19

Past

SUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA

DECEMBER 27, 2015

Sandeep Adhwaryu

2015

2,000 mt

80 million
EAT BEEF IN
THE COUNTRY

INDIAS BEEF-VEAL EXPORTS IN 15,

MAKING IT NO 1 IN THE WORLD

NEWSMAKER
OF THE YEAR

The

191 million

fall

It wasnt as if the year was

short of human dynamos
but it was the cow that
made us chew the cud the
most, featuring in just about
every debate intolerance,
governance, food habits,
economics and even art.
Sunday Times ruminates on
how Gau Mata ruled 2015

5.3 million

NUMBER OF
CATTLE OWNED
heap dont care. Their own parents and
grandparents believed in the cows sacredness, and thats enough to feel deeply invested in this creature. Their empathy
doesnt extend to all forms of life in fact
it could sharply exclude some humans
but it flows over at the thought of this suffering beast.
Shiv Sena MP Chandrakant Khaire recently demanded that the cow be made the
mother of the nation. In late colonial north

THE BAN ON SLAUGHTER

HURTS MILLIONS OF POOR
INDIANS, FOR WHOM THIS
MEAT WAS A CHEAP SOURCE
OF PROTEIN, AND STRIKES
AT MANY LIVELIHOODS

AMULYA GOPALAKRISHNAN

ike it or not, this is cow country now. Gau Mata loomed

large over the year that was,
and she will rule the year
that will be.
This gentlest of herbivores has inspired a battery
of laws, across 24 states, to
protect it. It has also provoked a vigilante movement thats killed at least
three human beings in the last year, and
injured and intimidated many more.
To those of little faith, the cow-related events of 2015 seemed not just tragic,
but also surreal. In Jaipur, an art installation of a suspended plastic cow called Divine Bovine was hauled down, and
respectfully garlanded,
while the artists and organisers were bullied. There
have been selfie campaigns
with cows. Some find it
funny that every cow product is held to be miraculous
poo and pee, milk, ghee and curd
and promoted as disinfectants, tonics
and shampoos, breakfast foods and soft
drinks, even cancer cures.
Though it is aggressively visible now,
cow love has been an article of faith and
flashpoint for a long time. It doesnt matter that cows were gladly eaten and sacrificed in the pre-Mauryan world; parents in Betul, Madhya Pradesh who
lovingly roll their toddlers in a dung

India, the nation, the Hindi language and

the cow were all smushed together as
metaphorical mother. Between 1880 and
1920, gaurakshini sabhas and gaushalas
came up, and Arya Samaj, sanatan dharma
sabhas and other Hindu bodies rallied
around them. Handbills and posters, poems and plays exhorted Hindus to protect
the material body of the cow from aggressors, usually depicted as Muslim butchers.
Its milk was meant to nurture Hindu manhood. The cow drew divided Hindus together, ranged them against the beef-eating
British and Muslims.
Then as now, the cow separates caste
Hindus from everyone else. A rumour
about cow killing is still the simplest way
to provoke violence for economic or political profit. And yet, 80 million people eat
beef, according to NSSO data. This includes Muslims, Dalits, tribals, miscellaneous others including Hindus. There is a
thriving economy around the cow, its labour, meat, hide and bones.
So far, the Indian state had flipped and
flopped on how far to accommodate this
belief. After all, as Gandhi acknowledged,
to ban an activity based on the fervent feelings of one group is to explicitly state that
this group owns the country. For the most
part, hypocrisy has sustained us. A directive principle in the Constitution asks the
state to stop cow slaughter, but covers it up

STRAY COWS; 20,000 CR

A YEAR NEEDED TO FEED THEM
with an economic-sounding call for modern and scientific agriculture. Many
states have qualified bans on cow slaughter, though they have been weakly enforced.
Now, there is no ambiguity on cow
slaughter. These laws now bare their teeth,
and are used as sanction for harassment.
Some states ban the killing of bulls too,
some place the burden of proof on the accused. This hurts millions of poor Indians,
for whom this meat was a cheap source of
protein, and strikes at the livelihoods of
those who have anything to do with the
cattle business, mainly minorities and low
castes.
But the fear has rippled further outwards. Indias meat production, which
ranks fifth in the world, rests heavily on
bovine meat, largely buffalo. The meatprocessing industry declined this year.
Leather exports have fallen; flayers and
tannery workers lakhs of people, from
the most oppressed castes have lost their
work. Contractors, truckers and traders
are running scared. Other industries that
use animal fat or gelatin soap, pharmaceuticals and the like are affected.
Theres a problem when emotions and
economics diverge too much. Cow populations actually thrive when selective culling
is permitted. After all, it is an agricultural
asset. Farmers, Hindu or otherwise, are
now stuck with unproductive heifers once
they are no longer lactating or reproducing. Cows that might have been quietly
sold, to possibly wind up in an abattoir, are
now just abandoned. According to the cattle census, there are already 53 lakh stray
cattle, nosing through garbage; it would
take 20,000 crore a year to feed them. With
all this terror around the disposing of elderly cattle, now farmers have fewer reasons to rear them.
The irony is that all this devotion
doesnt even help the desi cow, unless its
sustenance is accounted for. The Rashtriya
Gokul Mission set apart Rs150 crore last
year for cow-related activity, and states
have not flung open their coffers either.
And so, the more sanctified the cow is, the
less economically useful it is, and the more
likely that it will end up drifting on the
streets.
Lesson for cow protectors love it all
you want, just dont love it to death.

THE OTHER CONTENDERS

Lalu and
Nitish

Sundar
Pichai

Baba
Ramdev

He went from mid-level

Googler to the C-suite in
just a decade

n August, when Larry

Page and Sergey Brin
named the Sundar Pichai as the chief executive of the slimmed
down Google Inc., the
spotlight was firmly on the
43-year-old Chennai native
who, after a metallurgical engineering de g ree at IIT
Kharagpur, went on to study
at Stanford and Wharton. He
initially worked at McKinsey
& Co and later at Applied Materials before joining Google
in 2004. Pichai, known for his
e x e c u t i o n c h o p s, m a d e
Chrome the worlds most famous browser. However, its
going to be a challenging job
keeping growth ticking in
the face of increasing competition. As Wired magazine noted in an article on
Pichai, Cars may drive
themselves at the
Googleplex, but
companies
will not.

e tittered at the
accent, rolled
our eyes at the
music album,
laughed at the
Hollywood
connections...and then Quantico happened. It went on to
prove what she has been
claiming all along that she
was serious about making a
screen debut in the west, all
that aggressive elbowing into
Hollywood wasnt just a stunt
to impress the desis. Chopra
bagged the lead role in a highly publicized, ambitious
thriller around the FBI and its
chase to find terrorists. Critics, even those who slammed
the series for its jumpy plot
and weak direction, are unanimous on Chopras screen
presence hard to look away
from the self-assured, sexy,
athletic Alex Parrish when
she is on screen, they said.

Sanaina
Both got numero uno
rankings this year

Deepika
Padukone

Her sexy, confident

Alex Parrish broke new
ground on American TV

The Brothers Bihari showed

how a low-key campaign
can make the BJP a bahari
he engine that powered the grand alliance to power in
Bihar was RJD chief
Lalu Prasad. But he
could not have done
without Nitish Kumars calm
and sober leadership. Though
he critically depended on Lalu
to deliver the electoral muscle, Nitish is the lead player. It
will be Nitish-Lalu and not the
other way around. Nitish is
now in contention as the secular alternative to Narendra
Modi if things go well for him
and badly for the Prime Minister. Lalu, too, is a gainer. A
defeat would have been hard
to swallow. He now has the opportunity to launch his sons
as leaders in their own right.
His conviction in a criminal
case prevents him from contesting and he has had to play
second fiddle to Nitish. But
the quick-witted Yadav leader
is back in the reckoning.

Priyanka
Chopra

He showed that he is
guru of marketing as
well as yoga

n 2015, Baba Ramdev

the yoga guru proved
that he could put money
where his mat is after
his Patanjali Ayurved
c l o c ke d a n e at R s
2,000-crore turnover. An Edelweiss report said Patanjali was
well on course to achieve a targeted revenue of Rs 5,000-6,000
crore in fiscal year 2016. What
stood out in the report was Patanjalis operating margins of
approximately 20%, something
every FMCG player hopes to
achieve. When he took on Nestle India, which was reeling
from the lead controversy, to
launch his desi noodles at a
price cheaper than Maggi,
Ramdev had arrived in the corporate world of cut-throat competition. But, having plucked
the low-hanging fruit, 2016
holds a series of challenges in
store for Patanjali. Questions
have been raised on the quality
of its noodles. Not only will
Patanjali Ayurved have to get
it right on quality, but also
quantity (how they grow their
volumes) in the wake of competition from players
like Nestle India
which is putting all
efforts to resurrect
Maggi.

f youre wondering,
thats a mashup of Sania and Saina since both
of them were contenders for person of the
year. Sania Mirza, 29,
injected new life into her career with a brilliant run in
doubles this year, scoring
heavily in tandem with Swiss
legend Martina Hingis. The
pair came up with back-toback Grand Slam crowns at
Wimbledon and the US Open
before scripting a stirring
charge at the WTA Finals in
Singapore. The Hyderabadi,
who clinched the world no.1
ranking in April, finished the
year on a 22-match unbeaten
streak. Saina Nehwal added
many more feathers to her
shuttle in 2015. She became the
first Indian women shuttler to
enter the final of the All England Championships, the first
Indian women shuttler to be
ranked number 1 in the world
and also the first Indian to enter the final of a World Championships.

March of
Mavericks
You may not agree with
their ways but they have
challenged the status quo

ts been a year of the

maverick political leader. At home, Arvind
Kejriwal stunned everybody by leading his
party to an unprecedented win in the Delhi assembly grabbing 67 of the 70 seats.
In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn,
after managing to just win
enough nominations from
MPs to contest for the leadership of the Labour party and
being seen as too far to the left
to have a real chance, trounced
his rivals winning close to 60%
of the votes in the first ballot.
In the US, Bernie Sanders on
the left with his avowedly socialist stance and Donald
Trump on the far right with
his Muslim-baiting are making waves in the primaries for
the 2016 presidential elections.

She broke the silence and

stigma around depression

e all knew her as

a luminously
gorgeous Bollywood A-lister
but this year she
stunned everyone with a painful, personal
revelation. In an industry that
is pathologically tight-lipped
about vulnerabilities, Padukone courageously declared
on television no less that she
has been struggling with chronic depression and wants to use
her celebrity status to spread
awareness about the condition.
The details of her travail were
painful and her acceptance of
her condition, as well as her
determination to soldier on,
were both heartrending and
inspiring. There was of course
the much-lampooned My
Choice video but Padukone has
certainly emerged as a strong
voice for gender equality. Like
her young counterparts in Hollywood, she too has been talking
of the need for parity between
the fees paid to male and female
actors.