Udderly MP, A Déjà Moo

The election noise across Madhya Pradesh for the past eight months has gone silent after the BJP’s triumph in the assembly bypolls, but chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has ensured that his competitive political mooing keeps the state’s electorate engrossed a while longer. He announced the formation of a cow cabinet—a first-of-its-kind ministerial group in the country that will have six of his ministers as its members. That held its first virtual meeting on November 22. The bovine intervention is, perhaps, sought in the hope of deflating predecessor Kamal Nath’s claims of being a more caring son to gaumata. During his 15-month stint as CM, Nath promised to set a gaushala, or cowshed, in each of the state’s 23,000 panchayats.

The cow cabinet, chaired by Chouhan and comprising ministers for animal husbandry, forests, rural development, revenue, home and agriculture, took a slew of decisions, including designing an action plan to conserve and promote the state’s native breeds of cattle: Malvi, Nimari, Kankatha and Gaolo. Chouhan then flew to the country’s first cow sanctuary, set up in the state’s Agar Malwa district during his previous stint as CM in 2017, to mark Gopashtami.

More than 4,000 cows are in the sanctuary, which can house another 6,000. It is a different matter that the shelter has often been in the news for its poor condition that leads to premature deaths and shoddy disposal of carcasses. Nath launched a diatribe against the CM on the cow cabinet. “Chouhan should have hosted the first meeting at the sanctuary as announced earlier, but he held a virtual meet instead because he was scared that information about the pitiable condition of cows at the site would come out,” the Congress leader said.

Chouhan’s decision to host the meeting virtually was taken in light of rising Covid cases in MP, which have now forced him to order night curfews in several districts. While hosting a cabinet meeting at the sanctuary in Covid times could have been problematic for Chouhan, addressing a public meeting at the venue to wax eloquent about the many virtues of the Holy Cow and his devotion to her could obviously be milked for political mileage. The CM declared at the public meeting that children in anganwadi schools will be given cow milk, instead of eggs, to stem rising malnourishment in the state and that he was also mulling over a proposal to impose a small “cow cess” to raise funds for his cow protection plans.

Chouhan’s grandstanding on cow protection shouldn’t surprise anyone. For several decades, the cow has been used as a political tool with equal gusto by the BJP and Congress in MP. Congress’s Digvijaya Singh and Nath never shied away from keeping the cow happy. Each time the BJP raised the issue of cow protection, Singh has hit back, saying it was the Congress that had banned cow slaughter in 1955. During the recent bypoll campaign, Nath repeatedly asserted his devotion to gaumata and gauvansh while declaring that his government had allocated Rs 450 crore to open 1,000 gaushalas.

With Chouhan trying to pull gaumata back into the BJP’s gaushala, the Congress is bleating in protest. The Congress alleges that the Chouhan government has reduced budgetary allocation for maintenance of cows at gaushalas to a meager Rs 1.60 per cow as against the Rs 20 that Nath had provided.