmers who will be affected the most,” Arif Chowdhury, an office bearer of the All India Jamiatul Quresh, an organisation of beef traders, said.

indianexpress.com

Critics of the bill say their owners, mostly farmers, could now be stuck feeding them for years until they die of natural causes.

bbc.com